muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
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User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
27d ago
As I wrote in my other reply, the delay is quite common. As a comparative example of unrelated WW2-era atrocity, Wikipedia article about Korean comfort women suggests that the Korean-Japanese debate and activism about comfort women in particular (opposed to Korean forced laborers and compensation in general) gathered steam in the 1980s and 1990s.
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
21d ago
Isn't "service for the duration" the default assumption mostly everywhere? Only powers fighting far-off wars of little importance can afford to send soldiers on limited combat tours.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
21d ago
You can basically say this about almost any state that existed for several centuries
There are plenty of the oldest states with centuries (heck, millenia) of continuity that have not done anything interesting for a century or two. (Switzerland. Sweden. Denmark.)
But let's grant it true for great powers and aspirants. The realist argument of international anarchy doesn't really favor any side: as long as any country has sought keep or obtain greater status by periodical war, the neighbors of the same country have been wary of such attempts, or they have been its willing dominions, or its already conquered unwilling puppets. In international anarchy, it is natural for Russia's neighbors to seek to preempt Russian actions (unless Russia can win them with soft power).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
"Comparatively democratic" is intended to be read literally, as in, comparatively more cratos in the hands of demos than in other parts of Europe. Not as, it was democratic as 20th century had democracies. But lack of serfdom since early Middle Ages, continuous presence of institutions for deliberative, representational decisionmaking, and right to participate (in the said institutions) granted to large part of population, all of that, it is the traditional social capital argument.
I have no citations nor will to dig them up (=> what follows is not a high confidence claim) but my gestalt impression of the argument "details of parenting don't matter as long as minimum standards are met" comes from studies that measure parenting and quite generic statistical measures of education, income, or perhaps questionnaires about life satisfaction on 1-5 scale. I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Scattered thoughts.
In favor of your thesis: There was something going on with the Western music during the Enlightenment. Mozart was a contemporary with the enlightenment. Beethoven started his career moving to Vienna right on cue with the War of the First Coalition.
Against: There was a great deal of unequivocally bad music, too. It was an era that produced Portsmouth Sinfonia (transgressive and subversive, but of the kind where you stare at the subversion too long).
Written by the victors: Did the adults in the 1960s music like the music that now gets called great? Did they think they were seeing a peak in art, or where they scratching their heads why nobody is making new subversive Lindy Hop. (I once met a guy who lamented how the big band exited the popular consciousness when rock become ascendant, and thus, last of good music died.)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
27d ago
They all claim that "resettlement" secretly became "extermination" but they cannot say who, when, where, or why the change, or point to any documentary evidence that this is something which actually happened.
This is untrue. There is evidence of various resettlement plans that were first considered. There is evidence some of the plans were found impossible or infeasible to implement (such as Madagascar plan), thus they were not implemented. Lublin plan was partially implemented. If you argue that every Polish Jew was resettled to Lublin, you should explain why (all) the Polish Jews could not be found in Lublin after the war.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
I’m not really sure I want someone who would have trouble setting up a home router making internet policy or other technology policies because they don’t understand how this stuff works.
I am not certain the comparison is favorable to young people. Let's imagine your average 70-80 year old who started their corporate career in their twenties: born in 1954-1944, started their career in 1974-1964, retired at 65 in 2019-2009. During their career nearly all job that involved paperwork got electrified and then computerized: they have seen electro-mechanical typewriters, teleprinters, faxes, calculators, sevral generations of copying machines and printers, DOS, pagers, MS-DOS, email, web during the dot-com boom, dumb phones, remembered several phone numbers, and used all major popular versions of Windows and Office and Excel until Windows XP (possibly Windows Vista, 7, 8, even 10 depending if we are talking about average 60-70 years who retired in early or late 2010s). And that is a median office worker. During their free time, they have bought analog TVs, read magazines and newspapers that had be bought and distributed by mail, sent mail by themselves, visited library that had physical card catalogue system that got computerized several times over, switched their sound system from vinyls to cassettes to CDs to (maybe) MP3s, bought a car that didn't refuse to start because of a failed firmware update, and when driving that car, navigated with paper map instead of spoon-fed directions, and quite likely tried to set up VCR at least once.
Uncharitably, the average 20 year old is more used to touchscreens than keyboards, does not know what is "file path", possibly not even what is a "file"; is lost if the document they need is not listed in the Word "recently opened", or is asked to install software not in app store.
More importantly, I believe the 20 year olds are much more susceptible to "fish don't know about water" myopia than the grandpa who remembers who things used to be. Assuming the grandpa is not demented.
Granted, the optimal person probably is someone 50-60 year old (they probably actually set up that VCR most often).
ETA: The point about VCRs is that it was more complex thing than any router setup I have done in the past 5 years.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
5mo ago
I have been upgrading my priors to the effect "more shocking the video, higher likelihood it is AI generated", but this is not shocking enough.
