Corvos
54m ago
I liked it too, but as a grinding programmer at a British startup I was thinking, “wait, you get two weeks off in August???”.
It DID fail during the civil war, that's what a civil war is. There's a saying, "there's a great deal of ruin in a nation," and I think that goes 10x for America for various reasons: the USA realistically has a continent to itself and no serious rivals, it is gifted with oil + fertile farmland + good rivers + other natural resources beyond the dreams of any other country in the world except maybe Russia, and in a much more convenient form.
I don't actually mean to be too anti-American, I respect it more than comes across on this site because the site is pro-America enough that I end up providing the alternate view, but I think that America has a vast cushion for failure that other countries don't. More than that, though, @JeSuisCharlie posted the old-but-good Adam's quote that American society is suited only to a moral and religious people, and in practice I think he was expressing the same kind of sentiment. Think of it this way through the ages:
- Original colonisation. The colonies don't interact that much and are usually each set up by some special interest (e.g. Puritan societies). Coercion is rife (indetured labour for both blacks and whites) and punishment can be harsh.
- Post-revolution America. A loose federation of states, each of which has a pretty strong internal culture. Most of which have what we would consider today to be very heavy indoctrination, especially Christian. Travel is rare.
- Pre Civil War. Due to increased travel and other things, the states now interact enough that they can't look past their cultural differences (e.g. the status of escaped slaves) and policy increasingly gets hijacked as levers in the internal conflict (taxing export goods, making new states)
- Prewar. America has centralised significantly. FDR is actively an admirer of Mussolini and the general principle of “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. State education is now relatively standard after the Dewey reforms, with the kind of self-aware cultural indoctrination that would fall out of favour in the 1960s and later. Top-level government is very much a thing for a self-aware gentry - the Boston Brahmins etc. Low-level government is controlled by machines and bribery + patronage keeps voters and functionaries in line.
What I am getting at is that, in my reading, various factors conspired to keep the views of Americans reasonably homogenous on the level at which government was primarily operating, and that the one time this failed America had a civil war. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say,
This is getting to be a long comment and I'm nervous about losing it, so to answer the rest of your points very briefly:
I would say that your view inherently holds that the state is just, and by just I mean that your highest ideal is order. This represents an inherent trust in authority, which let's say a Russian wouldn't share. America is inherently founded on a certain distrust in authority.
I am not very keen on my state at the moment, and I certainly don't consider it just. I am a Reform voter, which is the closest the UK has to a 'blow it all up' party. Likewise I voted for Brexit, my feelings on trans and immigration are not in line with the state, and I spend perhaps 1 hour a day arguing politics on this website. I could justify it by saying that I am by hereditary class and education part of the group of people who absolutely are expected to have an opinion on matters like this, and that in that way it is in my 'pay grade'. But it would be more accurate to say that I am a hypocrite who intellectually believes that what I have said is true but can't hold to it. As the Operative of Serenity says, "there's no place there for me". It's one of the reasons I left Japan despite liking it so much.
Americans in many ways have a deeper trust in authority than almost any other country - apart from the Borderers they entirely lack the corrosive distrust you tend to see in Old World countries like Europe and Russia. What they distrust IMO is foreign authority, whether that be London or Washington.
Right now the scientific consensus is that gender affirmation is good and life saving. Now the general view of the Motte, and one I to some degree with, is that the doctors are ideologically captured. But some places have gone to the level that not affirming your child is legally considered child abuse. So whose pay grade is it to make these decisions? The doctors? The legislators? The parents? And to what degree does the parent have the right to not comply if they believe this is unjust?
(Epistemic confidence: low. I'm not sure I believe what I'm saying and I can think of lots of counterexamples.)
This is sort of what I'm getting it, in a 'fish have no word for water' way. When individual parents and doctors are making decisions like this (except to the extent that individual children to some extent have different needs), when legislators are deciding to coerce behaviour and we are debating whether parents have the right to resist that coercion, your country is already well on the way to breaking down. The mechanisms for achieving consensus have failed, and legislators/doctors/parents are engaged in inter-nicene brawl which is time-consuming and damaging to the medical profession plus every individual involved. Note that even Britain, which is dysfunctional in many ways, has been able to move relatively seamlessly and easily from 'transing the children is good' to 'transing the children is bad'.
