What is the nature of power?
I don't really know. I'm asking because I want ideas and reading material. To add some meat to this request, here are some ideas and definitions I have encountered or pondered over:
- The Psmith's Education of Cyrus review set many long forgotten ideas into succinct words.
- "coordinating different worldviews into a cohesive action oriented society level project"
- asymmetry between actors to manifest their distinctly desired outcome subsets
- сила в правде (perhaps found by reversing the Cartesian split through silicon Gods, yet subsuming our agency to their control/wielding...)
- whoever is willing to use the power to maintain (...) ultimately sets the rules / Who should control x? is the wrong question, rather: Who can?
- nested structures of delegation and decision making stacking up to the sky (patronage structures of yore in Rome or Tammany)
- the public consensus of legitimacy behind courts, institutions etc.
- the mighty do as they will, the weak as they must
- work, or applied energy, or results thereof (blood, sweat and oil bend and mold nature to our will)
All of these are relevant only between sovereign actors capable of acting and thinking themselves. Their power's a function of what benefit they offer other actors (either directly, or by mobilizing non-actors' into productive power.) I've read Kelsen, Grotius, de Vattel, Austin, Scott, Luttwak et al. and have built thriving and productive things. Yet I crave further understanding. Perhaps, I but yearn for a simpler, faded time, while today's structures impersonally placate the governed (placate, not wield, as (western) state(s') power's collapsed along with the social contract), or perhaps more accurate possessed both the governed and the governing ("they drank their own cool aide" and trying to understand this, my tools fail.
...does anyone understand how hyper cycles work (not just their contours like Gartner but e.g. how currents/egregores pick a specific avatar or specific areas of concern to battle over?
veqq
1yr ago
Catholic bishops are selected from a shortlist that originates while they’re still in seminary, and nobody knows or cares about the ideological lean of seminarians.
How does that work?
veqq
1yr ago
West World season 3 started with such a doordash for crime app, doing nothing with it. Search "RICO app". The big bad is actually using it to eliminate opponents or aberrations. (N.b. the show's not very good, I didn't finish.)
it's all unorganized violent crime, which doesn't translate to power
Someone else here (my notes summarize it without a source) once mentioned Schmidt's Theory of the Partisan which describes mob violence as the regime's political force. The liberal total state features the state restraining or permitting violence, where state violence against dissidents occurs through the criminal underclass whom the state chooses not to persecute (for gang violence, muggings etc.) Party NGOs enable street thugs and doxxing groups.
veqq
1yr ago
What's your take on or the news on the pink mafia? Long ago, people often discussed it and but I've not heard anything in over 5 years. Googling, I found articles from 10+ years ago. Is the church full of such things? http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-pink-mafia.html
veqq
1yr ago
Responding to a sentiment in many responses:
The Northern economy was very strong, contributing more than half the empire's shipping tonnage in colonial times and expanding after independence (American built ships flooded Europe, costing half the price to build.) The rapidly expanding canals fueled agricultural growth and population expansion. Then the industrial revolution itself etc. etc.
A few years ago, I dug deeply into slave financing namely how banks dealt with depreciation, whether they operated foreclosed plantations etc. (Generally, the solution was immediate disintermediation.) It turns out mortgages on slaves were one of the largest financial instruments in the world for a long time, with Dutch, German and French banks speculating on them.
While Jefferson could already mortgage 150 slaves to a Dutch company to build his mansion, after a crash in the 1820s, by the 1830s the slave bond market had grown to be 30x the size of all slaves and land in the South combined. When the price of cotton crashed again (Panic of 1837), interest payments alone were $33 million, while the whole Southern cotton crop was only worth $10 million. 343 of 850 US banks failed. The Southern states (all banks were state chartered) both refused to foreclose and to pay interest, cutting the South off from the global financial system, as they unilaterally waived debts (since the plantation owners ran the governments.) Until that point, slavery was state subsidized, profitable primarily through financial engineering (like Canada's real estate driven GDP today) because the states took on the debts of the large estates.
In the late 1840s, the process resumed. In 1828 a laborer could go for $300, rising above $600 in 1838, falling back under $300 before reaching $700 in 1860. Estates operated less on cash flows from farming and more on refinancing after asset appreciation. Furthermore, in the old South, soil had depleted too, such that cotton production slowly moved West to new lands and without constant expansion, when the new South's soil would deplete, the whole institution would collapse hence the expansionist drive.
veqq
1yr ago
developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built,
1.1% real growth per year is anemic: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/reimagining-economic-growth-in-africa-turning-diversity-into-opportunity
veqq
1yr ago
Palestinians are the Jews and Christians who converted to Islam (or kept Christianity.) Many are descended from Jews expelled elsewhere - I personally know multiple Palestinians who have gotten Spanish citizenship after proving their ancestors were expelled in 1492 for being Jewish along these lines: https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-refugee-gets-spanish-citizenship-after-discovering-jewish-roots/
veqq
1yr ago
Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul discusses how modernity reconceived people as their memories, instead of e.g. an immortal soul unimpacted by general experiences. Thus trauma, history etc. come into play. This "right side of history" blends well here. He also uses a concept "acting under description" for the reason something's done (demonic possession, trauma, because of bipolarity etc.) Very clearly, these people's worldview sees them embodying the wheel of history inexorably plodding....
veqq
1yr ago
- He only visits non-tourist locations, strides the peasant countryside like a colossus, shows up uninvited and unannounced where the locals have likely never seen a tourist, and is instantly treated with respect by the men and admiration by the women.
