quiet_NaN
4d ago
The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.
Hard disagree. If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground. See Scott Alexander's Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons:
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles.
If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.
Also, Hanania argues that Musk is worse than the liberals:
The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.
The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'. The embrace blank-slatism to a degree that they are unable to even engage with HBD on its merits. But to their credit, they at least believe that their world view is correct. This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.
By contrast, Trump (the guy who Musk is backing and sucking up to) has had a total disregard for Level 1 through his entire political career: birtherism, qanon, election denial to the migrants eating cats and dogs. He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think that the idea of an Europe united under German military leadership has been tried and found wanting.
I also did not say that Germany can not be counted to uphold peace and prosperity for her citizenry, but merely pointed out the fact that the pax americana was better for the thriving of Western Europe (and large sways of Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Iron Curtain) than pretty much anything we had had before.
If the US is not willing to fill their role any more, then we should work with other European nations on a common defense strategy. Personally, I am not keen for us to become a de-facto leader in that role, though, and would much prefer an European army or the Brits or the French to lead this time. Their military forces have more combat experience than the Bundeswehr (though not as much as Ukraine).
I think that completely dissolving our military ties to the US would be premature until Trump invades Canada or Greenland (which I think unlikely), the US seems to have a knack for getting back on track even if you think this time they have finally gone completely off the rails. I am also deeply personally offended by Putin bringing large scale warfare back to Europe and forcing us to spend on defense. As Eisenhower pointed out, [e]very gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
While I am personally disgusted by nukes, I also recognize that their deterrence value is likely higher than that of conventional weapons. I have not done the math, but I think that the expected loss of QALYs from a nuclear defense strategy might be lower than that from a conventional defense strategy (because the former is more likely not to result in a war).
A conventional army, navy and air force require a ton of different weapon systems for all kind of circumstances, to deliver an appropriate tat for any tit the opponent might play. This is essential for offensive wars.
Think of some self defense enthusiast who knows multiple martial arts and techniques which widely vary in lethality, who could hold his own in a bar fight, a ring, a street fight or (possibly) a knife fight. I don't want to be that guy because I don't find fighting very purposeful. If I felt threatened, I would get a gun instead. This does not allow for a very nuanced response, but I don't really care too much to uphold bar fight culture. If you defect from the rules of civilization, I will not meet you at your chosen level of un-civilization. Instead, I will either tolerate your defection or escalate to the level where at least one of us will die.
Likewise, if you attack a country with conventional weapons, civilization is going to die. It does not matter to me much if it dies slowly in the trenches over the years as the QALY costs accumulate of if it dies in a few minutes of nuclear fire because my only tool is a big red button labeled "DEFECT". This branch of the decision tree is lost either way, the only thing it is fit now is to improve the prior probability of now counterfactual branches, so let's get it over with.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
One thing I find annoying about Trump is that he generally has a zero-sum mindset. If Canada is happy with how trade with the US works, then that means that they are shafting the US. If Iran agreed to the deal, then that deal was obviously contrary to US interests. If the Democrats get really angry when he fires National Park employees, then it is in his interests to fire them.
Real life is not a zero-sum game, but often closer to a coordination problem. Sometimes, playing defect will be beneficial, but often, if you solve for equilibrium on iteration, you will find that the new equilibrium is much more inadequate than the old one, leaving money on the table because the zero-sum mindset people were unable to coordinate.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The memorandum does not contain a provision to defend Ukraine against attackers, so the fact that the US did not ratify it would only matter if the US invaded Ukraine. And if they did, I would not be saying "oh, they did not ratify it, so they are a-ok" but rather accuse them of doing long term damage to states ability to coordinate and breaking international norms.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I agree that nukes are not very useful in a jungle war. A credible commitment to nuke North Vietnamese cities if the Vietcong crossed some line (e.g. giving South Vietnam the control over the nukes) might have prevented the fall of Saigon, but would not have been enough to convince the VC to surrender.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses, but as a strategic weapon they have one use and one use only- forcing an enemy already defeated on the battlefield into harsher surrender terms than he would have otherwise agreed to without a costly invasion.
You mean historically, i.e. Japan? Arguably, speeding along the surrender of Japan is just a footnote in how nuclear weapons have shaped the world since they were invented.
In general, nukes can not replace an invasion for any power which is concerned with its diplomatic standing. If GWB had threatened to nuke Kabul unless the Taliban surrendered, he would just have made either a fool or a mass murderer out of himself.