Corvos
16hr ago
We seem to be watching enlightenment-values democracy slowly falling over, though. (Picking either one by itself is probably OK though).
If the next century is basically America receding from 'global interventionist superpower' to 'very rich but very disorganised country on a different continent', Europe mostly becoming a set of Muslim-minority secular-in-name-only states and Isreal having serious problems solving the disconnect between the Harethi and everyone else, then Iran's current strategy might look pretty smart.
That's a big 'if' of course but I'd give it maybe 40% odds?
He gets the ability to hypnotise people, and the ability to turn into mist that can presumably get through any hole or crack. I think that'd probably be enough, you?
Sometimes you reach a point where no more accommodation is possible, when you wage war on your own society (revolution). When that time comes, all bets are off.
Before that, well, that's hard. Emotionally, morally, there are things I approve of and I don't approve of. Arguably, I am doing sabotage already by quietly working to direct my employer towards business directions that I approve of and away from directions that I don't approve of. I'm a child of my culture and my age, and I can't be otherwise.
Intellectually, I believe in the case above - that you simply cannot run a country on the principle that 'the line between appropriate and inappropriate depends entirely against the injustice being fought'. A country simply doesn't work when everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on matters over their pay grade. I worked in Japan for many years and in many ways I miss it bitterly, because it worked and the reason it worked was that people acted together towards a common goal without individually deciding whether to permit it, subvert it or oppose it.
British schools used to be pretty unpleasant, and they taught children very sternly about Honour and Duty and Honesty. After WW1 and WW2 and it was suggested that this teaching had turned Englishmen into sheep, ready to be slaughtered, and the teaching system was repurposed towards self-confidence and self-expression. Japan has a pretty similar system today, though explicitly pacifistic. They teach children to fit in and to work together and not to put themselves above the group, and by all accounts that teaching can be pretty unpleasant too. But it helped make Britain great and it seemed to work pretty well for Japan, and I think any answers to our current omnicrisis have to address the fact that we have been made ungovernable by the philosophy you describe.
Which makes me a rebel and a hypocrite, so I can't really answer your question, but at least I'm not blockading the police.
Corvos
20hr ago
When you think about it, taking all the people who really hate you and sending them off to be part of your highly-armed and very rich neighbour is a strategy with some long term risks...
Corvos
1d ago
I looked up a couples of research articles yesterday that had experimented with different profiles and VPNs (firefox/safari, PC/iPhone, different countries, profiles corresponding to 'rich' customers i.e. luxury hotel websites vs. 'poor' customers) and found that differences were $10 max and didn't vary substantially across different countries let alone different user profiles, so I think you're right. But open to hearing otherwise.
A free state has to keep nearly everyone baseline content nearly all the time.
With the logical corollary that if it's not possible to keep everyone baseline content nearly all the time (due to values inhomogeneity / economic headwinds), it's impossible to run a state that is free according to your definition?
the line between obstruction and protest
But can we agree that sabotaging ICE arrests and barricading streets falls well on the wrong side of that line? Peaceful protest is when you see how many people you can get to go to the town square and wave a sign to make it clear they're unhappy.
Of course, for all I know you may be right about the legalities of it. I personally think that the American Constitution is a document considerably flawed by being written by people who had persuaded themselves that it was appropriate to wage violent revolution over being asked to pay a couple of pennies on the pound of tax to repay the money that had been spent defending their homes from invasion. American philosophy of rights and liberty has been flawed from inception by its inability to agree on when you should sit down and shut up vs. when you should erupt and slaughter all the people down the road who you don't like and take their stuff, which is why e.g. Americans also have a direct constitutional right to free speech surrounded by a penumbra of all the things you aren't allowed to say and when you aren't allowed to say them.
