quiet_NaN
7hr ago
Even if we grant them that they have discovered a new thing which can carry momentum, I am kind of puzzled about the implications for conservation of energy.
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Friction and air resistance aside, the most effective method to convert energy into momentum of your vehicle is a railway (or car). The other mass involved in the conservation of momentum is Earth, which is much heavier than your train, so almost all of the energy you invest ends up as kinetic energy in your train. We know from high school physics that the energy you have to invest to reach velocity v is E=m/2vv.
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Rockets are a lot less energy efficient than that. Because their momentum-balancing mass is much smaller, they end up with most of the energy being carried by the exhaust. Tyranny of the rocket equation and all that.
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Photon drives powered by onboard reactors may or may not fall under some weird relativistic version of the rocket equation (after all, your reactor will become slightly lighter as it provides energy), but are in any case laughably inefficient.
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A drive which provides a useful constant, rate of acceleration while using a constant amount of power would be better than the train, eventually, thereby violating conservation of energy.
Another way to think about it: If you are using undiscovered massive particles (perhaps dark matter) to dump your momentum into, the rest system of these particles will define an unique frame of reference. If you are in the rest system, you can accelerate very efficiently with your magical drive: just suck in particles and expel them with a tiny velocity (say 1m/s) to carry your momentum. If you do that for a while and now move through the particles with 10 km/s, you will notice that your job becomes much harder: to carry the same momentum, you will have to accelerate the incoming particles, which you see at 10km/s, to 10.001 km/s. This costs a lot more energy than accelerating them from 0m/s to 1m/s. (You will also see more particles per time, but this will not save you, fundamentally, the amount of energy you require to dump a marginal amount of momentum (dE/dp) will become very unfavorable.)
This of course suggests another test for the emDrive: Michelson-Morley experiment, dark matter edition. Measure the thrust per energy (probably in z direction, so don't pick the poles?) at different times of the day and the year, so that the relative velocity of the particles in the direction of the thrust is different. If you get fluctuations consistent with Earth moving through some particle field, this should be enough for at least one Nobel.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
As I see it, conscripted military in a democratic country are the ones who it is least just for someone attacked by that country to retaliate against, because they are coerced into doing what they do and often are not even allowed to leave before completing their service.
Well, draft dodging is a thing in most democratic countries, as few countries provide the kind of coercion which would get people to assist a serial killer.
In my mind, there is a kind of pyramid of responsibility.
On the lowest rug is the taxpayer. Most democratic countries do not wage total wars most of the time, so it is likely that only a small fraction of their productivity goes towards sustaining the war. Intentionally targeting these civilians is generally considered a war crime, but they may become collateral damage.
The next rug are people working full time for the war effort in low end jobs. This includes the conscript but also the person who works in a munitions factory or writes software documentation for killer drones. Killing them during their work seems a legitimate tactic to me.
Then you have the specialists, like fighter pilots, star programmers of smart munitions and so on. I think these might be legitimate subjects of targeted elimination.
Then you have the leadership, like generals and politicians. Legitimate targets.
(Note: I am not a lawyer or ethics expert, please consult with your lawyer and spiritual guidance provider before killing anyone.)
Ideally, you would want to achieve your tactical and strategic goals with minimum loss of life. Practically, the easiest way to neutralize enemy infantry is to shoot them, which is why every army in the world has weapon systems for that purpose. Sometimes (e.g. WWI), the best strategy is to to feed your men into the meat grinder and hope the enemy runs out of people first. Sometimes, it is mostly about taking out high tech materiel or leaders and any grunts killed are only collateral. Sometimes people decide to go for the tax base of their enemy, but we have thankfully agreed that the military benefits are too low to justify the costs in human lives and call these people "war criminals".
I will grant you that if Hamas had killed a thousand IDF conscripts on Oct 7 instead of civilians, that would not have achieved any strategic or tactical goals either. Still, I think the distinction of "unarmed civilians" and "soldiers" forms a very useful Schelling fence.
