muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
No bio...
User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Then how your comment is relevant, because the statistics shown in the figure counts investigators (who are sworn officers, not civilians?)
Sanity check from a different source:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-74> 686,665 full time officers in 2018 -> 210 per 100,000, almost exactly the same number as in the linked paper graphs. Even if one included civilians, the US would be massive outlier, and according to data description, one ought not to, because:
The UCR Program defines law enforcement officers as individuals who ordinarily carry a firearm and a badge, have full arrest powers, and are paid from governmental funds set aside specifically to pay sworn law enforcement.
Civilian employees include full-time agency personnel such as clerks, radio dispatchers, meter attendants, stenographers, jailers, correctional officers, and mechanics.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
21d ago
Conscription, like all laws restricting individual liberty, can be societal equivalent of Ulysses tying himself to mast.
Very few people really want to go fight in a war. Yet the consensus may be that all men are needed to fight or the war is lost and the war ought not to be lost.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
21d ago
ten to twenty years from now it will be generally accepted that Mistakes Were Made
I wish we had RemindMeBot? And is your prediction that general sentiment is "Mistakes Were Made"? Or is it the general sentiment that some particular group of people are too stupid to vote? They are not the same claim. The latter seems to be generally shared sentiment about the political outgroup in the US politics since I can remember, so I am uncertain how it can be verified. Perhaps you intend a more specific claim about responses about stupidity that is more strong than more than stable trend of everyday political animus?
Nevertheless, I don't think observable presence of either kind of sentiment would tell much about the objective facts of the war. Watching MAS*H, made 20 years after the Korean war, the generally accepted sentiment of the producers of the show is that the Korean war was a mistake (naturally the show was for a large part about Vietnam, also thought a mistake). I don't think the evidence proves that either war was a mistake. South Korea is clearly a victory for all of mankind, only complicated by their later problems with their birth rate. Vietnam is more difficult to assess. There were faults in execution of the war, both strategically and on home front, but containing the Communism probably was not one of the mistakes. The domino theory worked, sort-of. Who knows what would have happened in SE Asia if North Vietnam would have had a shorter, more victorious war. What if Second Malaysian Emergency would have started earlier and turned out differently? Would Singapore had been the success story it has been?
In general, if the overall American mood during "Freedom Fries" moments are not the most rational, it is mostly information about the state of American mood than anything objective. The consistent prediction is, the American mood ten years before or after "Freedom Fries" is equal in its rationality, no matter its current polarity or valence.
Concerning casual discussion: The amount of death during the course of human history is of such magnitude, any discussion about it will appear nothing but casual or callous in comparison. Also an isolated demand.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
The line of thought goes, simplified, their society had elements that share commonalities with a modern conception of democracy (mid-lower level social landholding had some minor but existent social and economic power, the freemen had rights recognized by everyone in the "everyone knows that everyone knows" way, the ideas how the decisionmaking institutions are supposed to work). Thus it is a confound: perhaps the democratic commonalities contributed to weird by-the-books behavior. And these democratic elements formed social capital (knowledge and preconceived ideas how to do things, transmitted intergenerationally) making it easier to run democracy!20thcentury in ethos, not only rubberstamping the correct procedures in the books approved by philosophers. The idea that ethos part is important in other democratic societies is not exactly a new idea. ^1
Naturally all this is comparative. From what I gather, they Nordics were corrupt (still are corrupt, just less in comparison than some other countries), the amount of corruption waxed and waned depending on the politics. Also, we know of the corruption because the peasants suffering from its effects mounted numerous legal complaints registered in the legal system, existence of which is somewhat positive sign.
Or do you think Ben would nod approvingly if Mexico went full Carolus Rex
I don't know about Ben. I would grant the possibility that Mexico could be a better place after 200 years the state running the show as the supreme gangboss, not tolerating other bosses that those serving him, applying principles of consistent governance, basing his powerbase on the free small-mid-sized enterprises against the high capital. But 200 year long experiments are difficult to run and the economic situation of the lucrative narcotics trade is difficult to square.
