JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Right wing complaints of voter suppression?
Maybe not direct voter suppression - at least I don't have a definite proof of it yet - but we have multiple and very well verified instances of speech suppression, economic suppression, access suppression etc. And this happened both on governmental level and on the level of various non-governmental gatekeepers, such as academia, media industry, entertainment industry, big corporations, etc. - every level that defines how the society is managed has multiple examples of people being suppressed for being on the Right.
The argument that social bonds are weaker because new people showed up seems weak and weird
How it's weird? Who am I likely to bond with - the person I (and my ancestors) lived next to for three generations, or with somebody who showed up around yesterday, doesn't speak my language, has totally different culture and beliefs, wears something I can't even name, and can't answer positively to any of my "remember when" questions? I'm not saying the latter is impossible, but claiming it's less likely than the former - if anything is ever "weird" is claiming something like that, and without any justification, just dropping it like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Of course it's not.
JarJarJedi
3hr ago
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
"This place" can't support anything, not unless we form a representative government and give it the rights to represent us in this matter. That's certainly not what I am here for. I think if you want to talk to people, talk to people. If you want to fish for a sweeping statements like "this place is full of X", whatever X is, please don't. Yes, for some values of X it may be true, but it's not the point of the thing.
I personally think Vance's statement makes sense - if somebody traces their ancestry from before the Civil War they certainly should not be excluded when defining what "America" is.
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
No. This statement does not say America must only be hereditarian, it says common history must not be excluded. I think this is true - while for a startup nation, bare idea may be enough, for the nation with 250-year old culture history is a big part of it. True, 250 years is not a lot, some nations measure in millenia, but it's enough to consider it seriously and not throw it out, especially because of momentary partisan considerations.
A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
I don't think you are describing the content of this statement properly. The proper description would be that Vance thinks just individual choices and beliefs are not enough to make somebody an American, but being a part of ancestry that created the culture we now call "America" may also be considered as a factor. If you lived somewhere in Galapagos Islands and you've just read the Declaration of Independence and you thought "actually these guys have some pretty decent ideas!" that doesn't automatically make you an American. You can become an American, and maybe you will, but you are not yet are. I don't see anything wrong with this claim.
Moreover, Vance specifically said he does not have the answer to the question of what is an American, and only calls to begin working it out. Presenting it as he already prescribed the "ancestry" answer gives me the strong "fine people" vibe. This is not a good way to conduct a discussion.
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
No, the definition of individualism does not exclude considering the individual's history or culture. No person exists as an island, people are social animals, and being a social animal means being part of the culture. And culture is rooted in history and ancestry. True, history and ancestry does not define the individual, as doesn't genetics or, in general, any wide-area criteria - it's impossible to define an individual by metrics that count in millions. But that doesn't mean those are to be completely ignored. Cultures exist, and individuals are heavily influenced by them. That does not deny the fact that the individual has to be evaluated on their personal merits, at least when it is possible. But one also has to realize these merits do not come from nothing. Ancestry is not the destiny, but it's often the foundation.
The tools you have described are indeed powerful, but they are secondary to defining the goals. To illustrate that, let's abstract them out and define a quality called "awesomeness". The person is more awesome if they are more efficient in achieving whatever they want to achieve. Looks good so far? Now, do we want to have more awesome people? Do we want to make immigration policy depend on awesomeness - the more awesome you are, the higher your chance for a citizenship. Before you answer, consider an awesome drug addict, an awesome psychopath, an awesome flat Earth cultist, an awesome Islamic (or, if you wish, Christian) fundamentalist. Does "awesomeness" looks as good as before, or do you want to put something in front of it? And if so, what exactly?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
- about 15 mins, 10 miles
- about 20 mins (it's really close to #1 actually but somehow google maps says it'll take 5 mins more to get there. Probably due to a bunch of 1-way streets aligned the wrong way).