Is it really that bizarre? As an intuition pump, what does the total morality thing say about obligatory meat consumption? Does the wrongness of the Inuit hunter who tries to kill the walrus to feed his family and the walrus that gores the hunter trying to kill it sum up to >=1? I would consider dodging this question by saying that the walrus can not be a moral subject to be a copout.
I think in that case I might be okay with the outcome of the struggle for life.
If I were a follower of Odin who thinks that battle is good, I might say the warriors of tribes A and B are both totally justified in trying to murder each other, because I like the resulting outcome (war).
Instead, I am a normalish modern Westerner who thinks that modern war is terrible, an inadequate equilibrium to be avoided almost all of the time. There are a small number of cases where war may be justified to remove vast amounts of negative utility, e.g. by liberating Auschwitz. But if the argument for side A being justified hinges on "if they win the war, this will create a better world than if they lose it", then the argument can not be true for both sides at once.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed.
Our moral intuitions differ on this a lot. I am not per se against actions whose only purpose is to depress the enemies utility function. If the only move you have is to break into Hitler's villa and destroy all his paintings just to piss him off, I will not hold it against you if you do that.
But when you target third parties such as civilians, reality is typically more complex than that, because they are not only terms in the utility function of the enemy, but also of other's utility functions, such as their own or mine.
In my mind, there is a ton of difference between accepting some collateral damage and intentionally targeting civilians. If Hamas targeted IDF bases with their rockets but accepted the possibility that they might miss and blow up a school instead, or if the IDF decides to blow up 50 people to get one Hamas commander, that can still be viewed as evil because it assigns so little utility to the civilians, but it is very different from expressing a preference for killing civilians, as Hamas did on Oct 7.
If Hamas had targeted shot IDF personnel without offering surrender, I would not have liked this either, but I would also have recognized that there was some military utility to their action.
Instead, they elected to go after civilians. Intentionally. As I have written elsewhere:
Hamas leadership know that they their organization will never defeat Israel militarily. Their best chance to achieving their dream of wiping Israel from the map is a broad alliance of Arab countries who defeat Israel together. The way they get there is public Muslim outrage at Israel. And the best way to generate such outrage is dead Palestinian kids. In my opinion, their attacks were militarily completely pointless, but served the important strategic goal of getting Israel to bomb Gaza down. This will likely throw a wrench into Israel's diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with its Arab neighbors.
In short, the Gazan war is not an acceptable price for Hamas to pay for their day of impotent vengeance on Oct 7, but the motivation for Oct 7 was to get Bibi to blow up a lot of Gazan kids.
I firmly believe that an organization acting like this should be wiped from the face of the earth.
On a broader scale, the problem with the Palestinians is that they don't know how to lose.
Wikipedia has this helpful list. The overall effect is reminiscent of that black knight scene in Monty python: "You have destroyed our ability to fight you in the open? No matter, we can still do suicide bombings. You have walled in Gaza? No matter, we can still fire rockets".
Israel is evidently not incompatible with continued Palestinian existence, so absent a road to victory, resisting them seems counter-productive.
Sometimes it is better to accept accept a peace which feels unjust than fight on forever. When the Alsace became French in 1945 again, a lot of the German-speaking people living there were probably not happy about it. But somehow, the proud tradition of fighting a war every few decades about that region was never revived. It surely helped that nationalist fervor was depleted a bit on the German side after the Nazis, but I still consider this an outcome vastly better for everyone than the alternatives.
"They're both justified to continue murdering each other"
From where I stand, this seems a totally bizarre statement. If two sides fight about a thing, then whatever metric you use to decide who is right and what you would consider a fair distribution of the land or whatever, the rightfulness of all sides summed up has to be less than unity. Only if you optimized for conflict instead of post-conflict outcomes could you prefer both sides to fight each other.