What nukes generally do is that they make your opponents much more reluctant to go to war with you. If your opponent has nukes, threatening their continued existence is off the table. (Of course, this is a game of chicken between the Nuclear Powers, "I will start WW3 unless the US/USSR surrenders and embraces communism/democracy" is unlikely to work. But it is an insurance against being wiped off the map the way Saddam's regime was.) This is why North Korea and Iran want them, and why Ukraine would likely have wanted them as well if they knew what was in store for them.
The fact that we had a cold war where both sides were trying to thwart each other while also tiptoeing around the other's red lines is a direct consequence of nuclear weapons.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I would argue that a security guarantee (e.g. NATO article 5) is also just a promise.
You are correct that the signatories are under no obligation to help Ukraine against an attacker (merely to call the Security Council if nukes are involved -- and a lot of good that would do). As you say, Russia rather explicitly promised not to attack Ukraine though:
- The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Typically, when a state annexes some territory, they do not give full citizenship to the people they conquered. At best, the conquered are second class citizens, at worst they are driven off the land or outright murdered. Also, the states that tend to favor imperialistic expansion are often not the states that put a lot of stock on citizen rights. If Hitler had extended German citizenship to the French, that would have improved their situation somewhat, but not greatly. Being treated by the Nazis as they treated e.g. German socialists would not have been a great improvement.
Afghanistan was colonized for 20 years
If Afghanistan is an example of colonization, it is a non-central example.
Normally, colonizers extract resources from their colony, their motivations are fundamentally economic.
We could debate if that was the case for Iraq (which has oil), but the occupation of Afghanistan was a net loss for the US taxpayer. I am sure that some PMCs and military industrial companies made a killing, but for the US as a whole it was a very expensive misadventure, which is why Biden pulled out.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
- The non-American western countries is well aware that the balance of power has shifted and that they are, at best, only nominal makers of the Rules. They resent being sidelined and are aware than American foreign policy is at least partly designed to make sure that none of them ever regain their former status as a Power.
Speaking as a (west) German here, the past eighty years under the hegemony of the US were by far the best we had in our history, anywhere in terms of peace and prosperity. Losing WW2 was the only good thing Hitler ever did for Germany. Anyone can see that large colonial empires have become a net negative. Sure, one requires resources such as rare earth elements for the tech stuff, but the real money is in building the tech, not in mining minerals.
I think that the other European former superpowers are mostly on the same page with us, there. "Hey, remember our glory days when we ruled a colonial empire and our men were always fighting in some war far away or even in Europe or dying of malaria so we could have cheap cotton and rum and tea?"
- Up-and-coming Powers like China are well aware that America will never willingly allow them to reach peer status unless America is absolutely sure they will be meek followers of the Rules as they stand. Which really just means submitting to American soft power instead of hard power.
What exactly is the US doing to prevent China from becoming a peer power? The CHIPS act? Allying with other SE Asian countries to prevent China from invading? These seem strategies for delaying China becoming a peer power rather than preventing it, and don't seem very objectionable to me as far as side effects are concerned.
The strategies the US could employ to prevent them from becoming a peer power, such as invading or nuking them are thankfully far out of the Overton window (or at least were under Biden).
quiet_NaN
10d ago
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum. The short version is that Ukraine destroyed its Soviet nukes, and in return, the signatories pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support actions in the Security Council if it should ever be threatened by nukes.
In 1994, this seemed like a good deal. The cold war was over, Ukraine likely did have more urgent spending priorities than a nuclear weapon program and the rest of the world, both the nuclear powers and the others were glad to keep the number of nuclear powers limited. Wars of conquest seemed a thing of the past. While the US engaged in some regime change operations (most of which turned out rather terrible, tbh), in the 1990s the idea to expand your territory through war seemed basically dead.
The rule-based world order was a higher, better equilibrium, just like most people would prefer to live in a country where weapons of war are controlled only by a small group of mostly decent people to living in some failed state where many people carry an assault weapon for the simple reason that many other people carry an assault weapon.
Putin's invasion made some serious cracks in that vision of a rule-based world order (which was always perceived to be strong in Europe), but Trump II basically broke it. Under Trump, the US can not be relied to punish defectors from the rule based system, and might not even relied to provide nuclear retaliation for nuclear attacks on NATO members.
