wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
11d ago
I try not to go down the fuck'em route for two reasons. Firstly, most people had no say or were not even born yet when these decisions were made. Holding groups of people responsible as if they were individuals doesn't make a lot of sense. Secondly and more importantly, cruelty out of malice rather than out of necessity is not something I'm okay with morally. Cruelty is a fact of life. But inflicting it on others for no personal gain other than some sense of schadenfreude is about where I draw the line.
wingdingspringking
11d ago
I guess I should add that I do have sympathy for both sides as well. In the same sense that I have sympathy for a stranger dying of an inoperable brain tumor. I certainly wouldn't wish this situation on anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists. My apathy is largely born out of the fact that there is almost nothing that can be done given the historical / cultural forces at work. Those measures that might actually work would take immense resources, and I think it's hard to justify giving such resources away with no clear benefit.
I guess this is just one of the flaws in modern Western thought; the idea that all problems A) are solvable, and B) are worth solving no matter the cost if they involve human suffering. This is in many ways analogous to the whole mass migration debate. In its most basic form, this a refusal of the idea that sometimes we have to make difficult decisions. It's saying that we should be allowed to make the comforting, happy decision all the time, and the world must accommodate this. So essentially, it's attempting to deny reality itself, and hoping everything will work out for the best. History has not been kind to this type of thinking.
wingdingspringking
12d ago
I'm not convinced that lacking the ability to run a modern state is enough of an impediment to prevent a group from trying to run a modern state. Look no further than the Taliban.
In any case, I suspect the arrangement that exists between the religious Zionists and the Haredi sects can only exist as long as there is a secular state there to exploit. Once that is diminished, things will come to a head rather quickly.
wingdingspringking
13d ago
I’ve been meaning to write out my full thoughts on Israel Palestine for a while, and as rhetoric heats up around election season, I figured now is as good a time as any.
First off, so that I don’t keep anyone guessing, let me state my position right off the bat. I don’t care. I would love nothing more than for the I/P conflict to be treated by the media like the much bloodier Sudanese civil war – a few words of condolence during the rare slow news cycle, then shutting up. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, and it seems we’re destined to listen to the same hyperbolic arguments from both sides over and over instead of news that’s relevant to our lives. So, that being the case, let’s look at the conflict.
A - There is no peaceful solution. You have two groups of people that have a multi-generational blood feud going. While there might be people on both sides that want peace, there are enough that want war to ensure that war will continue. Short of separating the groups for a generation until the memories of dead relatives die out, there is no way to end this peacefully.
B - Israel is in deep trouble. The original framework of support for Israel was US/Western World in favor (out of a combination of guilt and wanting to spread democracy), communist world against (mainly for reasons of optics/opposing western imperialism, etc).
Unfortunately for Israel, the cold war ended. For the American left, they are an easy scapegoat. The “America Bad” fifth column faction of the left has a long history of hating them for cold war reasons. Given that the factions that have joined together to make up the new left (identity group tribalists + various flavors of communists) don’t have any real reason to oppose this, hating Israel makes a for a great rallying cry among groups that historically have had a REALLY hard time finding common ground (LGBTQ & Muslims, etc). And as the American left goes, so goes Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere.
As for the American right, they seem to have lost any interest in the US maintaining international hegemony. As far as I can tell, the main effect of the social media age on the right has been to break down any sort of trust they once had in American institutions. I will be the first to admit that some of those institutions have been marred by leftist politics. But the net outcome seems to be that the right now sees ALL government peripheral institutions as inherently corrupt and not worth the cost of upkeep (which, to my mind, is the antithesis of conservatism, but that is a different discussion). Needless to say, satellite states are now within the realm of things they no longer want to pay for.
Finally, there’s Israel itself. Its secular population is declining at the same rate as the rest of the developed world. And its fundamentalists are procreating faster than almost anyone else on the planet. Within another generation, they will be the majority. They’ll have full control of everything, including a reputedly large and advanced nuclear arsenal. At which point, I’d imagine that what remains of the secular population will flee, and we will see yet another theocratic state arise in the land of milk and honey.