Narcotics is bit like the resource curse: You get lots of profit that don't require investments to rest of the local economy which would result in long-term benefit to rest of the society. Not only that, the resource curse profits are much higher and more concentrated than what others can made from rest of economy. The outsized profit, concentrated, makes it possible to hire armed enforcers to enforce control and continuation of profitable business in the hands of its current owner, and make any problems to go away.
^1: Tocqueville writes about the mores of American democracy:
The manners of the Americans of the United States are, then, the real cause which renders that people the only one of the American nations that is able to support a democratic government; and it is the influence of manners which produces the different degrees of order and of prosperity that may be distinguished in the several Anglo-American democracies. Thus the effect which the geographical position of a country may have upon the duration of democratic institutions is exaggerated in Europe. Too much importance is attributed to legislation, too little to manners. These three great causes serve, no doubt, to regulate and direct the American democracy; but if they were to be classed in their proper order, I should say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws, and the laws very subordinate to the manners of the people. I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country; whilst the latter may turn the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws to some advantage. The importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. It may be regarded as a central point in the range of human observation, and the common termination of all inquiry. So seriously do I insist upon this head, that if I have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence which I attribute to the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, to the manners of the Americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, I have failed in the principal object of my work.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.
Less decisive historical observation than one may think, as the confound of comparatively democratic power structures in the Nordics goes all the way back before the French revolution. Things were meetings of free men since before the middle ages. When the Swedish realm adopted European style Riksdag of estates, they had a fourth estate of free land-owning peasants.
I think there is a deterrent effect, and there should be deterrent effects for all punishment, but that the deterrent isn't strong enough for capital punishment to justify it, and it is mostly about revenge and satisfying vindictiveness.
I think the "anti-revenge" argument proves too much. It ultimately depends far too much on how much deterrent effect there is.
Most acts of violence are done in heat of the moment or otherwise irrational decisions: thus deterrence effect must be small, as the people who are committing illegal violence are not weighing their options and consequences rationally. And in fact, despite the all might of the (Western, developed) judicial system, most (Western, developed) countries have still some amounts of criminality. I acknowledge it is a point of contention, but let's assume for the sake of the argument that deterrence effect is small-to-negligible. Thus, any punishment worth its name is unjustified as deterrence, as deterrence doesn't happen to meaningful extent.
If there is no meaningful deterrence, and the idea of revenge is verboten, what reason remains to administer any punishment at all? If we are talking about a criminal who is a high-risk repeat offender, there is still argument that we should incapacitate to prevent them committing further crimes. However, not all people are like that. Some want to commit one, specific murder. Or some goody-shoes comes and argues they have a very good method to "rehabilitate" them (or prevent committing any more crimes, which is functionally same thing), and it involves electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, perhaps sniffing their internet traffic, and perhaps soon, AI. (Thus, they'd have a system of no other punishment than what is necessary to monitor they won't do it again.)
Thinking about this, I came to conclusion that justice as a concept must involve retributive elements, that is, a form of revenge, or it is not justice. A method that prevents the perpetrator from committing more crimes does nothing to the victim of their previous crimes. It is fully defenseless in the face of fait accompli: when crime has been committed, it can no longer be prevented. There either can be retribution or no retribution: admittedly is retribution is weak of ghost of justice as it can not make the crime undone, but it is still more than nothing, because acknowledges the pain of the victim (as it is administered in relation of the crime) whereas preventive methods won't ( as they focus on the future of the perpetrator), neither do deterrent methods (because they are concerned only with deterring other people, and the method of deterring crimes may turn out to be unrelated to the crime itself).
Finally, the system of no justice that I outlined is not fantasy, but the Nordic model slightly exaggerated. Yet it is proving impossible. According to their stated principles, Norwegians should let Anders Behring Breivik out as soon as their relevant officials are reasonably sure he is no longer danger to society or rendered harmless, as he has already sit the 10 year mandatory sentence they had in the books. Practically, by their stated philosophy, they should: after a hypothetical release, Breivik would be under constant monitoring, probably would not have chance to commit nor organize any further acts of terrorist violence, and he is getting pretty old. Yet they can't bear themselves to do it, and twist themselves into all kinds of legal knots that are not very believable as written but taken seriously because everyone involved deep-down knows it would act of injustice to let him walk free again. (I agree that he should sit for life, or should have faced capital punishment long ago. The Norwegian unwillingness to administer their law according to its written intentions shows they apparently also think their chosen system is illegitimate, in this case. And if it doesn't fit in this case, why not the other cases?)