The best time for Ukraine to restart their nuclear weapons program would have been when Russia defected from the Budapest Memorandum by annexing Crimea in 2014, before Russia was ready for a full scale invasion. I think it would have been technically feasible. An experienced Soviet nuclear weapons engineer who was 40 in 1990 would have been 64 in 2014. Ukraine also runs a lot of civilian nuclear reactor and has its own Uranium deposits (which would come in handy once they quit the NPT, because this might make acquiring fuel on the world market difficult). WP claims they even have enrichment plants.
In general, figuring out how to make nuclear weapons is something which took a good fraction of the world's geniuses in the 1940s, but has become much simpler since then. Getting an implosion device to work just right is something which would likely be helped a lot by high speed cameras and microelectronics, and a few decades of Moore's law likely makes a hell of a difference for simulations. Delivery systems might be a bit harder, but at the end of the day you don't need 100% reliability for deterrence to work. Even if your enemy is 50% confident that they can intercept the delivery, that still leaves the expected outcome of a nuclear exchange highly negative for them. Attacking a launch site -- conventionally or otherwise -- is forcing your enemy to either use or lose his nukes, and few think it wise to do so.
On a more personal note, I really hate nuclear weapons, and very much prefer the rule-based world order. I very much preferred the 2010s when Putin was mostly known for riding topless, as well as the odd murder of a journalist or dissident, the US was fine playing world police (which included some ill-advised military adventures, but also providing nuclear deterrence for NATO) and I was comfortably regarding nukes, NATO and large scale wars with the same distant horror I might have for medieval healthcare.
Even besides Ukraine, in the future Europe can not rely on the US for defense, and the UK and France arsenals might not be judged sufficient for deterrence, and some EU nuke might be called for. I am not sure how it would work. Classical EU commission manner, where 27 member states have to push the launch button and Orban can veto if he feels like it? Or give Mrs van-der-Leyen launch authority? Or simply have a common weapon program and distribute the spoils to 27 members?
quiet_NaN
11d ago
If the task of taking over the world is harder than playing pokemon, then I suppose that a deployment of the current iteration of Claude will not take over the world (unless it has more reason to get good at taking over the world during training than it has to get good at pokemon).
I think that given recent developments, anyone who is very confident on whether we will have ASI by 2050 is overconfident.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
From the context, it seems that Claude was not really trained (in the NN sense) to play Pokemon.
Deployed LLMs are limited by the length of their context window. Moreover, they have been trained to generate text, not to be especially good at being mesa-trainable at deployment time.
It is a bit like complaining that a chip which was designed to decode MP3 makes a terrible FPGA.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I get that some people just hate Russia, but what exactly is the hawks’ plan?
This feels like a real straw man.
Now, I am sure that there are still some cold war hawks who might be described as "hating Russia", but even they might just see Russia as an opponent in a zero-or-negative-sum game. Europe generally was fine with Russia. What I am not fine with, however, are wars of conquest. From a utilitarian perspective, we should try to prevent these wars, and the best way to prevent them is to support the victims so that a quick blitz is turned into a humiliating defeat. When this is not available, turned them into years of a costly and embarrassing meat grinder -- while having lower utility -- also serves to dissuade further wars of conquest.
If Russia was brought to the point of having to evacuate Crimea & Novorossiya, it would mean an existential political crisis & possible state collapse, the consequences of which would be incalculable.
Geographic note: I just checked on a map, and it seems that the Kremlin is not actually located on Crimea, but in Moscow, which is a bit further away.
Remember when the US pulled out of Vietnam, and this lead to a total collapse of their country? Roving bands of former US marines would try pillage Canadian and Mexican border villages, Kansas declared itself an absolute monarchy, missile bases would just launch their ICBM payloads against whatever cities their commanders personally disliked most, Stalinists took over most communal councils and fought the class war using zoning?
Of course, nothing of that sort happened.
If Ukraine retakes Crimea, which seems very unlikely, then most of the probability mass is probably not on them slaughtering every last able-bodied man in Russia on their path there, followed by killing Putin as he personally tries to hold Crimea. Instead, the hypothetical path to victory would be for political pressure to mount on Putin as more and more Russian citizens are killed, finally resulting in Putin withdrawing. (Slightly more realistically, his forces would withdraw to Crimea and perhaps a tiny slice of what used to be Ukraine, and Ukraine would be persuaded to accept the new borders.)
Sure, a loss of the war -- especially after this much bloodshed -- would also be a political loss for Putin, and it is uncertain if he would survive it. But from what I can tell, the key stakeholders -- his oligarchs -- are in it for having a carefree life of embezzling money, not for Making Russia Great Again. Likely, they let him slaughter his troops because they have a good thing going and don't really care too much either way, not because they believe that it is instrumental that Russia controls Kiev.