- Depending on what you mean by "farm". If you mean anybody who grows stuff that people eat for profit, then about 3 mins walk. Or 10 mins walk into practically any direction, they are everywhere around (though house prices are squeezing them out). If you mean a larger production with serious machinery and volumes, probably 1-2 miles. Two literally nearest ones grow cows and corn, as far as I can see, but there are all kinds around here. In fact my neighbors across the road have a large field but I am not sure if they grow stuff commercially (I can't see very well into that part of their property and I was never curious enough to find out, but wouldn't be surprised), but if they do then the answer would be "right next door".
- If you need specifically Amtrak, about 250 miles. Though there's talk about building a new line - not sure how real, but if it happens, it'd be about 10-15 miles likely. There used to be train service there, but closed in 1990s.
- 4 miles, 10 min drive. There are other large shops closer than that.
- Nearest major airport is in about 10 miles, which can take you to every major hub around the US and some other places, but it isn't "international" anymore as the company that was doing flights to Canada doesn't do it anymore. Which I guess is good as it eliminates the need to maintain the whole international security thing. So the nearest international one would be in about 350 miles, though the one you'd actually want to use if you flying to Europe or such is about 650 miles and about 1.5 hour flight.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Leftists hate Jews for being perceived as right-wing (economically and socially) oppressors.
Ironically, most of the American Jews (excluding Hassids and similar groups) are in deep love with the Left and especially the Left's economical and social doctrines. Not all, I'd say but the majority, especially the prominent Jews that show up on TV.
Many black men (famously Kanye) and poor whites fit this bill.
Kanye though is not poor and hardly unsuccessful. While black antisemitism has long and sordid history (which mostly resides on the "convenient proxy for oppression" part) I don't think alt-right antisemitism comes from that angle. Rather, it comes from resentment with the general power structure setup in American society, which many people, especially on the right, are feeling, and instead of doing proper intellectual work of figuring out where that comes from, reaching for the ages-old convenient explanation. Of course if shit's going wrong, it must be the Jews! It's always the Jews! Everybody knows that! And of course, the thing I mentioned above - many American Jews being in deep love with the left, even while the Left hates them - doesn't help since it automatically codes them as "the enemy".
If the new Israeli leader lacks big-dick-energy, the incels will mark him as effeminate and move over to their next source of resentment.
There's always "Mossad". Mossad has a ton of big dick energy, and you can blame them for literally anything - after all, not having any evidence just proves how cunning they are, you didn't expect the Mossad to leave any evidence, are you stupid or what?!
JarJarJedi
5d ago
People are saying this about the Jews for three thousands years at least. Yet the Jews are still around.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Do we really need a complex explanation of why a young woman appears attractive to an aging man?
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I think it is better than a horoscope or tarot, because it's based on the actual individual patterns of behavior, instead of something that has no relationship to the actual person. But of course attempting to reduce the infinite human diversity to a handful of broad classes would be very imprecise and frequently misleading. That said, there are people that can be described as "phlegmatic" or "sanguine", and that's not entirely wrong, even though nobody believes in the humoral theory anymore. It's clear that there are some patterns in people's behavior, and those can be to some measure classified. My type on MBTI comes out as INTJ and it's roughly matching my behavior and is probably useful to a certain measure - you wouldn't know everything about me, you won't probably know any of the important things about me as a person, but you would understand roughly how my thinking and approach to things works. I think that is useful, though one must always understand that this is very imprecise and not to put too much into it like "I know how you think now, you're totally transparent to me". No classification system is ever going to do that.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Yes, PA is not a full state, because any solution that was designed to get them to full state and permanent resolution of the conflict has been thoroughly and consistently rejected by the Palestinians. And when Gaza was made an experiment in de-facto evolving towards full self-rule without a formal agreement, what Israel got as the result is October 7. There's absolutely no desire in Palestinian politics to reach any permanent solution that involves Israel existing in peace. Given that, any additional sovereignty level that Israel allows would only lead to more casualties on Israel's side. Gaza demonstrated it (and continues to demonstrate, with Hamas' thorough rejection of any arrangement that requires Hamas to give up on killing Israelis) very convincingly, and demanding from Israel to be more suicidal than it already is does not sound like a fair demand.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
