marinuso
1d ago
the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won?
I think someone like Noire thinks he won. He did damage, he exercised power. He must've felt pretty good about himself. We call these people assholes, and you find them everywhere.
One thing about these anarchist-style places is that they're very susceptible to such people. You can apparently just barge in and start making demands and everyone has to at least listen to you. He went eight times? How is he a stakeholder in any way? It works only if everyone is playing in good faith, which requires keeping the circle small and invite-only.
You need proper formal decision-making structures. It doesn't even really matter what kind as long as you have something.
I live in the Netherlands, in a progressive city, and I haven't seen a mask since the mandates were dropped. I haven't even heard of any place voluntarily keeping a mandate in place after the government stopped requiring it.
In fact I remember the relief when Putin invaded Ukraine, because everyone who was gung-ho about Covid restrictions could be gung-ho about waving Ukrainian flags instead and it all went away remarkably quickly after that.
marinuso
2d ago
You can't rightly call this Western society.
This reads like satire. I'll grant you that such people exist but they're not mainstream. They're not even mainstream among LGBT people. This is the fringe of the fringe. It's like pointing at the Branch Davidians and calling it 'Christianity'.
marinuso
2d ago
People are still masking in the year of our Lord 2026?! I had to check the date. I had expected it to be from 2022.
marinuso
3d ago
Only about 2% of the population have anything at all to do with agriculture
I don't know about that, the Netherlands has that same statistic but that only counts owner-operator farmers and contract labour (modern farmhands, essentially). It doesn't count the tractor mechanics, feed suppliers, veterinarians, etc, all of whom would be unemployed if we were to stop farming. A tractor mechanic is in the tertiary sector (services). Those people may not be farmers but they sure have something to do with agriculture.
marinuso
3d ago
Sometimes I really dislike this place. Not enough to try and emigrate (just yet), after all, all my family is here, but I do dislike this place. Well, I don't dislike the place, I dislike what the government is doing to it.
Everyone's blaming Trump, which isn't wrong per se, but which is also no reason for our own government to make the situation even worse. But they can get away with it because everyone's blaming Trump.
marinuso
3d ago
I tried wandering into the barber shop by my house and they asked me to make an appointment. Like what. An appointment for a place with a barber pole outside? Wack.
I've always made appointments. I'm in and out in 15 minutes. They don't want a long queue of people waiting to get a haircut. I wouldn't want to sit there and wait either, I usually have more chores to take care of. The place I go (which is just the nearest one to my house, I don't need anything fancy done) doesn't even have a waiting area.
marinuso
3d ago
The research was at least partially US-funded. The release was not on purpose; it needn't have been a bioweapon either. You can think of legitimate reasons for gain-of-function research. A war with China would be devastating anyway. It isn't in anyone's interest. It's in nobody's best interest to whip up such a mood either, and in the absence of that, people would rather move on.
The worst thing you can really blame the Chinese government for is the initial coverup attempt that allowed it to get out of control as badly as it did. Even that's not worth an actual war, surely.
marinuso
3d ago
You have to have someone to blame / sue when it goes wrong. You can't blame the computer.
marinuso
17d ago
There would be a civil war if we tried this. They're not going to just let themselves be expelled.
Except for South Africa all your examples are in times of war, and South Africa isn't quite expelling anyone just yet, just trying to bully them out.
marinuso
1mo ago
Jean Raspail did live to see 'Wir Schaffen Das'. That was way more than this, it was millions of people. I wonder what he must have thought.
marinuso
2mo ago
This context is blocked in Europe. Here is a link to the law that it is blocked under. This law was enacted by [POLITICIAN]. Did you know you're in the same jurisdiction as they are? They're up for re-election in eighteen months.
Unfortunately the EU is nowhere near this transparent.
Americans have congressmen to yell at. The MEPs, and indeed the European parliament, are basically for show, as the latest Chat Control vote shows.
Laws don't matter either; Russian media were banned by decree (and ISPs forced to implement blocks) even before The Motte existed as a separate website, and there is still no actual legal reason why this should be so.
marinuso
2mo ago
Iunno.
Judges are people and people are not necessarily fair or without bias. Ideally, a judge is fair and without bias, but ideally, this goes for a qadi or a dayan in much the same way.
I would rather not allow immigrant or diaspora communities to establish their own law systems, but that's not because I think those law systems are necessarily unfair, or more so than ours, though of course they may be. It is because I think we should remain in control of our own countries. For this same reason I would rather not allow companies to do the same thing either.
But it is historically quite common that a contract would specify under which of several competing legal systems any disputes would be resolved, and this would make complete sense if there are in fact multiple competing legal systems.
marinuso
2mo ago
having the good sense not to post tiktoks mocking it
This does make the difference. What people do in private as individuals doesn't matter all that much. But they are actively ragebaiting on behalf of their whole group; not only did they think this was a good idea but their group seems to accept this kind of behaviour. They are going to get it back in their faces.
If there were career women going around celebrating in public that their babies cry and claiming this was women's empowerment, then no doubt people would start gaining opinions on women having careers. But they don't do that.
If you're obviously part of some group, no matter which one it is, then your actions will reflect on the group as a whole, unless the rest of them actively and visibly act to stop you.
(This is a more general principle: if someone misbehaves and his family doesn't seem to disapprove, you will think badly of the whole family, and this is still true in a homogeneous society without subgroups.)
marinuso
2mo ago
Singapore is a small city-state where everyone is living in each other's laps already, and to add to that most of its housing is government-built. ~80% of people live in public housing, which gives the government a lot of control over housing allocation without having to force any private landlord to do anything. Someone who moves from one end of Singapore to the other can still easily see his friends, go to his job, etc. This is also already an officially racialized society with everyone's ethnicity being written on their ID cards.