Rand had a paper to the effect that The golden ratio for hostile occupations of conquered people is 1 soldier per 50 civilians... that's what was used in Germany after WW2 and Kosovo, America's 2 successful occupations.
Agreed with the general direction of your argument, but nitpick concerning post-war Germany: Firstly, the presence of the Soviet zone with Soviet occupation methods provided an additional "good cop/bad cop" dynamic. Secondly, it's not like the West German state was built ex nihilo without any relation to pre-war regime (probably it would have been impossible as everyone who strove to be someone had no option than associate with pre-war regime or become resistance fighter, a heroic but also often a dead-end career choice; random google result.)
The point is, replicating the feat that was "post-war Germany" would require more than 1 to 50 ratio of soldiers, but also a big stick in form of a "worse option" (better yet, a common enemy) and a buy-in from the prominent members of civil society and state apparatus. The case for post-war Japan had many similarities; less sure about post-war South Korea, but they had a military dictatorship. Conclusion: If wants to run an occupation with sheer force only, counting sufficient soldiers, one would need to study other case studies, from someone else's books. Maybe Soviet methods, which generally worked for maintaining the Soviet control for some time (at a cost which they finally were no longer willing to pay, thus not lasting a full century).
And all of the above is ignoring the difference between fighting a state or a polity (who have state-like-goals) and fighting a drug enterprise (which have other kind of goals). What good is sending 2m soldiers to fight the War on Drugs in the enemy territory if the enemy general's reaction is "many potential customers have moved closer to supply, saving on the logistics costs"?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
11mo ago
Being a good pundit is difficult and requires specialization and probably some sort of (formal or informal) support organization. But being a pundit that gets interviewed a lot? Making a career out of it? That is quite different skillset.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
That is an interesting idea. However, agreed, it is not going to be limited to "NPC"s. "Spook contractors" controlling discourse sounds ... not far-fatched, but a bit abstract and conspiratorial.
I suggest putting in some skin in the game. Is it feasible to get a LLM to produce a Motte post (or a full persona) that is obviously not spam, doesn't violate any of themotte.org rules, and is actually so good it get voted in as a quality contribution?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Putin has been president since 2000. Two decades should be enough to build an organization -- from doctrine to senior appointed personnel -- that gives if not accurate, then directionally truthful reports. Ukraine built a fighting army in 8 years. In the meantime, Russia has had an epidemic of people falling out of window.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
23d ago
They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya.
"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.
"Nothing in "Crusade in Europe", Churchhill's "Second World War", or De Gualle's "Memoires De Guerre" suggest anything of the sort."
Reading this claim is weird given you are replying to the very quotes from Crusade in Europe that are not "nothing" after you first argued there would be no quotes like them in the book.
One doesn't need advanced degree of historiography to realize that Eisenhower and Churchill have all the reasons to not care too much about Holodomor or German victims of Soviet brutalities or Boer victims of British concentration camps. Naturally neither can't make comparisons to Cambodia or Great Leap Forward because they had not happened yet in 1948.
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
All of that "uniquely", "efficiency never seen before" stuff sounds something from History Channel and makes your argument is strawman-ish. Yes, unfortunately, some people have habit of talking about the historical events involving death with as dramatic words as possible while scary music loops in the background (see exhibit A, History Channel). However, gesturing at drivel and pointing out that it exists is evidence about the drivel, but not much else. The question being debated is not the uniqueness or the efficiency never seen before (mostly not the special status of the Holocaust in popular consciousness either): the question being debated is how many people died and how and when. If the overdramatic claims concerning the Holocaust inflate its relative scale compared to other mass deaths, the overinflated assessment of uniqueness and efficiency is not evidence people did not die.
