Along these lines:
(Old) English is rather special, being the 2nd non-classical European written language (after old Irish). Literacy (around 880 King Alfred tried to impose universal (male) literacy!) and our native tongue's long played a role, competing with Latin since the beginning. But most European standard languages were intentionally created in the last few hundred years (deciding which grammar to use and coining tens of thousands of words) by greats like Joachim Campe and Philipp von Zesen who coined modern German words for ancient, author, university, project, address, spelling etc. Vuk Karadžić, Ljudevit Gaj etc.did similar for Serbo-Croatian (oddly, a Slovak Bogoslav Šulek played a huge role in Croatian!) In Finnland, Mikael Agricola was quite early, Antero Warelius and August Ahlqvist made many words. In Hungary, Ferenc Kazinczy and Dávid Baróti Szabó tirelessly created thousands of words! For the Czechs Josef Jungmann and Josef Dobrovský etc. etc. It was only a short leap from here to creating a brand new language like Volapuk or Esperanto or bringing Hebrew back to life. (Indeed, Hungarian had almost disappeared in the late 18th century! The great Hungarian project turned everyone it could into a Hungarian through public schooling - Trianon hurt so badly, because within a few generations those lost Romanians etc. would have been Hungarians too!)
veqq
1yr ago
That's the wrong framing. "Realist" defense concerns play little role in Russia, otherwise it wouldn't have emptied its borders with NATO to feed the grinder in Ukraine. There've been a gish-gallop of contradictory reasons how x or y impact and threaten Russia's security posture, but they are trivially rejected when looking at Russia's actions and the arguments in totality. Rather, for both Russia, this is a question of self identity:
The standard Russian self-image includes Ukraine, where the reformers (1654) and leaders of the church for most recent history, where the first educators, language reformers, where your ancestors (1000 years ago and 80 years ago) came from, where the very fairy tales happened! At the same time, most of Ukraine was not Slavic until the Russians came and took the South, letting the central planes populate, now safe from Turkic slavers. Over time, Russia developed into a great, welcoming multiethnic empire, a true melting pot for its peoples with the sternest nationalist smiling on his Muslim Tatar friends and the president kissing the Quran, brought man into space and brought the arts and mathematics to great heights (otherwise abandoned in most of the West, today). Yes, this great project has had many struggles, but... How can you believe your brothers spit on this, abandon your shared history, authors, everything and move out? (Think of your wife showing you divorce papers...) Love turns to hate, spite, evil, post facto justifying the split.
Translated to American sensibilities, imagine Philadelphia succeeding, the great colonial cities, home of the liberty bell, the continental congress etc. and insisting you have nothing in common, you New Yorkers and Georgians just oppressed them and they don't even want to speak English anymore, but create some new literary tradition etc. etc.
The same process happened in Yugoslavia (which one common Russian narrative holds, broke hope of Russia-West integration.) China is not identical (Taiwan being far smaller and weaker, today and lacking historic relevance), with explicit reunification rather being an important political point. But most importantly, China has already won, as it races past the West in wealth, cultural power and future shaping vibrancy, the growing support for reunification will see Taiwan (even if only by creative interpretation) in the PRC's sphere.
The worst part about Russia in this is that, had they just gone in in 2014 or integrated the Donbas, instead of turning it into a mafia run hell hole, Ukraine wouldn't really have resisted now - indeed, had Putin not invaded, but worked with Zelensky who won on a pro-Russia platform, none of this would have happened. This is a self-own the US is now copying. (For lack of time, I will not go into polyphonic government, where seeing your neighbors thrive might inspire you that there's a better way. Squashing this threat by incorporating or forcing Ukrainians out helped regime stability.)
I'd like to dunk on Mearsheimer as a broken clock which looks right twice a day, but actually that's a stain and it's missing hands entirely. For one thing, he repeatedly stated that Russia would not invade Ukraine (as I too believed) and after it started began “There is no evidence that Putin wanted to take over the whole of Ukraine” yet somehow people claim he predicted everything? Baffling! He constantly praises Russia on the field, claims victory's just on the horizon, that Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk and and and will soon fall, while the lines haven't shifted a day's walk since the end of 2022.
veqq
1yr ago
overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college
All the ones I know are educated, e.g. school teachers at districts requiring MAs and midlevel financial analysts e.g. writing mining reports for a Tier II bank.
veqq
1yr ago
I wonder if "decolonization" in practice is somewhat genocidal.