In summary, I am not pro-Bibi, but I am really anti-Hamas. After Oct 7, Hamas needs to be crushed, and as Biden has not volunteered, it falls to the IDF to do the job. I don't think that the way the IDF wages this war is actually all that great, and I am very concerned that nobody has a plan to offer the Gazans a credible alternative. I also think that Israel should destroy the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and arrest the settlers who destroyed that Gazan aid convoy on charges of attempted murder.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Yes they do. Wikipedia points out that the force is (1/c) times the power, and helpfully converts 1/c to 3.34 Newtons per Gigawatt. The article also helpfully does the calculation for the solar radiation near 1 AU (i.e. Earth) and comes to a value of ten Micronewtons per square meter.
If one wants to use this force, the best thing one can do is have a very large and very light mirror, which is better than first taking the momentum of the suns photons on your solar collectors and then sending a small fraction of that momentum out in the direction you actually want to accelerate in. This is not completely hopeless: metallized Mylar foil might weight some 50 micrograms per square meter, so a space craft where most of the mass is in the foil might accelerate at 40 centimeters per second squared (though there are some constraints on the direction, similarly to sailing). Of course, having a spacecraft with two hectares of foil per kilogram of payload might be difficult from an engineering point, and micrometeorites might become a problem. I would probably play a Kerbal mod which adds Kerbol radiation pressure and giant sails, though.
Or you could actively shine an Earth- or Moonbound laser on your spacecraft.
In general, there is a tradeoff between getting the most momentum out of your propellant mass, which benefits from higher exhaust velocities on the one side (with photons being the optimal choice, and ultrarelativistic ions only slightly worse) and getting the most momentum per energy invested, which favors throwing out a huge mass at minimal velocity. For propulsions where the energy source is decoupled from the reaction mass, such as ion drives, the sweet spot seems to be at a mere 20-50km/s -- which is far away from the 300,000km/s you would get with photons.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Propellantless propulsion flies in the face of the conservation of momentum. This is a law which is baked in the current Physics theories, including the standard model and general relativity.
From a theoretical perspective, it follows from the Lagrange function being independent under certain coordinate transformations with Noether's theorem.
The steelman version of this propellantless propulsion would be the claim that of course momentum is conserved, there are just previously undetected particles or fields which carry momentum. Just like a plane can accelerate while staying at the same height without violating the conservation of momentum by transferring some momentum to the air with a propeller, a spacecraft might do the same. Of course, the particles could not be reacting with anything else (like satellites or these fancy detectors we use for dark matter search), otherwise they would have been found long ago. A fundamental part of the universe being discovered by chance through an commercially interesting engineering application seems unlikely -- it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works. (By contrast, my priors for observing complex systems exhibiting unexpected behaviors which will surprise physicists are much more relaxed, high temperature (that is, liquid nitrogen) superconductors were a total surprise, and the early experiments with heavier-than-air flight probably took place before we had any idea how a plane is generating lift.)
The priors for that would at least be slightly higher than "Archangel Uriel personally pushes the spacecraft forward", but still lower than for room temperature superconductors or even room temperature fusion.
The best way to convince the world that the "emdrive" works would be to put one in LEO in a cubesat. Even if you can only generate a very moderate thrust from solar power, the ability to create that thrust continuously will integrate to a tremendous delta v. A year at a thousandths of Earth surface acceleration would work out to 309km/s delta-v. Within three years, your spacecraft would pass Voyager 1 in distance. Humans have some capabilities to track satellites, so we could check easily enough.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
To keep such a system fair, you would also need a lot more crosswalks perhaps one every 50 meters in dense cities. As others have implied, you would have to sacrifice one lane per side plus change for parking so that drivers can get out of their car without stepping out onto the death zone. Or you just make parking on the side of the road illegal.
I think the result would be rather hellish for drivers.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Agreed. I think culpability should be assigned on a case by case basis. Someone jumps off a highway bridge in front of a moving truck, you can hardly blame the truck for not going slow enough so that it could come to a stop within a meter. Someone went 50km/h in a 30km/h zone and runs over some kid? Whole different story.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.
MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.
Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Originally I picked uniforms kind of at random, but thinking more about it, it seems like a fun hill to die on.