If we're being fair, that's partly because the PA is supposed to be in charge but actually are mostly grifters, so they've delegated blame, but ultimately you don't really see Israel trying to expand citizenship to more Palestinians
Given that PA territory is under full civil administration by PA, I'm not sure how would you expect Israel giving citizenship to Arabs living there. Security arrangements are more complex, but for this it doesn't matter - PA enjoys pretty much complete self-rule in civil matters (and so did Gaza btw) so calling Arabs living there "second class" compared to Israelis is just bizarre - they are not Israelis at all. As for PA leadership being grotesquely corrupt and indifferent to the needs of the population - that's extremely common situation in the Middle East, and Israel can't really fix it. It could annex the PA territory, kick out the PA and provide its own institutions, but nobody wants that. Short of that, the Arabs will have to do with the institutions they can build for themselves, and if those are not great, it's not Israel's fault.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
50 thousands Arab Christians would be very surprised to know they are "mostly gone". Gaza, indeed, was pretty much cleansed of Christians by Hamas, which is what happens when you give Islamic fundamentalists free reign of the territory, but in PA, where comparatively less insane Fateh is ruling, Christians still exist. Of course, just as all the good-wishers of the world totally ignored what happened to Christians who used to live in Gaza, if PA decides to cleanse all Christians from PA territory, nobody would even squeak, no Jews - no news. Things like that happened many times in other places (in the Middle East and outside) and no students on college campuses ever protested about it. You all know why.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct.
Nah it's completely false. In fact, it is the failure of Marxian approach that gave birth to wokeness, in a sense. According to Marx, capitalism, with time, was supposed to lead to worsening conditions of the proletariat and making workers extremely poor, so that the capitalists would own all the means of production and the workers would literally work there only because the alternative it dying from hunger, and only paid as much as to allow them to barely not die from hunger. Which eventually would cause the desperate masses to revolt. That part kinda makes sense, if I were in such situation I'd probably revolt too. Except that it's totally not what happened in the developed capitalist countries. In fact, even in the countries where the revolt did happen - like Russia - not only it could not happen by Marxian theory (Russia was way to underdeveloped to progress to that point, it barely crawled out of feudalism by then, and there was a lot of confusion among Russian Marxist theoreticians about what the heck Lenin is thinking when Marx clearly says Russia is not ready) but it was largely perpetrated by the intelligentsia, with the proletariat taken along for the ride and used as a figurehead. And it went worse from there, because the masses of the workers under capitalism liked their 401k and ESPP much more than preparing the glorious socialist revolution. And if you look closely at who we see as self-described Marxians today, you'll see a distinct scarcity of factory workers and large prevalence of college professors and their brainwashed students.
And that was the reason why the Left needed something different from the classical Marxism. Because building a movement based on wage workers eager to overthrow capitalism was not viable anymore. That's why Gramsci invented cultural Marxism, which eventually performed a hostile takeover of civil rights movement and ecological movements, and evolved into wokeness. This all was because Marx's theory completely failed to predict the actual events.
the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production
I don't know much about China, but I will get into a debate about Soviet Union, because I know quite a bit about it. And in Soviet Union, they actually tried to implement Marxian economical planning as much as they could, completely honestly, and involved such mathematical powerhouses as Kantorovich, and after they got over the idiotic rejection of cybernetics, also all the computation resources they could muster. Only after it became absolutely clear to them there's no possible way they can make it work they started to let some capitalist elements in, such as khozraschyot, cooperatives, economic incentivization, federalization of economic planning, etc. They tried Marx as hardcode as they could afford without causing famine.... oh wait, scratch that, including causing famines that cost millions of lives - and still could not make it work. Nobody can.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
If you're implying the policemen specifically look for people like George Floyd to abuse them, this does not sound plausible. I mean, did you see the man? His standard description in the woke media is "gentle giant". I am not sure about the gentle part, but he's 6'6", played multiple sports, was employed as a security guard, and he doesn't exactly look like something you'd describe as "weak". And, of course, if you wanted to target somebody weak and unable to resist with violence, without the possibility of punishment, would be a public street, in presence of your peers and multiple witnesses possessing recording devices, your preferred venue for that?