Unrelated to any claims Eisenhower made or any reports he sent, according to the statistics and documentary evidence, the major portion of mass killing of Jews happened in the East. Places that are not Gotha. Eisenhower went to places like Gotha. However, the claims indicate that he wanted to report that he was horrified by things he did see,
In general, it is not particularly suspicious Eisenhower and Churchill and De Gaulle (I admit I have little idea what De Gaulle wrote) discuss atrocities targeting Jews in fewer than 5% printed words (1). People tend to ignore and forget and not learn in the first place about atrocities that are not personally relevant to them. The general pattern is that until the advent of modern electronic mass media, it took decades for any atrocities to became widely known and people to care about them. Nobody in the West cared about the Armenian genocide when it happened or soon afterwards. It became only known when Armenians managed to gain some international prominence with their complaints about the past genocide. When the Holodomor was happening, the West considered it a famine like other famines. People started talking about it until after the collapse of the USSR. Nobody outside Asia paid particular attention to Japanese atrocities in China and Korea, the legal cases about "comfort women" and like happened decades later.
The reason why it takes time for atrocities to become known in is natural: Soon after a genocidal mass murder, the survivors often were not in a position to advertise their plight. It takes some time to emigrate out from the immediate aftereffects of the atrocity, then it takes time build stable life, it takes time get interviewed and/or get organized and/or become the person collecting evidence, writing memoirs, books and reports. Only after the memoirs and books have been printed people start reading them. It takes some time for the books and reports to became widely read and gain staying power. (Like today, also yesterday people forgot most of the news, unless they were personally affected or specifically paying attention. Especially WW2 had lot of atrocities, unreliably reported, difficult to distinguish from propaganda.) Consider Belgium's king Leopold's atrocities in Congo: they were a cause celebre for a brief moment in ~1900, and then were mostly forgotten for nearly a century. Congo never became that prominent place, they did not organize successfully to publish their victimization in the West. Same goes for the British atrocities in Africa. The atrocities in Congo were "found again" only in the 1990s after it had became popular and important in the West to talk about all atrocities and colonial atrocities in particular. Today, with widespread instant electronic communication and cultural milieu where comparing preferred outgroup to Nazis is a powerful political weapon, the handling of atoricites in the media as they happend is different than it was in the past.
Also, as an aside, you making a big show of Ctrl-Fin "holocaust", which is a very puzzling point for you to make: I don't understand what you are intending to achieve by making it. Rudimentary search into the existing "official" source as Wikipedia reveals that yes, use of the word "Holocaust" started getting traction in the 1950s and became common in the "late 1960s". This is well attested and well documented. Not finding any records of usage of a word with its modern meaning in works published in 1948 is not surprising, it is expected given the other available documentation. Like the question of "efficiency never seen before", the evolution of terminology and popular consciousness of "the Holocaust" is not direct evidence about to what Germans did or did not.
(1 if we accept your claim, which I am reluctant to do, given that you first argued that Eisenhower didn't discuss the Holocaust, then as another Mottezen provided quotes where Eisenhower does discuss the camps related to German atrocities, you proceed to dismiss it as "nothing". What other claims are "nothing" in your reading but not in other people's reading?)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
10mo ago
I don't know of Jefferson's biography to discuss the merits so let's grant the quoted monologue is correct. Jefferson didn't believe in it, just wrote it rouse the rabble. Then the question becomes, why those words to rouse the rabble instead of some other words? Aftereffects of choices made then have been felt for centuries.
It is a case study of power in ideas and common knowledge what are the ascendant ideas: the memes don't care whether the substrate believes or not, as long as they propagate.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The current blog still has some good comments. I think a couple of Scott's "Highlights From the Comments ..." collection posts have recently highlighted higher quality than the latest AAQC threads on the Motte. As an additional plus, the range of topics covered is more versatile than the Motte, which is mostly just CW politics.