Uniforms have been part of most armies for centuries. Kind of weird as a fashion choice? I think that the reason is that uniforms serve a useful purpose in the military: they erase differences in class and culture between the troops, and emphasize the difference between the troops and the enemy or civilians. This increases group cohesion: instead of seeing Bob the bully lying bleeding in the barbed wires in their stupid blue sweater, you see a fellow brother in arms. This unit cohesion and the sublimation of individual responsibility to the chain of command are then useful for military operations such as winning a battle or murdering a village.
"beliefs they are fighting for the oppressed" and "wears uniforms" are both Bayesian evidence for someone being more likely to drag you from your home and murdering you. Of course, there are some important difference in details between the postmen and the Einsatzgruppen, but there are also some important differences in details between the Stalinists and campus protesters.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
"What religious practices do you have to follow to not go to hell? -- Trick question, you are all going to hell unless you accept Christ, who will be born in another few hundred years or so" seems like the kind of shit the old testament god would pull, right.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think current LLMs are not remotely reliable enough to serve as politicians. Adversarial examples are a thing, after all. If we can not train an LLM to reliably avoid saying bad words, how can we expect it to reliably not vote for bad laws? And anything of truly human level intelligence would get us into alignment territory.
Then there might be a game theoretical cost if your opponents can just run your executive to determine what the reply to a provocation would be. If PresGPT was the head of the US executive, and China got their hands on a copy (one of the backups, or just a replication of the fine-tuning used on GPT5), they could have hard numerical probabilities on what the US response would be if they attacked Taiwan.
The problem with tyrants is that is attracts exactly the wrong people for the job even more than the office of president does. When Rome switched its political system from Republic to Empire, they certainly increased the variance of their leadership a lot.
And precommitting to following the policies of an assassination victim removes the incentives to kill them from the opponents of the policies, but might provide new incentives of supporters to throw them under the bus. I mean, if it is public knowledge that policy X will supported by politician P will pass with some probability p, then all you need to do is make sure that p does not change if they are killed. In practice, there is no such common knowledge, so situations where one side could act on private information will dominate.
And depending on the capabilities of the assassins, changing the mind of the successor on the policy might not be even their end goal. The end goal could be to change the mind of changing the mind of the one who succeeds the fifth murder victim or something.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think replying "That seems like a pretty controversial claim, do you have any evidence to back it up, my evidence for it not being true is so-and-so".
The (I guess) inflammatory statement was part of the top level post, which to me seems like a clear example of an effort-post. If the post was just this one statement, I think our mods would likely have asked the submitter to put more effort in by proactively providing evidence. But if one cancels every lengthy post which contains some claim which might be controversial and is not backed by evidence then there will be very few posts left.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:
- A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen -- anything from 'postmen and Nazis are exactly the same group' to 'there is no postman who is also a Nazi' remains possible.
- B. 'Every mass murdering tyrant in modern history had a stated agenda which was woke'. This is a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, even if I were to not dispute that every left-wing or communist regime from the Republican side of the Spanish civil war to the Khmer Rouge qualifies as woke there are a few counterexamples -- for example the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah or the Young Turks all committed their worst atrocities for explicitly racist or religious reasons. (WP List) For convenience and tradition, let us focus on the Holocaust. If you prefer interpretation B, what is your explanation? Does Hitler not qualify as a tyrant? Was the Shoah the product of an anti-racist agenda? Do we start with our weekly epistemic discussion about the Holocaust?
That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.
Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.
I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.
And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think that there is a significant correlation between being an American football player and being physically imposing. As a proxy for 'this guy looks buff, better not mess with him', you could do worse than football player.
A 'complete non-sequitur' would have been if they had said 'blacks are strongly over-represented in /chess/, hence they are more physically imposing'.
Of course, there are a zillion confounders. Getting into the NFL probably means specializing in football in college, which is a decision hinging not only on other cultural factors. And it is not like most black males end up in the NFL either, so it could be that blacks simply have a larger variance.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
The current SC is not exactly shy about overturning precedent, have they recently affirmed this position or is it an older decision?
quiet_NaN
7d ago
adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men
From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.
The causal chain might go like this:
- Claim 1: Modern dating is frustrating for a lot of people, compared to patriarchal mating strategies.