Inherently, yes. The entire colonization rhetoric is incoherent in honest historical context, unless e.g. viewed as moral justification for immediate power shifts and ethnic cleansing.
veqq
1yr ago
Tangential, but SWIFT's barely relevant anymore. There's no compelling or procompetitive reason to pay 5% fees and wait days when CIPS is instant and essentially free (cents to transfer millions of dollars, or small sums). The future of settlement's here: DPI. Brazil's Pix showed the way, China's CIPS now has integrations with some 20 countries and they're fusing their own systems together. Brazil used to have an ecosystem of Visa equivalents and banks charging high fees, now it's all free and instant through Pix, because of legitimately better technology. The US' protectionism for rampant rent seeking practices of its banks is a barrier to grow only rivaled by suburbia. Imagine if the US were able to leverage efficiency factors like this, if you could just freely scan people's phones for payment etc.? (Actually, I'm pro cash, security and tax issues but payment processing in the US is hellish.)
I typed up fluff I wanted to edit into a coherent comment, but something just came up. I'll edit it later.
veqq
1yr ago
Ukrainians pursuing a similar policy of forcible assimilation
That started because of the 2022 war, when people chose to stop speaking Russian because the Russian army was shelling them and then the government started e.g. removing Pushkin statues.
Ethnic data's difficult because terms like native language actually mean ancestral language, so people will e.g. claim to be natives of a language they don't speak. Of course, you also get wild 20% swings in different censuses as identities are relatively meaningless. A rather small amount of Easterners claimed to be ethnically Russian, but used Russian in all situations. N.b. I was a staunch "Ukrainian isn't a "real" identity" type (but very supportive of its independence, because many Ruses would lead to many courts and renaissance, like in Italy and Germany's golden ages. The languages are very close, effectively a few hundred unique roots and different 1:1 changes in the realization of others. Anyway, I never felt a need to use Ukrainian and never encountered it in day to day life.
veqq
1yr ago
If I were more optimistic about long term dynamics, I'd quite like this. I've built some large aquariums for fun, with some fish bridges etc. Definitely fun work with potential! May God deliver me from the temptation of becoming a Mormon glazier.
Why didn't you get into this line? Does your dad work with/train others?
veqq
1yr ago
lack of exposure to non-negotiable danger with permanent consequences.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by
veqq
1yr ago
is fanaticism a necessary component of grit?
Recently, a few people described rationalism as not making people... happy/productive, because they just analyze instead of doing things. Indeed, if something suddenly occurs to block you you might reassess the whole project (pausing or giving up entirely) instead of creatively finding a way to overcome it. Trying to over optimize your value capture from a 100% thing can lead to you losing out as you e.g. get stopped out.
veqq
1yr ago
Selling isn't building. Even making cigarettes isn't building. But building machines to build better cigarettes? Now we have a philosophical discussion about socially beneficial economic activity!
I'd say yes, it's good to design and even make better cigarette making machines. And evil to operate them. Just build them as a fun project, then retool for something good.
veqq
1yr ago
When they're first born, you grab them, spray paint their butts and throw them back! Repeat every so often as they grow.
veqq
1yr ago
N.b. Prediction markets aren't particularly profitable, even with perfect predictions. In the US, ForecastEX's count as swaps, but generally it's considered gambling income. But even worse you e.g. get taxed on your wager amount, besides what you receive back (put in $100 at 50%, win $200, only receive $140 at the end. Settlement time and miscellaneous fees mean you'd need events under 20% certainty to generate a livable income, but pot sizes aren't not big enough to justify the effort.
veqq
1yr ago
Great idea!
skeptical of central planning as a solution for long-running problems; the role of a rightly ordered state is more that of a gardener than an engineer
Quite tangential: We're basically identical in belief. However I believe in pro-social gains by simplifying complex systems. If you e.g. have 100,000 accountants normalizing books to match the law, the ideal gardener engineer could change the law and reporting standards, so that work's not necessary (either automatic or performed by only 10,000.) In our theoretical realm, those 90,000 could then create value instead of litigating who captures past value. In practice, I rarely believe this is done (how do you replace legalistic bureaucracies and replace them with trade practitioners who want to replace themselves?)
veqq
1yr ago
What awesome denomination is this? Sounds awesome! Kuyper implies Calvinist, but who knows
veqq
1yr ago
should not be a citizen as he has no actual connection
It's only consistent, as the US rather aggressively applies citizenship. There's a basket industry for "accidental citizens" who first discover they're American upon receiving a 6-7 figure bill for back taxes and renouncing citizenship incurs a tax on all assets. Further, because of FATCA, they suddenly get debanked.
veqq
1yr ago
veqq
1yr ago
"We," who?