However, there are more low-effort posters that makes signal-to-noise ratio worse, especially in Open Threads, and Substack comment UI is actively hostile.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I do not have PhD nor any degree whatsoever in immunology. But what about this: I think none of allergens (say, hay pollen) multiply in the host organism nor cause any other problems than the immunological overreaction. Infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, and other) do generally grow and multiply and eventually will cause problems to the host if the immune system stands still twiddling their thumbs. (And then you have toxins, which are not biological replicators, but disrupt biological function of the host.)
If you introduce allergens to host body in very small quantities, the immune system may do nothing, and then adapt to the "observation" that left alone, those allergens do nothing and ultimately disappear. Whereas a pathogen, unless dealt with, will keep multiplying and causing increasing amounts of problems to the host organism's main functions. If you introduce a very small dose of pathogen to the host organism, so small that the immune system (again) may do nothing, you will have more of the pathogen (a larger "attack surface" for the immune system).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
P.S. Furthermore, many traits are effectively immutable during time periods relevant for the purposes of dating or friendship formation. For example, one can not presume that a member of a cultural group will change their thoughts and cultural expression during the time period a decision is made (and one could make an argument that such intention that they should change is colonialist anyhow).
One particular example is music taste, which is mostly set by adulthood.
Thus, if one accepts the prof's insane troll logic, the obligation should extend to dating people who love country music.
Another angle to explore: "Bisexual" is a simply a word for certain behaviors and activities and immutable preferences for them. Thus, the argument for an obligation to be bisexual can be generalized to an obligation to disregard ones own preferences in order to reciprocate to some other person's immutable sexual preferences. But here we are in a conundrum: why some preferences are immutable that are considered to result in obligation to reciprocate, but some others are not (but are required to be disregarded)?
Can one have meaningful ability to consent in presence of such obligation to consent, anyway?
I am intentionally disregarding the "reasonable burdensomeness" criterion, as it is an obviously silly and unprincipled excuse that unravels to whole argument. Why would boredom with nonverbals be a reasonably big burden, but sex with men would not? And if distaste for sex with men is a reasonable burden, every heterosexual men with such distaste is not obliged to be bisexual, and the "obligation" is not a general obligation.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.
It isn't exactly my position, but closest to it out of three you outline. Basically, it builds on observation that sometimes one genuinely must choose between some evil or another, and the government action to ban another doesn't necessarily help. Abortions are bad, so people cry that the state must do something; banning abortions is something, but what are its consequences?
On the topic of "domestic violence defense": I would say that most of time in Western history, a government action against domestic violence could have been detrimental for the core purpose of family (material conditions of upbringing or children; managing the household; transmission of property to the next generation), because legal proceedings would have removed an important adult from the family. Only with a bunch of other modern solutions to social fabric, the government action and prosecution of domestic violence makes sense. Incidentally it makes families less important and fundamental. (And frankly, sometimes the modern system can be abused by one party by casting as abuse or violence many things that are not.)
Abortion once came up in presence of my grandmother when she still was lucid. I had previously never discussed anything sexuality-related topics with her because of sort of decorum and religious upbringing. I was gobsmacked when she very matter-of-factually started recalling ages-old gossip about a neighbor who died from home attempted abortion related to infidelity case during the aftermath of WW2.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Intentional obfuscation - sometimes. Far more I observe obfuscated language caused by the authors being sloppy and/or avoiding speaking plainly if they didn't understand something.
Most common: Enamored with big words yet trying to meet the journal word count limit, a big word is used in a way the meaning of the sentence becomes imprecise. Sometimes they have obtained a minor result, but big words are used to make it sound more important than it is. (Others will misunderstand and take the big words a a face value.)
Sometimes the authors are sloppy to extent that they understand meaning of some concept differently than others and never bother to make it explicit. Often the difference in understanding is a genuine difference in scientific opinion, but sometimes (especially in a run-of-a-mill study) it is because the authors failed to understand something. Sometimes the authors have followed "best practices" but do not understand the arguments for the best practices, producing slightly nonsensical approach. Sometimes authors claim to have found a $thing when they actually found $anotherthing. A mistake or misunderstanding is seldom admitted.