Even if they decide to get rid of him, they would likely just put on of their numbers in charge. The probability that some doomsday cult running on a platform of nuclear Armageddon will end up in charge of Russia seems tiny indeed.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I would argue that if you want to align rational entities through punishment, it is crucial to establish likely causal pathways.
Suppose for a minute that we cheapened out on criminal investigations. Instead of autopsies, forensics, jury trials, appeals, we would just a cop to the murder site, and that cop would be tasked with thinking for five minutes who the likely culprit is, then shoot them.
Moral considerations aside, I would argue that this would be much worse for setting incentives against murder. To get away with murder, you would simply have to outwit a cop for five minutes, which you can do reliably by not being caught at the murder scene. By contrast, nobody would report murder victims, because the risk of being the likeliest suspect would be too great.
Instead, civilization really detests murder, and is willing to spend extraordinary amounts to find murderers.
The other extreme are trivial infractions, where strict liability is more common. If you are caught driving with a broken tail light, you are on the hook for that. Nobody cares to investigate your claims that of course you checked that all your lights were working before starting the car, and that your evil neighbor inserted a light bulb on the verge of failing to frame you. The reason we do this is because the punishment is mild, and a thorough investigation and jury trial would cost much more than whatever the fine is. If the punishment for a broken tail light was death, then people would actually have incentives to frame their neighbors and we would have to investigate these cases as carefully as murders to prevent bad incentives.
Given that we are talking about a SCOTUS case here, it seems to me that the likely fine would be of an order of magnitude that spending a few millions on establishing causal relationships would not be a huge deal, even if one does not go for the 'beyond reasonable doubt' standard.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think a loser who manages to kill a few people just graduates to extra pathetic loser through his murders. I have sympathy for losers, but not for killer losers. Humans are squishy and easily killed if you don't care about social consequences. Real life is not some MMORPG where A killing B proves anything relevant about the relative merits of A and B: the guys who shot celebrities such as Dutschke, MLK, Lennon might have had an impact on world history, but that does not mean that they the respectability of their victims should somehow be transferred to them. World history should not care for these murderers more than it should care to name the lightning strikes which kill a person.
If I am ever killed by some fuckwit, please don't elevate him to some level of respectability out of respect for me. I am totally with Brecht when he asks us to destroy any respect for killers and their acts of killing. Don't mention my killer by name, instead invent some demeaning nickname for him. Killing people (absent a very good reason) should get more ridicule than most other ridiculous behaviors. By all means, let late night TV speculate about the killer's penis size instead of turning my murder into a grimdark real crime drama with gloomy music.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way.
I think a lot of it is related to the media coverage. People running amok with knives or driving cars into crowds are over-represented compared to the number of people they kill in the media, and this in turn plants these ideas into the minds of people who are either clinically insane or plain evil.
For something which is much less reported on, look at wrong way driving on the Autobahn. If done in an attempt to kill yourself and possibly others, it is just as evil. But as it is much harder to establish intent after the fact, most of these deaths are just traffic accidents. Sure, the vultures of Bild will report on it, especially if they get juicy pictures of half-burned corpses, but it will not give them the kind of hard-on they get from a psychotic migrant stabbing some people.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
This.
The idea that anyone would naturally own allegiance to the Taliban just by being born in Afghanistan and would be some kind of oath-breaker if he helped the US is absurd.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
so evil as to collaborate with foreign occupiers
Collaborating with foreign occupiers is not evil per se. It depends on the evilness ratio between the non-occupation government and the occupying force. If your nations government is a liberal democracy and your occupier are the Nazis, helping the occupiers is bad, if it is the other way round, it is praiseworthy. You own allegiance to humanity, not whatever government the nation you ended in happens to have. (As far as Afghanistan goes, I think that more than one side can be disgusting. With the Taliban regime, I think that rapes are limited to marital rapes between husband and wife and women who are inadequately controlled/protected by their male relatives.)
Also, what is your position on US military members who helped prop up the "puppet regime based around raping boys and growing opium"? Presumably, a US serviceman had a lot more alternatives to propping up the regime (e.g., going to military prison) and was a lot more complicit in insuring the regime survival than some Afghan dude who would be willing to be an interpreter for the US forces so his family would not starve. Who knows what else the marines who fought on the side of the rapists might do as civilians back in America. Absolutely reckless, it would be much safer to deport anyone who served in Afghanistan back there.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think a lot depends on how likely it is that SF was causally responsible. For example, if the EPA said to SF in 2011: "We have detected trivially elevated concentrations of Cs-137 in the Pacific near your city, so we will punish you for that", that would be absurd, you would just punish them for sharing an ocean with Fukushima.