...users of the Motte? How is it consensus building to ask what people are doing as the world collapses around us?
"Leftist" (larping) contacts are waxing verbosely about how to flee the US. To quote one:
frustrating that in this moment of panic, of fight or flight, the left, or what passes for it, is so quick to pick fleeing-- something mainly available to the petite-bourgeois and above, not poor proles. The thought of waging a struggle, of organizing something to get rid of the system that harms them and the majority, is so off-putting to them because they have the delusional idea that this political and economic system is actually all about serving them. I don't mean to sound idealistic, but the total lack of fighting spirit is pathetic. Liberals are like, "well, if we can't vote, then we have to lay down and die! Nothing can be changed!" They don't see when it's most apparent that voting is nothing but consent to their own powerlessness, and that they choose this powerlessness time and time again. They also seem totally unaware that they have become thoroughly conservative because their whole worldview consists in a defense of the previous status quo (law and order, patriotism, the constitution, being granted permission to grumble in the most inconsequential way).
For the most part, they don't understand how immigration works, imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!) They all believe they're next, that the Reichstag fire will occur, that their occasional meming or anti-Israel comments will get them sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp.
No one has the least idea of e.g. debanking, let alone how to cope with it. Their networking all happens through FB or at best ... gmail. I was kicked from the conversation for mentioning such matters (why crypto, https://odysee.com/ etc. exist etc.) and the performativeness of their whole program. They don't realize that... They have been on the (deep) state's side the whole time, while nominally opposing it? Baffling!
Anyway, https://landchad.net/ is lovely. Everyone should cyberhomestead.
What do we do now (that we "won")? What interesting projects do we have to move forward?
Edit: Our community's migration here went into full swing when Reddit admins removed a common of mine about quotation marks. It turns out, I don't understand quotation marks either - my load bearing quotation marks get misunderstood. This is of course my fault; I must write better. But I have not the slightest clue how that could be construed as "consensus building". As I can't magically write better, I will write more words to clarify the final question(s):
The previous system is collapsing, how do users of this forum plan to insulate themselves from the shocks and take advantages of the opportunities going forward? I shared tidings from frenemies of the old regime, who never fully captured (or wielded) it to their liking. I am curious how to e.g. influence things as a fellow traveler and not be hit by blowback, how to protect and continue to amass wealth amid dedollarization and inflation etc. New world, now what?
veqq
1yr ago
'70s economics
Malthusianism reigned until 80s works like Simon's Ultimate Resource revived cornicopian thought.
veqq
1yr ago
So for that whole crowd to double down on their worst issue feels mostly just disappointing
AI was the whole point and focus. The sequences and overall movement were just a method to teach people what they needed to know, to be able to understand the AI argument. A la Ellul or Soviet literacy programs, you need to educate people to make them susceptible to propaganda.
I think you guys are missing the point. US immigration law is messed up, it's an insane struggle to bring a spouse to the US (like a 10 year bureaucratic process of living and waiting in the Czech Republic to be allowed in, or a few years for some spousal visa.) This guy has a US citizen wife, who's not able to keep her family. Yes, the border's weak, many bad apples were let in which spoil the bunch, but this regulatory environment is not helping you and me; it restricts the supply of tradwives!
As a sovereign citizen, I should be able to relocate my harem to Idaho, but Johnny gov don't let me, and you celebrate precedent to arbitrarily remove the spouses we do get in?! To quote Crass:
If you care to take a closer look at the way things really stand, You'd see we're all just niggers to the rulers of this land.
Remember, they are exerting effort to defamily a US citizen, to break the bonds of holy matrimony, instead of prioritizing the millions without such bonds and connections. This is raw anarchotyranny.
That's actually perfect. I first thought of Texas (since it was acquired after the main project was underway, developed its own self-identity by interaction with the main project etc. But the US civil war being fought over how manifest destiny would play out (slavery, filibustering Central America) rhymes perfectly with fighting over how the Rus/East Slavs' future should play out.
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