Sometimes the authors are sloppy reading or understanding the previous literature: when I see a paper cited in support of simplistic oneliner statement, these days I am never certain the cited reference supports the statement as clearly as implied ("It is known that system of soothing provides excellent results, thus we followed the approach of Tarr and Fether (1845)" -> go read Tarr and Fether, there is no single coherent system of soothing described, but three, and if you ignore the discussion but look at the results, the implications are unclear. Sometimes I suspect malice, more often I suspect laziness -- they never read Tarr and Fether, but they read something else that claimed to use the method of Tarr and Feather and misunderstood it.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
yeah. Naive calculation: Suppose Alice has a factory that produces tens of hi-tech bespoke post-Cold war optimized tanks during one year, say 50 units in year. Suppose Bob has several dozens of factories that can produce 500,000 of civilian vehicles each year. Bob needs only engineers to redesign the civilian car production line into something useful in military use -- perhaps, integrate anti-tank guided missile launcher and drone platform and minimal armor against small arms fire -- and then Bob can produce 10,000 modern anti-tank vehicles for each Alice's hi-tech bespoke tank. After the first couple of months, if both realize their current designs are not performing adequately in the field, assuming it takes equal time to come up with a redesign, after the resign and couple of months of production Bob has produced 80,000 upgraded vehicles against 8 Alice's upgraded bespoke units. But frankly, I presume if you have factories producing hundreds of thousands units for civilian consumption, your engineers are much better at setting up production lines, adapting and rolling out new redesigns than if your experience is producing hundreds of bespoke units to a contract.
Eh, I would require a lot more evidence for how effective art is at producing conservative values.
It isn't only HPMOR, but it is Atlas Shrugged, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Émile Zola ...
It is difficult to evaluate the magnitude of the effect, but there is anecdotal evidence that art acts as (firstly) a Schelling point for like-minded people to meet and network and (secondly) as cultural growth medium for their activities. Consider how many of the left-wing activists are college students enrolled or teaching in literature and humanities programmes or writers or artists. The activist is a person who is willing to spend their time at activism (promoting ideals) full-time instead of starting a career in banking or engineering. A person who does that is most often an idealist, and idealists need something to be idealistic about. When you have it going, you have started a perpetual machine that provides steady supply of idealists to promote your ideas for generations to come. Instead of giving man a fish, set up an aquaculture farm. Sometimes political manifestos seem work (if they are romantic and fiery and engaging), but fine art has often wider appeal. (And sometimes it is good thing on it's own. Victor Hugo saved Notre Dome of Paris by writing a popular novel.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.
I think the bankruptcy is of intellectual sort. Newborn babies have many complaints and they make them loud, and while they are not very eloquent and detailed in their requests, all of them indicate willingness to continue living (and to have the uncomfortable things to go away).
Am I wrong and maybe sort of paranoid, or is there a concentrated and obvious effort in the Western public
It is a difficult question to settle without any citations to primary evidence than recollections. I have not kept a detailed diary neither, but I thought that looting, poor equipment and logistics were mostly discussed in spring 2022 (when the initial invasion had started showing ever increasing cracks and subsequently Kiev invasion was given up). Russian Kharkov front collapse / retreat, later in the autumn, sounds quite much like poorly trained and equipped soldiers running away ("fleeing in masse"). Retreat from Kherson, muddled picture. Then much debate whether the fight for Bakhmut made sense and was the loss ratio favorable to Ukrainians or Russians. I forget when the Iranian drones entered the picture. Since then there has been much waiting for the grand counter-offensive to yield noticeable results on the map and hand-wringing why is that (all of it keeps reminding me of reading about WW1 trench warfare period after Marne and Race to the Sea, massive battles that result only in small visible changes in the overall picture as civilians reading the news can see); only recently, since August or so, there has been reported changes in lines near Robotyne, which may or may not be a breakthrough (my general feeling is of pro-Ukrainian pundits appearing cautiously optimistic but noncommittal about relevance its success: though that describes the attitude of some pundits already back in May, so no change there).