European countries are much bigger and lack all of these things. There's no official ethnic registration, at best there's the "migration background" thing that only goes back one generation. It would have to be established. Is it time to riot yet?
In the Netherlands, only about a quarter of people live in public housing. Over two thirds own their house. The remainder live in private rentals. You would have to nationalize the housing stock, or regulate housing sales to the point of de facto nationalizing the housing stock. Is it time to riot yet?
Also in the Netherlands, the big cities are majority-minority already whereas much of the countryside has few immigrants, and when they do, it's Poles. Equalizing the population would mean making people move far away from their jobs and families. They're not going to like that. Is it time to riot yet? Etc.
marinuso
2mo ago
I mean, you can't really force it. You would have to break up their communities by force and reeducate them, in a "kill the Indian and save the man" kind of way. Perhaps it is not physically impossible, but it would certainly require the kind of cruelty you are trying to avoid here. Probably more cruelty than remigration (even deporting them all) would entail. Arabs are not Malays. They need to, fundamentally, stop being Arabs if they are to be individual members of Western societies.
The Middle East is the area of the world that has been multicultural for the longest time, it being the crossroads of continents. And what kind of culture survives such churn while keeping itself intact? One that is extremely clannish, inward-looking, and outwardly hostile to the point that individual members can't defect because everyone else hates them and will reject them. There are multiple cultures in the Middle East but they're all like that and even the Israelis, who used to be relatively European in their outlook, are in the process of becoming exactly this.
The other alternative, besides this and remigration, is to accept that multiculturalism is here to stay and make it official by organizing something like the Ottoman millet system, which seems to be what Brainwavez was getting at. Keep everyone apart and make interethnic interactions into explicitly ethnic interactions, so that the entire community can be held accountable for the actions of the members, so that in turn communities will police their own rather than risk collective retaliation. In other words, prison rules. And this would mean for Europeans to adopt this Middle-Eastern "multicultural" mindset.
But the fiction that we're all individuals before the law, part of the same society, cannot keep standing forever when it is so clearly not the case anymore.
marinuso
2mo ago
I was made to take years of French, never got any further than slowly being able to struggle through a newspaper, and have since forgotten all of it. My English, however, is decent.
The difference is that I actually use my English. I grew up watching American movies. Higher education is in English and office jobs require English. Bilingualism comes naturally if you are in a situation where you need to speak two languages.
Nobody is going to retain any Spanish unless they need it, except some language nerds. And anyone can (will, indeed) learn any language if they must, but not otherwise.
marinuso
3mo ago
Americans of all flavors are the infamous for being mild in their celebrations
Really? Over here Americans have the reputation of being loud.
If you can't be loud and in-tears after an emotional moment for your team, then are you even a real fan ?
An adult should have a sense of decorum, certainly in public.
You would think that goes twice in this day and age when everything you do can be filmed and immortalized and put on TikTok for all to see.
marinuso
3mo ago
I'm not an American, but it seems the losing side did, grudgingly and for the most part, eventually accept the legitimacy. Not everyone, but enough. The majority at least, and the Republican Party as a whole.
That said, at least when seen from across the pond there was enough weirdness that, if the same thing were to happen in e.g. an African country, everyone internationally would've said it was sus. I'm not assuming there was enough fraud to actually change the election. I'm perfectly happy to recognize Biden's win. But none of it looked good, and I would expect better from a first-world democracy.
marinuso
3mo ago
It's interesting to see how this attitude differs between Europe and the US. Most of Europe generally has more restrictive abortion laws than the US, even after Roe v Wade was overturned. The Netherlands has a two-trimester limit on elective abortions, and this is the most liberal in the EU (tied with the UK, but it is not in the EU anymore). Some places, like Poland and Malta, ban elective abortions entirely, on religious grounds.
But medical abortions, including if the child has Down's Syndrome, are always allowed. If your child has Down's Syndrome, that's a valid reason for abortion, and pretty much nobody would say otherwise, including conservatives.
marinuso
3mo ago
Democracy cannot work unless you can convince the loser that they lost a fair game. That's fundamental. Otherwise there's no reason for them to keep playing along. Elections need to be essentially flawless.
marinuso
4mo ago
Imagine this justification used for crimes:
[state]: pay the fine for running a red light
[person]: but i didnt run a red light
[state]: Well someone ran that red light, and we can't let it be known that running red lights will go unpunished. You were nearby and I've already captured you, it would be too much work to go get the real culprit if it turns out it wasn't you.
This exact scenario is the case in most of Europe. If a car runs a red light, the owner is fined. It doesn't matter who was driving. It is the same for speeding. The reason for the law is exactly as you said. It would be hard for an automated camera to find the driver (maybe less so now than 20 years ago though), but it can just read the license plate and check the registration.
marinuso
4mo ago
Everyone wants to stay in power. This includes even democracies. The more dissent against the system there is, the more repressive said system will need to be. Communism just doesn't work very well, causing more dissent and thus needing more repression.
China is a good example. Maoism was totalitarian. Today's China is much less repressive, not because the Communist Party has embraced individual rights in any way, but because they simply don't need it as much.
Since they let go of the strict communism, they went from being as poor as Zimbabwe to being the closest thing the US has to a peer competitor. As a result, people don't generally feel like they'd be better off by overthrowing the system. And ambitious people can throw themselves into making money, rather than the only outlet for ambition being scheming either within or against the Party. There is less need for repression, and therefore there is less repression.
Capitalist-ish dictatorships generally have better economies and more outlets for personal ambition than do traditional communist dictatorships, therefore the latter are going to need more repression just to keep going.
Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.
If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.
If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.
It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.
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