- Claim 2: For women, this manifests as being more worried about rape in a dating context.
- Claim 3: This generalizes to being more worried about rape in general, hence the preference for the bear.
The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I don't see it.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.
You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.
However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)
While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.
I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I am a utilitarian, numbers matter to me. The main difference between gitmo and the gulags are the scale. Now, I thought gitmo was an abomination when it was first established by GWB and I think the same to that day.
We have two options to compare these systems. One is to count every act of state violence against members of the population. Of course, this puts us in morally ultra-relativist territory: "Some states have the death penalty for murder, rape, gay sex, criticizing the party, theft, not bowing deep enough, apostasy, listening to enemy radio stations, arson. All of these serve to keep the regime in power, therefore all of the acts forbidden are morally equal as forms of political dissent." Or we could claim that some of these acts are intrinsically more political than others. States not (at least in principle) punishing murders leads to a bad equilibrium (feuds), so almost all states at least notionally have laws against murder on the book.
But even if you count the whole US prison industrial system as pure repression, by the numbers I would gladly pick the US over the 1940s USSR even through a veil of ignorance where I materialize as a random citizen. And that is before we even go to the indirect advantages of having less repression, like
As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.
The version I could agree on is 'every system of government has a minimum of repression it requires to stay in power'.
Some governments deal out too little repression and are overthrown, like the Weimar Republic.
But a common feature of the more repressive governments is that they overdo repression. Almost no organization ever declares that its mission is accomplished and disbands itself. The secret police is no exception. There will always be someone who is the first to stop applauding after Comrade Stalin gives a speech, some intellectual who is the least aligned with the party line.
And some ideologies are more accepting of repression than others. A communist who declared that the class struggle is over, all the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries are defeated would have to answer uncomfortable questions about when exactly the communist utopia will become reality, while in a liberal democracy a lack of life-or-death conflict should be the default state.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.
The motte: To the degree that this is true, it is so vague that it is useless. It is like saying "every animal can survive outside water", implying (a) for some non-zero time span (b) in microgravity (c) with the correct air pressure.
The bailey: To the degree that it is non-vague, falsifiable it hints at 'repression is a key element in any regime', or 'the amount of repression is similar between regimes' this is false.
If someone asked you 'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?' and you reply 'Repression is universal, so it does not matter', that is akin to answering 'what would make a good pet for my terrarium, a hamster or a gold fish?' with 'every animal can survive outside the water, so it does not matter'.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
A large number of parties making coalitions more difficult in Weimar was at least the excuse the Grundgesetz used to impose a 5% limit on votes. And I think that argument has a bit of a point. I mean, in the 1928 elections in Germany.
Percentage of Reichstag seats:
- Far-Left:
- KPD (Communists): 11%
- Democratic:
- SPD (Social democrats): 31.2%
- Zentrum (Catholics): 12.4%
- DVP (Right liberal): 9.1%
- DDP (Left liberal): 5.1% (but below 5% of the popular vote!)
- BVP (Bavarians): 3.4%
- Far Right:
- DNVP (Monarchists): 14.8%
- NSDAP (Nazis): 2.4%
- Others (some probably also democratic):
- WP (middle class Saxons?): 4.6%
- Smaller parties: 5.7%
Here, the five parties under the heading democratic formed a coalition with had a whopping 61.2% majority. I am not sure why they did it that way. They obviously needed SPD and Zentrum. Perhaps a coalition with the DVP only would have resulted in the them being more vulnerable to threats of the DVP to walk out. Instead with the five party coalition, none of the three junior partners could threaten to break the government by walking out. Or they wanted to share power among the democratic parties to ensure that none of them would profit more by defecting to the anti-democrats. From a modern German perspective, this seems weird. Top politicians generally want to become ministers. Anyone suggesting that a coalition should give up 19% of the minister posts to parties which they don't require to form a majority to be more inclusive towards fellow democratic-minded parties would be laughed out of the room.