That is not to say that American ideas have nothing to give to the world, far from it, but American constitutionality seems like Christianity to me in that it is an essentially apocalyptic doctrine which has survived and thrived for hundreds of years only because it gets interpreted so loosely.
Then people often employ methods to hamper the goals of the government, especially the goals they find morally objectionable, without resorting to violence. Perhaps you just 'forget' to add the fuse in half of the bombs you build for the Nazi war machine. Perhaps you use your privileged status as a white person to help slaves escape to the northern US. Perhaps you give aid to civilians persecuted by a regime. Perhaps you just decide that you did not see a petty theft.
I understand where you are coming from but to be frank I see this doctrine as an aberration. The fact of the matter - to me - is that you simply cannot run a prosperous and well-ordered society when any random person feels entitled to sabotage it every time that they personally feel it is important enough (and there is always someone who feels it's important). It is a recipe for lies, betrayal of duty, and the kind of despairing slowdown we now see where any attempt by the government to solve any problem is bogged down by activists until it grinds to a halt. Notably this behaviour featured heavily in sabotage manuals that both the USSR and the CIA gave to their fifth-column spies, because it is the most effective method of destroying a well-defended country over time.
Like the doctrine that soldiers should disobey orders when they decide they ought to (yes there are rules but ultimately it comes down to a personal decision), the idea that you personally are enjoined to enforce your morality on your country even if it means betraying your duty is a malign holdover from the memory of Nazi Germany* that has been rotting Western civilisations for the last eighty years, supported by the accession to global superpower of a country that for historical reasons fetishises rebellion.
If someone doesn't wish to build bombs, and their children aren't being held at gunpoint, then they shouldn't get a job as a bomb-maker. If you want to stop the government doing something that you think is wrong, then go into politics, fight as hard as you can, and accept that you may lose. If you are not going to see the hungry homeless man stealing bread, do not let someone pay you to guard their shop. Again, it's not that I'm not sympathetic to some of these scenarios, I've been there to some degree. But the whole point of having laws against obstruction is to make it clear, harshly clear when necessary, that just because you don't like where society is going doesn't give you the right to unilaterally sabotage it. In a sense, going on a killing spree would almost be more admirable than a smile and a knife in the back, because it clearly signals that you are an enemy of the current society and intend to war against it and suffer the consequences.
TL;DR: 'She should just have stayed at home, and nobody would have shot her' works if your beliefs have nothing to do with whether you are allowed to sabotage law enforcement
*that is, the problem with NG is that it did things that are bad, not the fact that its populace were effective at doing them. If a man kills three children with a kitchen knife, it does not mean that kitchen knifes should be made cheap and rusty in the future. Or to put it another way, telling people to do whatever they're told risks disaster, but in the long term telling them to #resist whenever it seems appropriate guarantees disaster.
Thankfully the middle-aged white women in my life are much more liberal than me but still reasonably sensible. It's the middle-aged men who spam me with 'did you see what Trump did today' and 'this would never have happened before Brexit'. (I'm in the UK).
EDIT: I realised that you meant 'middle-aged' as in 37 and now I feel old. I was talking 50-60.
Corvos
1d ago
And that means you have to make a decision. Because when the gun turns against your tribe, the nature of war is that you don't get a choice of which tribe you are part of. If we decide that killing middle aged women for being turbolibs is ok, I can't decide that I'm not part of the tribe, my family and my friends decide that for me. I can only decide whether I'm ok with their deaths or not.
I find it so difficult to see this perspective. Literally all anyone has to do to achieve complete safety is not deliberately antagonise and obstruct members of the police force or equivalent as they go about their duty. You see a bunch of agents, you give them five minutes and you don't get in the way.
Do they really think that ICE are on some spree killing of middle-aged white women now?
Corvos
1d ago
This has always been rumoured and it's possible but is there any actual evidence of it?
Corvos
2d ago
I also observe quite a lot of 1 but with a racial tint: the only possible reason not to want to have open borders is a dislike of foreigners, and therefore anything short of open borders is racist. And any rational non-racist argument against non-maximally-open-borders is just a covers for the racist argument (not always wrong!).