If it had been clear that the EPA imposed both restrictions on the easily controllable (e.g., the quality of the wastewater) and the environmental outcome, then that would be a-ok with me. If a teacher says "to pass my class, you have to do well on your homework and the final test", then I would not be overly sympathetic to a student who did the homework and failed the test -- they knew that the test was coming and that the homework might not be enough preparation for them.
On the other hand, if the environmental goal had not be previously mentioned, that would feel unfair. If a teacher said "to pass my class, you just have to do well on your homework" and then had their students take a test to pass because "if you did your homework, you will probably be fine", that would be deeply unfair.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
If states were a single economic entity, then one would really need game theory to explain why harming yourself plus the party that defected from free trade would be a good idea. But states are generally not a single economic entity.
For consumer goods, a simplified model would be that a state contains both industry which builds consumer goods -- cars, smartphones, TVs and the like -- and people which buy such things.
The consumer side -- which will bear the impact of import tariffs -- has a coordination problem. If everyone has to pay 50$ more for a smartphone, that is not worth anyone's time to really get upset about. This is especially true because the consumer might not even know what fraction of the prices they are paying is tariffs. And of course, they also will not see the international competition which decided not to compete in their domestic market in the first place. Even for major investments like cars, it is hard to get upset if you don't know what offers you might be missing.
The supply side -- both the workers and the owners of the factories -- has no such coordination problem. If a small minority in a country is losing their jobs due to tariffs imposed by another country, that is very likely to result in political action.
In net, import tariffs hurt your own consumers and foreign producers, but because nobody cares about the trivial pain of a lot of consumers, they can be treated as mostly hurting the foreign producers.
In other areas, things work differently and a state is closer to a single economic entity. For example, for military hardware or critical means of production (such as the lithography machines you mentioned), things are reversed. China does not go: "Europe, if you impose a tariff on our electric cars, we will retaliate by placing high tariffs on ASML", as that would hurt their semiconductor industry far more than it would hurt a niche European company. Instead, strategic concerns dominate here. If you buy weapon systems, you want to be reasonable certain that you will still get ammo for them in conflicts which you anticipate. If you sell weapons, the strategic impact of them will likely be a more important consideration than just making a quick buck. I guess on the buyers side, strategic considerations might work kind of like a tariff -- if country A would be indifferent between buying a 50M$ fighter jet from country B or a 100M$ jet from country C, this could be seen as a 100% tariff on fighter jets from country B (imposed by and paid for by country A, so no money is changing hands). Of course, on the supply side of things, often it is "we will not sell the AI chips / ICBMs to you for any price you would care to pay" instead.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
I think there is a world of a difference between the plain military fatigues he is wearing and some generalissimo uniform (which Trump would doubtlessly have found more acceptable).
Every politician performs in part for the people at home. I guess the message he wants to convey to his soldiers in the trenches is "Like you, I had this war forced upon me. Like you, I am at the risk of Russian bombings. We are fighting for the same thing."
As every political messaging, it is a bit silly, but it is a brand which has worked for him so far. Zelensky decided that it is more important to stay on-brand for his people than to appease Trump by being his dress-up doll. I think he was correct.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
His childish behavior (inappropriate attire, attempting to alter the deal in front of the press, insolence to a nation responsible for his nation still existing) put the deal at risk, and seems to indicate that his country’s well-being no longer holds paramount sway in Zelensky.
I guess not everyone is the kind of respectable elder statesman that Trump is.
It has been said that the west will defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier, and there is some truth in that. For NATO, Ukraine is a great geostrategic investment. We pay peanuts (compared to the NATO military budget) to weaken the primary opponent of NATO and get someone else to do all the dying for us. As a bonus, the country we support is much more sympathetic than the mujaheddin were back in the old days and seem much less likely to disrupt the NYC real estate market.
Obviously, Ukraine is going to take NATO aid as long as they want to resist Putin. But expecting them to be more grateful to NATO than the mujaheddin were would be unrealistic.
Now enter Trump. This dude starts "peace talks" with Russia, immediately makes big concessions to Putin while calling Zelensky a dictator. Then he invites him to the White House and expects him to grovel. Even if Zelensky did everything Trump wanted, signed the deal, wore whatever Trump felt was appropriate, rolled over on command and so on, Trump will not be satisfied and keep the military aid flowing. In the end, he expects Ukraine to accept some peace deal he is negotiating with Putin.