C - The Palestinians are utterly doomed. There is no scenario where they come out of this well. The BEST case scenario is that they somehow get integrated into the surrounding Arab countries, and are spread thinly enough that there is no repeat of the Black September uprising. But in general, the conditions that the Palestinians have been subject to has made them into a vengeful and violent people, and I don’t know what country would be willing to risk taking them in.
Short of that, every road leads to death. If Israel becomes a true, North Korea style pariah state lead by fundamentalists, then there will be little to stop them from ACTUALLY committing genocide. If the modern equilibrium holds, an increasingly aggressive Israel will continue to whittle away at the Palestinian population and territory until there is nothing left. If somehow the gulf states unite and defeat Israel militarily, given the horrific deaths the Israelis would likely meet at the hands of an invading Arab army, I have little doubt that Israel would elect to glass the entire region.
And in the end, I don’t think any of these outcomes (except maybe the one with the mass nuclear exchange) are going to have much more of an effect on the western world than the Sudanese civil war, or the oppression of the Uighurs, or the various coups in Burma. Except for the fact that, due to some quirks of history, we are doomed to hear about it forever.
wingdingspringking
29d ago
I agree that the reddit of 2010 bore very little resemblance to what exists now. That the free speech ideals of its origins were still somewhat visible in the culture of the site. But at the same time, the cracks were starting to show. You mentioned a bunch of fringe subs that ultimately got banned. But if you want a story that better parallels the evolution of reddit as a whole, the (then) fringe sub to look at would be /r/SRS. Do you remember them? The brigading? The purity tests? The militant extreme feminism? Sound familiar?
/r/SRS was the prototype for what reddit was to become. Not the grey tribe free speech absolutists. They may have started reddit, but ultimately they lost. In fact, the founders of reddit lost in the most stereotypical ways possible for idealistic young grey tribers (Steve Huffman decided getting paid was more important, Aaron Swartz got crushed by the leviathan of the state, and Serena Williams made Alexis Ohanian her bitch).
Now that same vein of militant feminism has wormed its way into everything. Not just reddit, but most of the internet and liberal culture as well. You remember the debates during the early 2020s where the left leaning people hid behind the fact that there was no clear definition of "woke" in order to claim that it didn't exist. Well, fine tune an LLM on early 2010s /r/SRS and /r/TwoXChromosomes and its world view would be pretty damn close to the mark.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
To your point (and @haroldbkny 's ), I agree that public opinion was never completely dictated from above. The "market of ideas" so to speak, is actually more like a testing ground to see what ideas resonate with the public and what do not. But the consolidation of news papers and publishers under the likes of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about a situation where the people at the top had a large say in which of these "publicly resonant" stories were allowed to propagate. And over the following century, it largely stayed that way. Of course there were smaller publishers and other communication channels, but the majority of public discourse was under the thumb of these gatekeepers.
We have just gone through an era in which there were essentially no gatekeepers. Anything that was emotionally resonant enough "went viral" on social media and entered into the public zeitgeist. Look at what the results have been.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
I agree with most of your criticisms of reddit. But I don't know if it is particularly indicative of anything about the human condition. I think, rather, that it says something about the type of person who comments on reddit threads. The number of reads that reddit gets dwarfs the number of posts and comments by orders of magnitude. And the number of people that actually spend time reading reddit posts is just a tiny fraction of humanity.
I think there are two take aways from this. The first is that it is worth thinking about why only a tiny fraction post things. My guess is that posting takes effort, and people are very hesitant to put forth effort for no reward. The people that do end up posting are often some combination of very unusual or very unbalanced. More often than not, I think it may be the later. People who's lives are going well don't spend their time angrily yelling at people they don't know and will never know about minute differences of opinion.