What do you mean by "isolated" and "stigmatized"? Floyd certainly weren't "isolated", given how much resources have been spent on defending his cause and lionizing him, including burying him in a golden casket, all DNC leadership kneeling to apologize for whatever happened to him, and erecting a monument to him. And anybody alive in the last 20 years would know how such things work. So if you think the policemen were on the lookout for some helpless victim nobody would care about, it's literally the worst choice in the history of bad choices. And they would know it very well. Neither is he "stigmatized" - if anything, all his past as violent psychopath and drug addict is completely forgotten and any discussion of it is now considered "downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power" and definitely means whoever discusses it is a racist.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Stanislaw Lem had as a teaching example the tale of the robot being asked to clean the old storage closet full of disused globes with the prompt "remove all spherical objects from this room". It did it perfectly, and also removed the operator's head too - it looked spherical enough to match. I think that was in The Magellanic Cloud.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
And they didn't have their production code and databases backed up?
As hilarious as it sounds, with this "vibe coding" thing I totally expect it. I mean, this is a magic machine, why would I need "backups"? If there were the need for backups, the magic machine would make some, by magic. Since it didn't, it must be just some stupid superstition boomer coders invented to justify their inflated salaries.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Just today saw this: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/i-destroyed-months-of-your-work-in-seconds-says-ai-coding-tool-after-deleting-a-devs-entire-database-during-a-code-freeze-i-panicked-instead-of-thinking/
So much fascinating stuff there - from people giving an LLM unfiltered access to vital business functions, and then having no shame to tell about it on the internet to the model cheerfully reporting "yes, I deleted your production database, yes, I ignored all permissions and instructions, yes, it is a catastrophic failure, can I help you with anything else now?" I knew Black Mirror is closer to reality than I'd like to, but I didn't expect it to become practically a documentary already.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
You have a dangerous line of thought.
Thank you, I guess? Usually the ideas that can be endangered by thinking aren't the worthy ones.
You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.
I didn't "downplay" anything, I didn't discuss this topic at all. I think you are projecting some kind of bias on me which is not related to what I have said.
Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime
Not sure what you mean here.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
The Soviet Union had no western style prisons
Of course they had. Well, not "western-style" - much, much worse - but they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisons_in_the_Soviet_Union The problem was that building a physical prison - with walls, doors, grates, beds, plumbing, etc. - was too expensive and too slow for the number of inmates the NKVD machine needed to process. So most were directed to "camps" which were much cheaper to maintain (and way worse to be in, of course).
That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from.
Err, no, Vory as a socio-cultural phenomenon existed way before the Glorious Socialist Revolution. But, since Soviet style mass imprisonment was not practiced in Russia before, at least not in the way USSR practiced it (look up how the revolutionaries sentenced to be deported to remote areas were handled by the Tsar - they were basically free to do whatever they liked there, including access to firearms for hunting, with the only requirement to periodically check in with the police. And yes, they were allowed to be accompanied by their wives, too) - the fertile ground for development of real comprehensive mafia-like structure only appeared with Gulag. Though given that many other mafias also started gaining power at the same time (e.g. Cosa Nostra, which existed way before, but started to become really powerful in the US by mid-century), I wonder if it's not part of some larger trend.
That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.
It didn't matter too much, it was hell regardless of who was around - it was designed and implemented that way. Of course, none of the above establishes that the majority of Gulag inmates are career criminals, as claimed, that point remains unproven.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?
I'd say more likely any person who would end up in this situation would be a criminal with the probability > 95%. I mean to set off the whole thing, the person obviously needs to be black, poor (a cop may arrest an affluent looking man, but much less likely to manhandle him), drug addict (otherwise he wouldn't die) and with poor impulse control (otherwise he'd just quietly go into the car). And it should happen in a large city, otherwise it'd be impossible to make a huge deal out of it. The chance that a person with such profile, statistically, doesn't have a record is not very large, to be honest.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
- Tried Annihilation Score the second time after a break, but then caught myself thinking "why I am forcing myself to read a book which I clearly hate? I'm not even paid for this!" and dropped it. Probably done with Stross for a while.
