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User ID: 1083
Epistemic status: Stream of consciousness ramblings written at work.
Or in other words, the larger/denser the city, the more authoritarian the populace must be for it to function, for the raw density of assholes per square mile is far higher in a megatropolis than it is anywhere else on Earth.
East Asia is weird in this regard, actually. Asian city-dwellers are extremely low in NIMBYism and you generally don’t see the same kind of hyperregulation that you find in the West when it comes to zoning laws, building height restrictions, street food regulations, etc. Even when they exist, enforcement is spotty to say the least (China is a great example of a country where there’s a huge and seemingly-contradictory gulf between “the rules on paper” and “what happens in practice”; in practice many supposed infractions aren’t strongly policed on the local level). Things like road rules are for the most part regarded as just a suggestion. The result is that Asian cities are much more bustling and loud, Chinese and Southeast Asian ones in particular, and you often have to negotiate your way through a city. Mixed-use spaces are the norm; in Malaysia, China, South Korea, Vietnam and so on it’s normal to find a historic temple, a large park, a street market and a major shopping centre all right beside each other. Traffic is pretty much always wild beyond belief and motorcycles/electric scooters will wind their way through streets clogged with vendors. Generally in practice there’s also less focus on enforcing banal aesthetic matters such as trying to make sure everyone’s lawns are trimmed to the Correct Height and so on, in this sense the vibe is in some ways less authoritarian and regulated than American cities.
The way in which they are more authoritarian is in their policing of crime, in particular drug-related offences, and as a result you don’t end up seeing dealers, junkies and other such seedy shit on the streets. Their power to investigate and punish these offences is much greater than it is in the West, and often policy-makers are very mindful of ghettoisation and take serious steps to prevent it from happening. China’s hukou system, which they used to control rural inflow into the cities so as to prevent the creation of large slums during their rapid modernisation, is probably the most radical solution to that, though that system has relaxed considerably as of late. All of this is reinforced by social attitudes as well - there’s more of a competitive, hard-nosed “get to work” attitude in Asia which very much relies on pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not relying on handouts, and staying on the straight and narrow - if you take drugs you get ostracised socially. There’s just not the same kind of self-destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket inner-city mindset you find in many Western countries. This results in a general lack of crime and bad behaviour since you don’t really end up with a large, disenfranchised, heavily substance-dependent segment of the population that goes on to cause further issues. In America there is a political push to protect this class of citizen at the expense of others, an idea which your average Asian likely would find repellent if not outright incomprehensible.
In other words Asia is both more authoritarian and more laissez-faire at the same time. You don’t have to be uniformly more authoritarian on the whole to maintain a stable society, rather, you have to be authoritarian about the right things. I have to say that I generally agree with the Asian approach on what they have chosen to prioritise and police, I like night markets, I like mixed-use spaces and hate seeing hobos crawl onto a train just to piss all over the floor, but I grew up in Asia too so perhaps I’m biased. My family travelled from Malaysia to the UK recently and were generally just appalled at the level of dysfunction in London (from what I hear, within three days they witnessed two robberies, and saw beggars in many of the shopping streets); it’s a meme here that much of Asia is low-trust but frankly the “low-trust” Asians are often shocked at the state of many Western cities.
I do not like this argument of “that’s just living in the city bro” either but to be fair, this specific issue really does appear to be a bit of an intractable problem when you live in high-density environments - which a city necessarily is. Other things that libs hand wave as just being part of Living In Da City are clearly and obviously avoidable and to a large extent concern how people behave; East Asian cities for example lack much of the issues with violence, theft and drug use that is pervasive in many North American and some European urban cores, but there isn’t really much you can do about a physical lack of space and the sardine-like parking conditions that results from it. It may be the one context where that argument is actually applicable.
This is why I'm not using the word "winning" to describe what occurred with Iran; they were capable of creating enough attrition to force the US to give up. The US, however, did not achieve the overwhelming bulk of its aims even in the best-case scenario for the US going forward, even the purported "gains" trotted out likely could have been achieved via diplomacy instead without incurring so much cost, and that is the relevant metric when trying to assess a statement like "The US has so much global power that it can effortlessly topple every regime, and nobody can do anything in response". It doesn't matter what word you assign to the whole sorry situation, though it's more accurately described as "US failure" than "Iranian victory".
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might.
Quite evidently people who believed the previous statement about practically unchecked US power certainly need to update! That is not a hallucination; it was an actual position which was triumphantly and openly stated by some users, as the links provided by Dase illustrate.
American defeat was well outside my model, so this is "winning too much", as it were.
I did not necessarily expect this outcome either, and I remember arguing with users here at the start of this war who were pre-emptively gloating about America having global unrestricted power to bulldoze everybody Chyna decided to associate with, that the good ol' US of A enjoyed such an overwhelming military dominance over virtually everyone else that they could just walk in, topple regimes and replace them with puppets, then walk away in slow motion while explosions detonated behind them.
Turns out none of these takes aged well at all. It was ridiculous hubris then and it's ridiculous hubris now, and at this point one would expect to see grovelling mea culpas from anybody remotely capable of updating their priors.
Honestly, the only thing I've played for a while is online Scrabble, which I have become very good at for no particular reason. There is literally no practical use to knowing things like "what are all the admissible two letter words in the American Scrabble dictionary" and yet I continue.
The latter. You have a semi-separate nervous system of sorts in your gut, called the enteric nervous system, which orchestrates the entire digestive process (including peristalsis) and has a sleep-wake cycle of its own regulated by your circadian rhythm. It's a large collection of neurons that's about as sizeable as a cat's brain, and can operate by itself if disconnected from the rest of your nervous system.
The real philosophical question is whether such a thing is independently conscious to some degree, but that line of questioning leads nowhere good.
Well, you're in luck: Not only am I pretty certain I'm autistic (undiagnosed but the constellation of social deficits, special interests, executive function disorder and intense catastrophic burnout fits me all too well to ignore), I have independently written about coming across the normifying tendency in my own life and steadfastly refusing to succumb to it. Most of your comment could have been written by me, and fucking hell I also write massive unreadable blocks of text which then get trimmed down to something more manageable.
The primary difference is that I don't live in "merry-go-round cycles" as you describe them - I am now sustainably functional, though currently working in a job that threatens to burn me out a lot. And neither do I swing back and forth in terms of the actual opinions I hold; I have always been rather politically radical from young and very strongly police any such tendency to just moderate my opinions since I view that as stultifying one's own intellectual development for the sake of social harmony. What has varied over time is my ability to argue my positions, and the amount of energy I have to care about them and articulate them.
When it comes to keeping myself intellectually honest, I personally find that hashing things out with people and participating in places like this one helps; actually trying to test your opinions and rearticulate them via debate really helps clarify and sharpen your point of view. It can change your point of view too, but at least reasoned debate is an actually valid means through which to shape your beliefs as opposed to simply succumbing to a zeitgeist.
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