Which brings me to my second point, that the culture of much of the world was dictated for about 15 years by those exact, maladjusted posters. From around 2010 up until very recently, the collective opinions that these people coalesced around were pumped into the mainstream by journalists, media companies, and news networks that couldn't resist a cheap and easy source of material that was pre-optimized to be as tribalizing and divisive as possible. While there was a culture war before then, almost all the ideas debated on this forum and across society as a whole crystalized into their modern form during this era. I guess now that bots are starting to out-post humans by wide margins, this will probably change, and we'll move back to a world where majority opinions are dictated from above rather than from the grass roots. But the scars from it will last a long time. In the end, it really makes the optimism of the early internet era look utterly absurd in hindsight. Who in their right mind thought that letting anyone message everyone would possibly lead to good outcomes?
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
Liberalism has been around for hundreds of years. The internet killed fertility rates. And evolution will take care of that in a generation or two if we don't nuke ourselves or singularity ourselves out of existence. The people that can keep having kids while taking cheap dopamine hits will pass on those precious horny doomscrolling genes. And life will continue.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
I think at some point in the next 10 years, assuming a relatively normal timeline (no nuclear Armageddon, no singularity, etc), we will probably see either a grand bargain or a runaway convention resulting in some significant changes to the constitution. In this scenario, is Jus soli is one of the first things to go. People on the right hate it, and other than a few groups of ideologues (devout neoliberals, the everything-is-racist caucus, etc), the rank and file on the left don't seem to care about it that much. They seem much more concerned with full on economic Marxism at the moment.
wingdingspringking
3mo ago
Next on sick sad world
wingdingspringking
4mo ago
I tend to lean towards model 1, except I don't really think it was a coordinated campaign, just social incentives. Due to geopolitics of the cold war, Israel became a symbol of the west. And if there is anything the left truly loves, it's destroying symbols and hating on the west. And if you want to try and unite the working class globally, you better pick an international issue that everyone is familiar with.
The irony is that Israel is less and less representative of western culture as time goes on, given that their religious lunatics are growing rapidly as a percentage of the population. Once they pass 50%, things are gonna get very hairy over there. You think Netanyahu is bad, wait until the all ministerial positions are occupied by the Haredim.
In the meantime, we all get to deal with the absurdity of listening to "leftists" go on and on about Israel despite the fact is has nothing to do with envisioned proletariat uprisings, and that far worse atrocities are being committed in almost all non-western corners of the globe as we speak.
wingdingspringking
4mo ago
The problem with (2) is that I would not say the vast majority of objectors fall into that category, because if it was you'd find quite a bit more measured discourse rather than, y'know, what we see right now.
It's an issue of granularity. If you take the 10k foot view "I want to improve boarder security / decrease illegal immigration", the vast majority of people are okay with that. Only like 20% of the population truly wants open boarders. It's only an issue because a bunch of political thinkers buy into the whole "people are fungible and we need as many as possible in an era of negative population growth" ideology. So 80% should in theory agree with Trump. But each time you get more specific, you lose people. Do you want ICE roaming around picking up criminals? A decent size chunk of people are okay with that. How about just general illegals? Eh...probably less. Do you want them doing performative raids with face coverings and tactical gear in quiet suburban neighborhoods and occasionally detaining or killing a citizen? Your average person is probably not happy anymore. It started hitting way too close to home.
Basically any Trump policy has this shortcoming. Because when you come to the fork in the road where you can choose pragmatism/results on one path and showmanship on the other, Trump always chooses showmanship. In the end, it is just aesthetics. It's what Trump lives for, what he derives his support from, and what keeps him from actually getting anything done.
wingdingspringking
4mo ago
My problem with TDS is that it conflates three different things. The original meaning was hating something purely because it was done by Trump (and the assumption that people would have approved of a policy if it was enacted by their tribe). This is the true aesthetic snobbery, which probably happens more than we would like to admit. There are two other factors at play though.
1 - Genuine dislike of Trump's goals. This is certainly the case with true believers on the left. They like the bureaucracy that is getting axed. They like the world order that is being dismantled. They like the identity politics and moral panics, etc. I wouldn't say they have TDS. I'd say they don't like change.