The world in general and wars in particular are chaotic. I believe pundits often attempt to tell more consistent stories than the reality warrants. Low-quality pundits will reiterate soundbites. It would be quite expected that reported bits of information have changed because the relevant facts on the ground keep changing, may have shifted multiple times, with different information coming from different units with variable experiences. Let's consider the equipment situation of the Russians. It is not uncommon that troops in retreat or soon to start retreating have bad material situation (which necessitates the retreat); this explains reports of very poorly equipped Russians retreating. Yet, one purpose of strategic retreat is to improve the strategical situation, including logistics; who knows, possibly Russians succeeded in improving the situation, explaining there are reports compatible better equipped Russian troops (after the retreat). Likewise, which side has better drone tech and doctrine and relevant parties' perception of their relative strength may have changed several times over.
It is difficult to discuss this kind of question ("am I wrong ... or is there a concentrated and obvious effort ... to retcon") without specific articles and events to discuss. Attempts to litigate is such retcon attempt "obvious"? Even more difficult without such references of who said what and when. Maybe the "Narrative" has switched, or maybe the different voices are more prominent then previously; maybe the overall atmosphere among the audience reading the mostly similar information content has changed, or maybe it is not the overall atmosphere but individual perception.
This prediction, a dull mainstay of science fiction from the 1950s onwards, was misinterpreted by some social media manager for the WEF as a purely optimistic forecast, and then inserted into the Facebook video.
I have upvoted / liked / thumbs up my share of WEF memes to the effect, "doesn't stakeholder capitalism sound quite much like dystopia" but not the overt conspiracy stuff. Call it mildly conspiratorial anti-WEF position and a form of protest.
hcnzosdu in a sibling thread argues otherwise, but I always assumed your take was correct: it was a message misinterpreted by some (incompetent / daft) social media manager for the WEF. Which was also the part I find troubling: that the WEF is (1) an important organization, (2) large enough to employ social media managers whose messages are seen by non-insignificant amount of people (3) the said managers think such visions are optimistic and utopian. It epitomizes the values and vision of those aligned with the WEF: I disagree with those values and vision.
I for one never believed the WEF is a dark Illuminati presided by Dark Lord Schwab who possesses detailed, itemized, decade-spanning agenda "how to take over the world". Nevertheless, it is not an insignificant thing either: many politicians go there, network which each other, discuss and share ideas ... and afterwards, those politicians tend to propose policy and legislation that is often more aligned with the WEF values than not. Some of those politicians have continue to have nice, elite careers if they lose elections and retire from political life. The WEF is not a conspiracy in the sense it is an instrumental coordinating nucleus, a critical piece of infrastructure without which nothing would exist. If Davos didn't exist, there would be other conferences and other networking opportunities that could be made appear equally sinister or equally banal and boring. Before the WEF, I recall the Bilderberg meeting was the famous conference that attracted attention of a conspiratorial mind. Everyone who attends such events has their boring informal professional networks which are probably much more important to each individual. However, the WEF exists.
I don't think it is a conspiracy theory to think conferences like the World Economic Forum have similar value as any other networking events and conferences attached to an agenda / set of ideas (I suppose you could call it a memeplex). Take NIPS/NeurIPS. It would be very weird to argue that NIPS is totally irrelevant or not worth looking at, especially would have been when it was the 2010s, it was still called NIPS, and neural networks were becoming an superbly interesting thing (again). It would be silly to claim that the NIPS Organizing Committee was a conspiratorial cabal with a project to install particular AI algorithm paradigm. But it was founded with the intention that the scientists interested in neural information processing systems could meet each other, share valuable ideas and knowledge, and have some prestigious fun (which may be more important than it sounds). All those people going to same place and talking to each other and having not-bad-time together is important: humans are social animals, it is how people organize themselves, and organized effort is more effective than one without organization.
I do think it makes sense to note that the WEF is an organization important enough to attract the members of "elite class" (point 1 and bit of 2) and it posts social media PR (Facebook posts, Instagram stories) about owning nothing, substituting meat with vegan products, the Great Reset like they are the most cheerful thing ever (points 2 to 3).