When you are fighting a war, national pride (however much I might detest the concept) is an asset. Zelensky getting humiliated by Trump would definitely affect the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, and is likely not worth the few extra bombs Trump might deliver before cutting their flow to force Ukraine to accept a deal he has made with his best buddy Putin.
quiet_NaN
18d ago
I would argue that liberal democracies also have a big advantage in R&D, and that in general technological progress is required for human thriving. In my world model, slavery and feudalism did not stop because people saw the light and decided that they were immoral, but because technological progress moved the equilibrium solution away from them.
While the USSR certainly made significant contributions to science, my general feeling is that Putin's Russia does not focus on selling high tech to the world, but rather natural resources. Basically, you can make your buddies boss of the natural oil companies, and they will extract revenue and have your back. However, if you were to put your buddies in charge of Google, that would likely result in smaller companies eating their lunch. It takes a special kind of person to run a successful tech company, not just some goon. This in turn makes innovative companies a power base which can not be easily controlled, so most autocrats do without them.
I realize that China is a counter-example: a country which performs cutting-edge research while also being totalitarian. But at least as far as tech companies go, they do have a problem with billionaire tech bros and strip them of their companies sometimes when they become to powerful for the CCP to tolerate.
quiet_NaN
18d ago
If there is a hell, then Höss in the very lowest pit, and while nobody deserves to be in hell, I can hardly think of anyone who tried harder to deserve to be there. When the utilitarians break hell, his kind shall be the last to be freed.
The amount of utility loss Höss has caused is unfathomable. A comic book villain could rape and murder a five year old every day of his bloody life, and still the QALY loss of his lifetime would be less than what Höss and his team achieved in a month. He had every opportunity to regret his actions during his tenure of running the hell he had created on earth. If god wanted him to repent, then every cry of a child he murdered was a call to repent, and he ignored them all. He did not try to blow up the gas chambers, or take his own life, or even ask to be transferred to the front to serve Hitler without directly getting his hands dirty.
And then in a prison cell, he suddenly discovered that he had done grave wrong and asked god for forgiveness. Why did the Soviets even give him a priest? And if I had been his confessor, I would have told him that a million murders were a bit about my pay grade, but that I would be very happy to forgive him a dozen murders of his choice, and let him try the Nuremberg defense at the pearly gates for the others.
Of course, the evilness of giving comfort to Höss pales compared to what the Catholic Church did for other Nazis. The same Church which had barely lifted a finger to try to stop the genocides of Hitler was not only willing to forgive famous Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann or Joseph Mengele, they were willing to bet all their moral authority on helping them to escape worldly justice as well. Thanks to Christian forgiveness, Mengele, the Nazi doctor died in freedom in Argentina, and Eichmann only got his due because the Israeli were less forgiving than the Vatican.
Anything the Catholics did after the ratlines is small fries compared to the evil they did back then. I mean, if Christian forgiveness means smuggling mass murderers to Argentina, then it obviously also means shielding priest from worldly authorities and enabling them to continue to sexually abuse children. As long as they confess from time to time, a few raped kids will not prevent them from joining Höss in the Catholic conception of paradise.
So your heuristic is that we should just ignore less successful people when they criticize their more successful peers? So when some Republicans claim that Biden has dementia, we can safely ignore that because the ones making the claim are not a sitting president of the United States, but some congressmen at best?
For the career of Hanania, a political endorsement of Trump would have been a no-brainer: Trump might have offer him a job in his administration, while there is no way in hell Harris would have offered him a job. So either he was deluded into thinking that there was no way Trump could win (unlikely) or we must consider the possibility that he is driven by something other than opportunism. I think it is likely that he considered a Trump policy so bad that it would be net negative even if Trump implemented a few of his policy proposals.
Personally, I do not think that Musk turned into an idiot, and more that he turned evil or that he was always evil, but used to mask that fact through backing pro-social causes like electric cars -- that he faked being aligned to the thriving of humanity when it served his interests, and now he fakes being aligned to Trump's interests instead.
Granted, Musk backed Trump before the election (while the other tech billionaires mostly waited until Trump had won to kiss his ring), but this still does not seem an unreasonable gamble. Trump is very willing to use the federal government to harass companies which have offended him personally. The Democrats have certainly also leaned on tech companies in the past, but they might force SpaceX to hire a few more DEI, not blacklist them for government contracts because they hate Musk.
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