2 - Approval of Trump's goals but dislike of his methods. I'd say the vast majority of objectors fall into this category (myself included). I do support a bunch of what Trump wants to do (at least from a very high level). But his ways of doing those things are some combination of a) incompetent or b) designed primarily for the aesthetic appeal. This makes sense from an electoral perspective, but it's not a long term strategy. Eventually the underlying reality of the world (ex: oil and gas economics) catches up. And at that point, you end up causing a crisis and delivering the government back to the very people you wanted to remove from power. You put on a flashy show, but just end up as a small detour in Cthulhu's leftward swim.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
I had an interesting thought about this (the capacity of AI to replace humans) today while using Claude. It is very good at suggesting possibilities. Telling me how I can do something. But if I argue long enough, it will almost always concede the point. I'm sure that I'm not always right in these arguments.
What it lacks is not judgement so much as convictions. Knowing which points are flexible and which are not. And this is important because when an agent is working on something, it has to make a lot of small decisions with compounding effects. Recently the quality of these decisions while made in a vacuum has been getting much better. But the second they start getting push-back from the real world, I have a strong suspicion that the agents are just going to roll over.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
It's not a disinformation campaign. It is literal Darwinism. Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.
I tend to think the whole "drop in birth rate" thing is overblown. It will correct itself in a generation or two, after people who lose the drive to reproduce in modern, information rich environments are removed from the gene pool. This is the strongest selective pressure our species has come under in quite a while. And if all that comes out on the other side is a bunch of Mormons, Muslims, and Haredi Jews, so be it. Natural selection has spoken.
Even in the case of Ireland, the violence just swayed opinion. It didn't actually kill off or pacify enough of the losing demographic to affect the outcome; that requires the "old" prehistoric type of violence. Iran's crackdown has been more in that vein than anything we do. Newer violence is mostly just a PR move.
The civil rights movement is interesting in that it was the starting point for this whole conflict. But I don't know if it tells us too much about how it ends. At the risk of dramatizing it a bit, the historical arc as I see it looks like this:
You start with a system that is pretty blatantly unfair (encoded in law, rigidly enforced etc) to the various groups that make up the current woke pantheon. You also have a rich, quickly advancing society (US circa 1960s) that has every reason to be optimistic about the future. In an environment like that, it's easy to convince the majority of people that it's only fair to make life better for those on the bottom rungs. People are generous when their bellies are full.
Then the organizations and institutions that were built around helping those groups end up winning. They achieve their goals. But careers have been built around this. Huge fund raising networks exist. Do you just set everything down and walk away when you're done? Of course not. You find new problems. Maybe not as big, but problems none the less.
Go through a few dozen iterations of that, and you end up where we are now. We aren't nearly as prosperous and optimistic anymore. These movements have taken on the characteristics of religions, complete with crazed zealots running around attacking non believers. In a situation like that, you suddenly get backlash. Small and isolated at first, and then suddenly huge. The wokes/SJWs try to fight back, expecting the same up-swell of support they got back in the 60s, but it's not there. Nobody under the age of 70 even remembers segregation. But we all remember not being able to get some perk because we don't tick the right intersectional boxes.
Religious zealots don't usually put down their scourges willingly. And religious beliefs are pretty hard to change if they've become the bedrock of one's morality. But the bulk of society is no longer willing to play along with the SJW fantasies about living in the 60s. Normally, the birth of a new religion has gone hand in hand with a violent struggle against whatever existing institutions it encountered. But if that's not able to happen....then what will?
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
I agree with most of this, but I think one of the primary failure modes of the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" line of reasoning is that, within a single modern day society, those other guys can't kill you. Nor can you kill them. At least not at any meaningful scale. This is where the lizard brain short circuits.
In prehistoric times (the times our brains are optimized for), once your group had decided another group was dangerous, you tried to kill them. And they tried to kill you. One side succeeded and then moved on. The loser was either dead, enslaved, or driven far away. Even a couple hundred years ago, intra-society tribal feuds could result in things like civil wars and pogroms. But in modern western societies, there is no such mechanism. Look at how bent out of shape society got after 2 people were killed by sectarian violence.