Speaking of the Great Reset, it sounds a bit more ambitious project / campaign / attempt to seed a memeplex (?) than a simple tax reform. Archival link
The Great Reset agenda would have three main components. The first would steer the market toward fairer outcomes. To this end, governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.” At a time of diminishing tax bases and soaring public debt, governments have a powerful incentive to pursue such action.
Moreover, governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes. Depending on the country, these may include changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition.
The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress. The European Commission, for one, has unveiled plans for a €750 billion ($826 billion) recovery fund. The US, China, and Japan also have ambitious economic-stimulus plans.
Rather than using these funds, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to fill cracks in the old system, we should use them to create a new one that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.
The third and final priority of a Great Reset agenda is to harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. During the COVID-19 crisis, companies, universities, and others have joined forces to develop diagnostics, therapeutics, and possible vaccines; establish testing centers; create mechanisms for tracing infections; and deliver telemedicine. Imagine what could be possible if similar concerted efforts were made in every sector.
That is much more than a global minimum corporation tax. In fact, it is not explicitly mentioned at all, taxes are a throwaway line! However, most of the index funds I had invested to have turned to applying ESG indexes. Are ESG screened indexes dystopian? Not so sure, but some stakeholder capitalist somewhere has their thumb on the scales in a different place than previously.
The World Economic Forum is a conference but also a vision. it is a thing worth paying attention to and a thing one can disagree with. How one does disagree with a vision on the internet? One can write long posts arguing against it in obscure internet forum. But if one wants to be efficient and have impact, one should share funny memes against the WEF and the vision it represents.
I am genuinely unsure if the overtly conspiratorial stuff helps or not. (I have not met genuine conspiracy theorists in non-internet social sphere. I have had some success getting reactions like "WEF is a bit weird/tacky".)
Schwab also wrote a book, titled 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution', a poorly written text that says little and which argues for what is effectively globalized neoliberal "stakeholder capitalism".
I would like to draw a comparison to the standard multinational corporate bullshit jargon. This genre of writing should be familiar to most people (think of HR and PR departments of large Western companies and other organizations). Collections of banal, unsophisticated, trivial statements. Many a corporate document is like Schwab's book, "a poorly written text that says little." Generally co-workers will agree the jargon is often silly and sometimes difficult to take seriously. Nevertheless, such jargon-laden, poorly written documents are how the generic Western corporation function, and thus they have tremendous effect in yearly performance reviews, project launches, funding decisions, real stuff in the real world. Poorly written text that says little can be important.
Sure, the Communist Manifesto had an evocative opening and said much (not all of it good nor true), but our age is less romantic.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Weird, what I heard was that The Dawn of Everything sometimes makes huge speculative leaps that are not supported by the literature purportedly cited. There was some discussion about it when it was reviewed in ACX YBR, links to some comment chains:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything/comment/7059788
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything/comment/7062066
My take concerning the ethical issues is very similar to yours.
I have come to conclusion that the difficulties are not about the law as written, but the societal and cultural stuff it is supposed to reflect. Namely, there is nothing to reflect. You can not write a law and have it obeyed if it doesn't "fit" the society.
(Draconian authoritarian enforcement may help, but that option comes with a risk that the draconian authoritarian enforcers will take bribes to look the other way because they don't agree with law either. Part of the risk in a police state is that it won't be the ideal Spartan "tough but just" police state but the draconian police state where widespread corruption and disrespect of the law is a norm, which is worse.)
If people have a commonly shared moral framework broadly accepted by mostly everyone, you can write a law "abortion is generally banned except in medical emergencies" and have outcomes you expect. Without the such shared moral framework, you either get "no medical emergency is serious enough, women suffer / die of complications" or "having an unwanted baby would cause some unwanted mental distress, which qualifies as a medical reason".
Thus, my opinion is that any serious [1] legal solution is downstream of values. Why people no longer want kids? Why they are viewed as a burden? If we'd solve that, and there is a possibility for long-term effective change.
[1] There is a possibility there are legal changes that could go together with a successful values reappraisal, or some marginal tweak will improve individual outcomes. But in big picture, it won't move the overall statistic / sentiment.
More options
Context Copy link