- Read Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, which, unsurprisingly, is an overview of how racial classifications work in the US. No partisan politics (well at least not noticeable to me, with all my biases), just a meticulous description of the whole thing. I thought it's a mess but boy was I underestimating it by orders of magnitude. Truly eye-opening, though not in any optimistic way.
- Started Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and got about halfway so far. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but so far it's going surprisingly well, even though I'm getting a bit of "show about nothing" vibe.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Yeah that's why pretty much stopped playing - to have a good game takes at least a whole weekend, maybe longer, for pretty much every game I'd enjoy. And I can't justify spending that much time to myself. I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it, but probably won't do anything like that again for a while.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
Express grave concern? Maybe even issue a strongly-worded letter of condemnation.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Israeli-linked ringleaders and elements arrested in southwestern Iran, says Iran's news agency
Through vigilant efforts, Iranian security and judicial authorities have identified and arrested several individuals connected to opposition groups who were operating in line with the enemies’ aims, Vahid Mousavian said.
Quite clear those have zero to do with Israel, just local dissidents rounded up. They can't even bring themselves to claim those actually are Israeli agents, just "operating in line with aims", which is pretty much any opposition to the current regime.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
First of all, people are punished for imaginary crimes all the frickin time. Starting with the sitting president, who has been punished (or there was an attempt to punish him) for imaginary crimes at least half-dozen times, maybe more. And downstream from that, down to declaring parents who want to know not even what happens in the upper regions of the system, but in their own local school - domestic terrorists, and making a task force to find some imaginary crimes they can be prosecuted for. This is part of the deal too - while the patricians virtually never get prosecuted for anything - unless they cross another, more important, patrician - the plebeians are getting prosecuted left and right for utter bullshit.
But second of all, the crimes of Epstein are not "imaginary". He was known as a convicted criminal since 2008, and the exact nature of his conviction was also known since then. Moreover, the materials of his and Maxwell criminal cases strongly suggest that his operation was not uniquely tailored to satisfy one single person, but was wider. And also common sense suggests that at least some people who associated with known criminal who did not exactly hide his proclivities used his criminal services. One can not claim, obviously, just having any business with Epstein means they were part of the criminal business too, but at least it is plausible that there is more than one person that consumed those services. And there are witnesses that claim they know for a fact such persons exist.
And if it is plausible, the inferior people would like the people who claim they are there to protect them (or at least The Law), and given enormous powers to do so, will actually do at least a proper investigation on the matter. We know they can do that - this happens in drug cases, this happens in terrorist cases, this happened on Jan 6 where the FBI deployed immense resources to find every last grandma in Alabama who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on that day, and put her into jail. They have the powers. They are not using them. The inferior people are wondering - why? What is happening here? You answer is "you are just a bunch of dumb idiots and nobody is going to explain you anything because you are dumb". This answer is not very satisfactory.
The trick here is claiming there's such thing as quantifiable "use value". It's actually two tricks. The first one that there's some objective fixed value that an object has, regardless of anybody's opinions, and it can be calculated, even if it required omniscient entity having total view of the economy. The second trick is that a specific person or organization (Gosplan if you will) can calculate it. Both are wrong. This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why socialism fails - it can not produce proper prices, and without proper prices, economic cooperation can not function, as prices drive resource allocation. The Soviets tried to implement non-price resource allocation and failed miserably. You can just "assign" prices but as they would be disconnected from actual economic value, you will either get massive deficits, or a ton of resources wasted on producing useless widgets. In a socialist economy, you usually have plenty of both.
Sure, bubbles are a consequence of resource misallocation. But you know what is also true of bubbles? None of them can last for long. Exactly because this is a self-defeating process - the longer the price remains misaligned, the higher is the pressure to correct. Until the bubble bursts. On the contrary, the misallocation that is driven by directive prices and resource assignment can last indefinitely, it does not have the feedback mechanism.
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