From his videos, these are quite run of the mill places, really. Vietnam e.g. is full of Western tourists and these people speak more English than the average person.
veqq
1yr ago
Every single one of us is running a kernel that was written in the 90s using paradigms formed in the 80s with a computer language that was invented in the 70s.
The paradigms are from the 70s. The language and paradigms are inherently related. UNIX is the c environment. After Pascal's demise, our hardware was deformed to fit this structure too, so we're really 50 years behind. It's so sad.
veqq
1yr ago
silly ideas like "undergraduate activists are the elite and well-connected billionaires are the counter-elite" on the right or "senior career government officials are a counter-elite" on the left
I'd have read it as: the bureaucratic (managerial) complex and the pipeline of activists coming to them are the elite, said billionaires and other youthful activists, budding lawyers etc. are the counter elite. The problems occur when considering democratic transitions of power, different rungs of elites in their respective areas stacked on top of each other until you have country and court elites. But I believe the basic lens works well for privilege discourse etc. as Pongalh was talking about.
veqq
1yr ago
It's just elite theory. Pareto described revolutions etc. as non governing elites replacing the governing elites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory
veqq
2yr ago
For those interested, the "managerial revolution" expands this a lot further. A dash of "elite theory" spices it up.
veqq
2yr ago
I doubt it contains many rare earths!
They aren't very rare, just costly to separate. They make up a good amount of the impurities in other metals, for the matter. The difficulty in extracting them is accumulating them, because a lot of random dirt will have them in small amounts, so you need to pick them out of a lot of dirt. This isn't generally economical, but China has been subsidizing it. Other mines can "simply" spend the money to accumulate them when processing other ores and some are beginning to.
veqq
2yr ago
Off topic:
A reminder to everyone, we have a Telegram group with nearly 100 members. Join us: https://t.me/quokkas_den
veqq
2yr ago
Well, Lee was the only confederate leader who could win. The other theaters all collapsed rather quickly.
veqq
2yr ago
Duplicating a comment (how do you tag users?):
In the US "White" includes most Hispanics (besides Arabs). Every branch of my family's been in California since the 1920s, when they came from New Mexico. They spoke English and Spanish for 4 generations before the move, and more since. If you look at the employee roaster for Hughes Aircraft Company's engineers in 1959, half the names are Alvarez, Vasquez etc. The same for a high school marching band in 1942...
While the 80s and 90s saw a massive influx of Mexicans, the "Whites" in the bullet belt aren't who you're thinking of. I have a few generations of family in aerospace and their work photos aren't super white. By the late 70s, you get the children and wives of executed Vietnamese judges, many doctors, electrical engineers etc. coming. Within a few years, they appear on department pictures and cards.
In the US "White" includes most Hispanics (besides Arabs). Every branch of my family's been in California since the 1920s, when they came from New Mexico. They spoke English and Spanish for 4 generations before the move, and more since. If you look at the employee roaster for Hughes Aircraft Company's engineers in 1959, half the names are Alvarez, Vasquez etc. The same for a high school marching band in 1942...
While the 80s and 90s saw a massive influx of Mexicans, the "Whites" in the bullet belt aren't who you're thinking of. I have a few generations of family in aerospace and their work photos aren't super white. By the late 70s, you get the children and wives of executed Vietnamese judges, many doctors, electrical engineers etc. coming. Within a few years, they appear on department pictures and cards.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Porcentage_de_hispanos_por_condado_de_Estados_Unidos%2C_1960.jpg Note that LA county is the unclear 25%+.
the known uranium supply will be depleted within 5 years.
It's more like 10,000 years. The 5 year thing is how much is currently mined and stockpiled in warehouses. You might as well say civilization can't continue because we only have so many months of oil and coal already extracted, in warehouses. This article is hilariously bad. Furthermore, current technology would allow us to get significantly more energy from uranium, however poor regulations (to fight nuclear proliferation) prevent us from doing that. Check out breeder reactors. Beyond that, we can use a lot more than just uranium.
But that's even what the article says next:
Theoretically, that amount would last for 5,700 years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power. (In fast breeder reactors, which extend the use of uranium by a factor of 60, the uranium could last for 300,000 years.
To your next point, yes, (traditional) peak oil was true and we have resorted to non-traditional methods to continue extracting it, which require huge energy commitments. Notably, frack wells quickly lose most of their production - instead of a decades long curve, they're barely producing after 2-3 years.
Beyond this, we do have other forms of energy production. Solar and wind are effective. As currently implemented, we have a lot of problems (re: the grid, stupid placement etc.) but they're both eroi positive - especially if you put solar panels in the desert (eroi of 20, unbuffered) instead of on people's rooves to make them feel good. Nuclear has an eroi above 70, generally speaking, over 2x coal's.
This (reality based learning and selection through mmo) is a really fun idea. Has this been described further elsewhere I could I nerdsnipe you into more detail?
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