So we have two sides that have gone from grudging cooperation to full on "we need to fight, this is an enemy" mode. But no matter how hard you fight, the enemy is still there. You can pass laws and change policies, but the enemy is just sitting there watching, getting angrier and angrier. I don't know what a modern resolution to this type of schism looks like.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
While possible, this is still sort of science fiction. The bigger risk to gold is that, as gold gets more expensive, deeper and deeper extraction becomes economical. This pushes innovation in the technologies surrounding deep mineral extraction. If it turns out that there are much larger deposits down there, the market suddenly looks very different.
wingdingspringking
6mo ago
In the short/mid term I agree. Precious metals have a pretty good track record of weathering financial crises, and given the lack of fiscal responsibility being exhibited right now, at some point a huge amount of capital is going to be looking for a new safe haven.
The tricky part though is finding new places to park assets long term, the segment of the market that used to be dominated by 30 year treasuries. Each alternative store of value has its corresponding black swan events that could wipe you out:
Gold/Silver -The discovery of a large new lode made available through new tech.
Bitcoin/crypto -Large scale internet outage and/or network fragmentation (ie the US internet is no longer able to talk to Asia for some period of time). Anything that disrupts the continuity of the blockchain. I think this is a much larger threat to crypto than than shor's algorithm.
Index funds -Because they cover the Western economy as a whole, they are highly susceptible to geopolitical risk. A major shift in the geopolitical centers of power would likely take its toll on these markets.
I guess maybe long term a basket of commodities with some real estate sprinkled in might work, but that's not nearly as fungible and lacks a consistent track record. It'll be interesting to see what people do.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
I'm genuinely curious, in what way do you think JD Vance would be a step down? I'm assuming you are somewhat inclined towards preserving elements of the status quo given your posts. Do you believe Vance would be more destructive? More impulsive? What is the main concern?
I ask because I've seen this sort of addendum tacked on to a lot of statements about Trump across the internet, but I've yet to hear what specifically is so much worse about Vance.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
A lot of that is a function of how the representatives are chosen though. We have A) an extremely polarizing primary process, and B) a system that allows the executive and agencies to function in a weird sort of limbo while the legislature does nothing. Those are both problems caused by perverse incentives, that could easily be fixed by a better structure.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
He starts out talking about the full sovereignty enjoyed by British parliament, but then goes down a rabbit hole with some pie-in-the-sky, untested, cyber-punk app idea. Why not go with what you know works (and has worked for 700+ years). Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system. I bet you could get support from a lot of unexpected corners. You can call the prime minister the president if you want, for the sake of the hard core traditionalists. But otherwise, it would be a clean sweep.
For the record, I prefer stability over all of this. But if you are going to do something, copy an existing model and implement it well. That's how China is eating our lunch. We might as well eat someone else's.
wingdingspringking
8mo ago
While there is a population difference, I think the primary reason China is so much more capable than the west isn't cultural but economic. They have a much more potent economic model than the (more or less) free market capitalism that exists in the west. They limit the places their citizens can store money to largely just banks and real estate. They then hyper focus that pooled capital towards very unprofitable ventures in order to super charge industries. While this model is not particularly pleasant for the individuals involved, it is highly competitive on the national scale. The west, with its focus on individual rights, just can't compete.
I think a lot of the cope on this comes from people that have internalized the whole "capitalism is optimized asset allocation" thing. I don't see why that's necessarily the case. Clearly it outperforms feudalism or true centralized command communism, but why should we believe that it's the best possible economic system with so few data points. It seems to me like the Chinese have threaded the needle between communism and capitalism and created something better. Is it sustainable? Who knows. Centralizing economic authority can lead to some catastrophic failures when that authority becomes incompetent. But for now, being able to focus a country's pooled resources into any industry looks a hell of a lot better than the western economic model, where our best and brightest are incentivized to spend their prime years shuffling assets from one pile to another to make a buck.
wingdingspringking
9mo ago
How many societies allowed open condemnation of the gods by philosophers? Ancient Greece, maybe. But even there, if you pushed too far, you ended up drinking hemlock.
Both true. I certainly have no interest in expending my resources (or to the extent it is my choice, my country's resources) solving this problem. I simply don't on a personal level like taking pleasure in their plight. Based on my (admittedly very subjective) moral framework, apathy is acceptable. Satisfaction isn't.
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