Corvos
3hr ago
I do wonder how much selective empathy is going on.
Bucketloads, on all sides. In general the wars of the last decade have really opened my eyes to the fact that most people can't have empathy (even nominally) for the opposing side of a conflict that they actually care about.
(I don't claim immunity to the phenomenon myself, and noticing that has been pretty creepy too. Especially since noticing it doesn't actually change it.)
Ultimately wars don't start when the leader of a formerly peaceful nation wakes up and decides to kill some people, they are an escalation of a violent and hostile relationship. If invading Iranian territory and killing its head of state doesn't make A+I the aggressors, probably aggressor/defender is the wrong way to look at this conflict.
For example, if Iran had nuked America six months ago, I think people would call them the aggressor even though America was imposing heavy sanctions i.e. blockades on them, had multiple times threatened/attempted to/historically actually achieved regime change, was attacking them via regional proxies (Israel) and had already bombed them.
I don't think it's about being old or young. The wars of our great-grandparents' day were existential, at least if you were in Europe. And notably the one party in the Iran conflict for whom this stuff is - rightly or wrongly - somewhat existential is Israel and they are ultimately pretty accepting of casualties. Likewise Ukraine.
If you are American of course it's a bit more complicated, but I still think that WW2 was visibly more urgent from an American POV in ways that created greater tolerance for large-scale casualties. Japan attacked the US; and the Nazi regime were very powerful, very dangerous genuine racial supremacists who had taken over France and Poland, presided over mass bombing and mass executions, and had the explicit goal of ethnic cleansing Eastern Europe for German expansion. Putin just isn't in the same league, and neither is Iran.
Corvos
18hr ago
Labour in the UK are trying surprisingly hard as well, from what I can see. Not doing that well but definitely much more than I was expecting - and more than the Tories for that matter.
Corvos
19hr ago
Makes sense. I was thinking that 'inability to explain' or denial at that age might be simple inarticulacy / fear of adults or authority rather than literal amnesia or dissociation.
Fascinating! I am once again in awe of the TV showrunners of House who realised that a medical mystery could be swapped for a crime mystery.
During normal daily activities, the boy would suddenly freeze. He would look incredibly distressed, and then he would get the human equivalent of the zoomies. He would sprint around the room. After the running stopped, he would approach his mother or older sister and bite them. Sometimes he bit hard enough to draw blood. He could not explain why he did this or what he experienced during the episodes.
Aggression related to panic attacks?
I looked at him again. He was a perfectly normal, fidgety kid missing a few baby teeth. There were no obvious signs of hydrophobia, though I mentally filed rabies under "highly unlikely but technically possible."
He'd be dead, wouldn't he? Survival time is usually less than a week after symptoms appear, though I'm surprised to learn you can have morbid rabies for months or years before symptoms show up.
EDIT: google AI lied about its sources but 'within a few days' does seem accurate: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/13848-rabies. Other sources say one to two weeks: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/rabies/for-health-professionals.html
Actually happened to a friend of a friend 30 years ago. A cartel tried to bump him off, figuring a tourist overdosing on the other side of town would be a good distraction ahead of a drugs sweep. They just hadn't realised that he was already a heroin addict with heroic tolerance for the stuff - he woke up two days later none the worse for wear.
Excellent comment. Now I desperately want to read @quiet_NaN’s “You’re Doing It Wrong: How to Kill Correctly And With Style”.
When people object to capitalism, their anger is usually at excess profits, not companies ruthlessly competing away each other's margins; whatever grumbles about airline leg room there are, it's not what's driving any political anti-capitalism.
I think this is the wrong way round. People say and think it’s excess profits but actually it’s excess competition.
It’s always dangerous to psychoanalyse one’s opponents but I think the train of thought is roughly:
- I seem to be paying more and more (or at least the same) for less and less. Air France used to give two suitcases for free, now I have to pay considerable markup on each of them. (I also get in-flight WiFi now but I have to pay for that and people are more sensitive to loss than gain).