If I were to guess, it is something mundane, and the tables have turned and past stereotypes have become a funhouse mirror: these days it's the Chinese who come from such a well-ordered society that they amaze Westerners with their ability to stand in line waiting for their turn.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Don't know about Singaporean system, but any prestige from conscription hinges on the implementation details. My hypothesis:
Conscription system where everyone is called up, avoiding draft is difficult, and candidates to officer and specialist tracks are selected by reliable, standardized tests and methods for IQ and other desiderata, compulsorily administered to all -> Military is unpleasant, but has some prestige to offset, because (a) if you made it to the officer track, your rank signals your IQ (b) no matter your personal rank, there is a high chance that in you observed relatively intelligent and competent superiors during your stint.
Conscription system where draft avoidance is easily possible -> Highly competent, affluent people who have most to gain from college or have family networks or otherwise good prospects of lucrative career have the highest opportunity cost from the draft -> They avoid the draft -> The majority of the elite in your country doesn't serve -> If you manage to nevertheless recruit competent officers, the elite won't observe their competence first-hand -> Avoiding draft correlates with elite status and signals good things, military career signals bad things. -> Prestige plummets.
Won't outline the failure mode where instead of standardized tests the officers are selected by either political patronage or nepotism.
In any mass communication, the irony is like any subtext -- it is usually lost after a couple of steps unless you filter for audience to people who get the subtext. Internet hastens this process, but it is present in all youth cultures. Nobody knows if the kid puts up the poster ironically or as a statement or they like the person in the poster, their internal motivations and rationalizations are lost to the observers. How much of the Elvis craze or Beatlemania or Lisztomania or any altCoin was 'dead serious' right from the beginning? I think quite likely most people start participating first jokingly, not so seriously, perhaps ironically because of all the excitement and "cool kids are doing it too" effect. But after you have collected enough inertia in the movement, tribal group dynamics take driver's seat and then it is serious.
Suppose some youngsters adopt saying inshallah ironically. Next they adopt the non-ironic positive cultural signifiers (excessively shaking hands and having sharp haircuts?) Soon the shared cultural context is wholly mixed to point you can't tell lapsed Muslims from the lapsed Christians and Western atheists. The Westerners themselves no longer can't tell which parts they are doing ironically. Nothing ultiamtely wrong with it I suppose, that's how cultural exchange looks like. Not infeasible that if by that point Islam as practiced by the non-lapsed Muslims is still the same puritanical form as it is currently known, it will be the stronger evangelizing force and cultural attractor.
Not the only possibility, though. Religious space is field of constant competition and evolutionary pressure. Wouldn't be surprised if the competitive forms of Christianity or the dare you call it the secular state religion of rainbow flag will adopt features that make them competitive.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
To my knowledge, Israel and Finland. I think both are offshoot developments the old German system, where a prospective officer candidates were volunteers but had to serve a lengthy period of time first in enlisted and NCO equivalent positions in regular regiments before and between officer school exams.
You don’t need to be a politician at 22 to be a politician at 60. They can go on the safer career paths (honestly prefer politicians with outside politics experience).
Sure. And my point kinda was, any random kid is going to better served by realistically geared aspirations and fully generic "how to be successful in life, at the margin" kind of lessons (less about becoming the president or going to Harvard, more about conscientiousness, habit forming, reading the room to observe true unwritten rules). If the kid has the special something to become the president, he/she will stumble upon that path by their own talents (or perhaps you already possess much more meaningful resources to help them than aspirations only, such as a trust fund or networks).
Truth is in a meritocracy especially with intelligence being highly hereditary you would expect the longer that meritocracy exists that elites would largely come from some form of elites (in Americas case it’s going to be dominated by the PMC or top 20%). The only way you get elites from the lower class with intelligence being hereditary is [...]
Unrelated, but there may be something wrong with that model, depending on how do you quantify "largely" and all the rest of the details. An example of a possible mechanic to consider: Consider differential birthrates in social strata. Suppose a fully deterministic hereditary model of genetic eliteness and the meritocratic elite has relatively less children than non-elite classes. Then, due to dwindling applicant pool, either the size of elite gets smaller each generation, or the brightest sons and daughters of plebeian background must be given opportunities to enter. Alternatively, if the meritocratic elite has relatively more kids but size of elite stays the same, in a couple of generations, there will be large class of nearly elite upper middle class class just below the threshold, with nearly the same genetic background as the members of elite. Due to random variation, some kids of this non-elite upper middle class again would have the merits to become elite again.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
There's a movie called "The Punk Syndrome" about a Punk Rock band of guys with Autism in Sweden. Not banned, totally PC, but hard to find because no one funds it anymore? I saw it at a film fest in Taiwan, where it got a standing ovation (because no one knows Punk Rock like a bunch of documentary film fest attendees at a University in Taichung, right?).
A demonstration of the power of the internet for information retrieval and social aggregation: The production company has put the documentary film on Vimeo (and true punks they are, charge 4.70€ for rental streaming. Trailer is free.) Brought to you by information superhighway.