Corvos
2d ago
I think this is downstream of American Revolution/Independence hagiography and then Civil Rights.
For historical reasons, the US is very sensitive to the optics of putting down riots. It’s supposed to be done by the nasty people that America was made to get away from. So if it’s not serious enough to start shooting, nothing should be done.
Corvos
3d ago
My point is that you are excluding the vast majority of what people consider 'tyranny' from your list and then saying there isn't very much tyranny in the world. If we include the Gestapo, the KGB, COVID lockdowns, anti-Catholic burnings during the Reformation, the Terror in revolutionary France, Jim Crow etc. then it's still broadly true that people underweight the harms of anarchy compared to 'you can get along as long as you don't do anything to upset the government', but the picture is more complex than 'really there are only two tyrannies in the world and they're both tiny'.
While I sympathise with your broader point, I don’t think that you’re making the argument well. People are afraid of living with the equivalent of the Gestapo or the KGB, so saying that they weren’t real tyranny is just going to get ‘well, I don’t want not-real-tyranny either thank you’.
And indeed one of the problems with tyranny is that it can coexist perfectly happily with anarchy.
Corvos
3d ago
"Ah, but I have White Privilege and since society is Systemically Racist and set up to support White Privilege, nothing bad can happen to me, white person, so I can use my superpower for good!"
Noblesse oblige.
Corvos
4d ago
Everyone is aware of that, that's the point. When you are holding a deadly weapon and the other guy isn't, then "We respect your sovereignty and would never do that" isn't a threat, "I'll use this if I have to" is absolutely 100% a threat.
All true, but I'm a simple man. I liked the original Dead Space and I wanted to see what they could do with modern lighting systems. And to be fair they made non-graphical improvements as well: Kendra's character is much improved, and the weapons feel better too. I preferred the old zero-grav sections though.
I loved that bit! Very much 'we're saved!' and then the slow realisation that you've really, really fucked up. Plus it makes total sense to me that
Dead Space Remake. I'm a wuss so I play on easy - the scares are enough excitement for me already, I don't need to be constantly fretting about ammo or surviving by the skin of my teeth at the same time.
In general I've been re-discovering easy mode lately. I love Dark Souls and similar soulslikes, and got very into the 'if it weren't so hard to get to the next area, it wouldn't have nearly the same emotional weight' way of thinking about games. It's a good philosophy but especially for games that aren't as tight as Miyazaki-san's stuff, it can really suck the fun out of what's supposed to be an enjoyable experience.
For example I was regretting buying Pacific Drive until I bumped the difficulty way down. Once I was getting new upgrades and story almost every trip, I got much more immersed in the story and started really enjoying it. Of course it was over soon but 13h of fun is way better than 40h of pain.
showing far too much leg in 34F temperatures
You get this in the UK for both men and women: Geordie of the Antarctic. (Geordie means someone from Newcastle up north.)
As someone who is somewhat aristocratic (my family did not pay for Oxbridge's anything, but 200 years ago they probably could have) you are misunderstanding how it works. Think of it as meritocracy with a sliding window and a small momentum factor.
Rather than the intelligent rising to the top after a major shakeup and then camping there until the next revolution, people broadly rise or fall through their lifetimes. My family were long ago pretty influential. They made many bad choices and a few good ones, and went from 'we own a castle and a good estate' to 'we own a farm and a small business' to 'sorry, kid, I gave everything to an exotic dancer' and then back up to 'decent upper-middle class' through the generations.
This results in a society which is marginally less meritocratic but involves considerably less striving. Your brilliant father would have been unlikely to go from hauling crates to owning (a chain?) of hospitals, though it did happen, but would likely have gone from hauling crates to second-in-command of the hauling company, married to a nice girl of a higher class, with children who raised in the style of that class and who would move upwards or downwards from there according to their own ability. Especially since brilliance is more clear when IQ is slightly higher variance in your profession.
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