Did I have a point to make? Hm... if the Reichstag had a 5% barrier to entry, then 21.2% of the seats would not have gone to smaller parties. But 8.5% of them would just have been shuffled around among the coalition (BVP going to Zentrum, DDP perhaps forming a general liberal party with DVP). At the the ~10% of seats of the Others might have bolstered the ranks of the bigger democratic parties.
For democracy to thrive, you need both a viable coalition of democratic parties and a credible opposition of democratic parties offering another option. If 11% of the seats are taken by people who want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and some 17% are by people who want to restore the monarchy or establish a Fuehrerstaat, then you are in trouble perhaps not immediately but in the next elections, as people disillusioned with the previous government end decide to vote them out, and will likely turn to the extremist parties.
It is a bit of a catch-22: if the democrats don't form coalitions with the toxic extremist parties, the extremist parties won't get blamed for bad outcomes while the democrats will, and if they form coalitions with them they might just enable a Machtergreifung.
Having ten or percent of the seats occupied by sub-5% small parties which can not form stable coalitions due to scaling issues is making the problem a bit worse, but the main problem is the extremist parties.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The nice thing about democracies is that there is a peaceful path forward if you are unhappy with an administration. Canvas for your issue, change the mind of the voters, change the stance of politicians or get elected yourself. Not an easy path forward, but with some notable benefits over the alternative.
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in if they decided to do their thing without the blessings of President, SC and Congress.
And while this is getting deep into silly "could Darth Vader take Superman in a fight?" hypotheticals territory, there is the fact that the federal police agencies are not the strongest kid on the block. The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president. They obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, but if the constitutional organs of the US are in agreement that a part of the DC bureaucracy is in rebellion, I strongly expect them to intercede on the side of the constitution. And a battle of federal law enforcement vs the US army would be even more lopsided that a battle of Feds versus Trump militias.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
While I can not speak for HR panels, I want to emphasize that I do not think that men enjoy any biological specialization which makes them relevantly better at STEM than their female colleagues. At my workplace, we have perhaps 40% women and for whatever weird subsubpopulation ends up in my field (a non-booming field of physics), I do not see gender being correlated with competence. (There are significant variances within specialties, FWIW. The small subset of colleagues who I consider to be good or great programmers are mostly male. On the other hand, women are more likely to actually ask for help. Just the other day, I chased a crash down the entirely wrong rabbit hole with a debugger and might have wasted hours which my female colleague in the end solved in five minutes with an email.)
While I think that there are certainly degrees and occupations which have more or less objective usefulness (e.g. medicine vs grievance studies), I do not believe there is much in the way of correlation between gender-codedness and objective usefulness.
I mean, I consider woke studies -- which are coded female -- to be net negative, but I also consider marginal contributions to the capabilities of the world's militaries to be net negative, with the security dilemma being a prime example of an inadequate equilibrium if there ever was one.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think the bad-tasteness of it depends on the group size. Three people can keep a secret (if two of them are dead) and all that. If three boys want to spend their time fantasizing about their classmates, that is very different than if three quarters of the class participate in the ranking, in my mind. (I don't know what the participation rate for that spreadsheet thing was, I am trying to make a general point.)
I don't think having rankings is necessarily bad taste. I am fine with men ranking porn stars (or participants of a dating show) by their hotness, or athletes by their speeds, or competitive eaters by how many burgers they can eat, or students by how well they did on their last math test (even though I would prefer to just tell everyone their outcome and the overall statistics in that case). In all these cases, the ranking is kind of relevant to the job. Don't want to be judged by your genitals? Then don't become a porn star.
I agree that not every inappropriate ranking implies bullying and victimization. If the bottom of the list gets rated a 4/10, the whole endeavor would still be slightly ill-advised, but victim-free. (Some feminists might disagree with me here, whatever.) If half the class coordinates to agree on an 1/10 rating for one classmate especially based on politics and this strongly influences how they subsequently treat them, that would be bullying.
I am by no means an expert on medieval Japan, but I wonder how a samurai would make a good playable character in an AC game. Climbing along some facade to kill an enemy leader (which is a good part of what tends to fill AC games) does not sound very samurai-like. In fact, it sounds positively ninja-like.
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