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
1mo ago
Consider also the vast majority of theoretical papers that have been published but you didn't read. Why people read seminal papers and vast majority of other published papers lie forgotten? Usually the papers that become seminal have special something that makes them useful and applicable in practice, and that applicability is discovered by testing against the reality. In experimental sciences, the testing against reality comes from running and reporting formal experiments. Sometimes in the form of explaining past observations and experiments. In engineering, people might not bother reporting experiments, but they integrate the useful results and principles in their products (which usually must be functional in the physical reality). In pure theory land, the mathematical proofs take the place of experiment (very difficult to come up with, often difficult to verify).
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).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4mo ago
I agree KnotGodel is near the right track but not exactly, and GP had a point. In Culture Wars of the way way past, we have stuff like 30 Years' War, or iconoclasts, or Akhenaten's cult. What is the common thread?
My theory: in culture wars, culture is the fuel, war is the process, but the engine is the mass media technology. Each form of technology comes with its particular equilibrium where the locus of control is. (To torture the metaphor, it is a twin-engine aircraft and the other engine is the technology for waging war, but that is no longer the culture war, just the regular war.)
Outcome is likely to be Cuius regio, eius religio once again.
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?)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I view "sometimes my money goes people I don't like" as a price for participating in an economy. If I buy free-range eggs from a farmer, what I know of their political beliefs? And that farmer probably has to buy crops and stuff from some other people I know even less about. If I buy a Big Mac, the profits will be diluted to countless stockholders after the suits have taken their cut. As a whole, people who profit from my Big Mac have not a coherent opinion.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
8mo ago
But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2, and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance.
I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?
I see two, no, three possible thought process that are not too alien to me.
Maybe I don't believe terror bombings are ineffective. It is difficult to judge whether extreme measures are truly ineffective, especially if you view some forms of violence positively and/or iare distrustful of progressive-liberal-coded research findings. I can imagine that a military commander, especially from a less Westernized military culture thinks that tough, aggressive, brutal measures are the effective measures, thinking the findings suggesting otherwise are mistaken or just outright liberal propaganda to serve the liberal sentiments.
Second explanation draws from banal realities of bureaucracy and greater number of civilian targets. The boss demands that important targets are hit. Successfully hitting hardened military targets may be difficult, especially after you have already sent missiles to all permanent military targets you knew of before the war, several times over: either are already destroyed, difficult to destroy, and-or the enemy found new locations. Hitting mobile or relocated targets requires current and correct intelligence of their whereabouts, which is slow and expensive. So maybe shoot some missiles to a school building (high chance of success) and dress it up as a critical infrastructure or troop location or important demoralizing terror attack in a report to the superior. This will be good for you as long as the superior will not reprimand you for terror attacks (or reprimands are not worse than reprimands for inaction or for failed attempts to hit the enemy HQ bunker hardened against nuclear attack).
Third: pure vindictiveness and vengeance (not necessary proportional) in retaliation for strikes and crimes by the opponent (real or perceived, recent or past).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".
He's a bad match for Star Wars.
I agree he wasn't a good match, but "rule of cool" wasn't the reason. Star Wars is a space opera conceived as "WW2 fighter planes, Jidaigeki, and Wild West, ... IN SPACE." In other words, rule of cool. None of the rich details of the exotic universe make sense, they are there because they look cool. Lucas wanted to cast a Japanese period drama samurai star as Obi-Wan Kenobi because of "how cool that'd be". Consistency is maintained in OT and prequels because of inertia and involving a single auteur whose vision of "cool" didn't change too much.
Hiring a "rule of cool" director was a good idea. The mistake of was that Johnson's brand of cool was different. Hiring a director who worships "canon" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it can work for some time, but eventually it will result in milking the original vision empty, producing soulless merchandise.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
I will use exactly the same justification progressives use in favor of censorship and against freedom of speech: information should be open and accessible to all, but only experts should be allowed to comment and be given a platform, lest we suffer from a misinformation contagion propagated by the undereducated.
The issue is that internet made the line between private communication and public communication even murkier than before.
I imagine the process is like this. Step 0. Information is open and accessible, but only vetted experts are allowed to opine on public platforms. Step 1. Me and my friends want to chat about the expert-verified opinions. We set up a private Discord server / Facebook group / Telegram-thing / what young people use today. Step 2. If we are very good (discussion is information-dense, or entertaining, or got some popular people involved), at some point the extrovert friend shares the invite link to his/her friends. Suddenly our group has hundreds of lurkers. Is it still a private discussion group? Step 3. Rinse and repeat. When you hit thousands of members, congratulations, it is a major newsletter.
(Steps 2-3 were accelerated in the old Web of blogs and forums.)
Initially it doesn't feel like you are setting up a major media platform. Most of them never become big. Is there a point where it makes sense to ban them?
I think they did. Eyewitness accounts is more reliable, especially concerning matters very unreliably transmitted by archeological evidence. Answering a question like yours, however, requires careful interpretation.
Concerning the question of Carthaginian child sacrifice: According to their press releases, archeologists from Oxford, presumable better positioned to interpret the evidence, argue that the literary evidence supports the archeological evidence. I also note that the press release mentions that other archaeologist disagree on the matter, and I have no expertise to evaluate their claims other than common sense.
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