- Companies are still making profits and there are lots of billionaires around the place. (Not actually making their money in the same business but people don’t notice this.)
- Therefore these billionaires must be getting rich by stealing the money that used to go into nice services for decent prices. They’re certainly not getting their money by making services better!
When people actually feel like they’re getting a great bargain and new cool stuff, they don’t usually mind the creators getting rich. If anything a lot of people support them as an 'our team' kind of thing - look at the way people felt about Palmer Luckey when he invented modern VR, or Anthropic.
There may have been an element of that, I don't know. I can't remember if the chap was Japanese but she certainly had no shortage of non-Japanese admirers. She was half-French, or she'd grown up in France, if I recall correctly, and was involved with the embassy in some fashion. It's a fleeting impression from a while ago in any case so my recollections could be incorrect in any number of ways.
What makes it so vivid for me is the memory of her confusion at my confusion, as if it was weird and rather impolite of me to not be familiar with the kayfabe involved. Clearly, it was very improper of me to expect "there's no way I'd sleep with that guy!" would not be followed up with "brb, fucking that guy".
I filed it away as another part of the world I'd failed to understand until then.
Corvos
1d ago
Oh, that was the one with Simon Pegg, wasn’t it? I remember it being good. The action was rather formulaic - if any plan was announced explicitly or implicitly, you could guarantee something would go horribly wrong within five minutes - but it was just really nice to see someone who had a very good formula apply it so well.
Corvos
1d ago
Buying a tag from Tesco’s with cash like you’d buy a beer is the closest you can get I think.
Corvos
1d ago
Because there are many parties who wish to know for savoury or unsavoury reasons what embarrassing things people are doing when they think they’re alone - the security services among them - and consequently that information is very valuable.
I’m not saying that the ID company is saving face-key dicts, but I wouldn’t be very surprised if they were. And if this became rolled out all over the country and users got used to the system it would be very easy for the government to quietly or publicly justify getting the company to cough up ids. Especially when losing government accredition would immediately torpedo their business.
You may consider this excessively paranoid and you might even be right but the insistence on ID at a time when the government has been very clear that what you do alone in your room puts you as a thought criminal or potential rapist doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
Corvos
1d ago
Not English. I met her back in Japan - she was some non-Japanese Asian ethnicity like Korean or Indonesian. No idea about her finances but we're definitely not talking welfare queen.
I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.
No idea about a canonical definition but it makes sense to me that forms of social organisation have a life cycle similar to e.g. tech like Google Search.
- you start with enthusiasm and success (loads of people use google search, it suddenly renders the internet legible, it's great).
- expansion (everyone has an indexable website, search results are really good).
- an increasing number of problems as parasites, middlemen, activists, bureaucrats etc. figure out all the places that they can hijack the system (SEO appears and swiftly becomes mandatory to get any traction, Google increasingly stacks the deck towards large and favoured organisations, the map becomes the territory all over).
- eventually the whole system collapses under the weight of enshittification / all the edge cases it's responsible for supporting / parasitic load etc.
So for capitalism:
- you have a massive initial expansion of activity as corps come into being, positive sum investment and economic activity become possible, LLCs make it possible to invest without risking prison.
- companies make loads of stuff people want, poverty drops hugely etc.
- increasingly most of our (remaining and new) problems start being caused by companies b/c they're everywhere. Quarterly reports stop being a useful indicator of company health and start being the lodestar that guides all investment/hiring decision. Mergers and private equity vandals turn great companies into skin suits. Stock market arbitrage starts being far more lucrative than making things and selling them to people who want to buy them. 'You are here'.
- Theoretically, all of these problems finally cause capitalist economies to slowly become so decrepit, futile, ineffectual and malicious to the humans caught up in them that it sparks revolution / takeover by healthy societies with different social arrangements / evolution towards a new model.
Corvos
1d ago
Open source software doesn't usually have mass-market adoption and it doesn't do this kind of skinner-boxing engagement hacking in my experience; of all possible tech regulations I don't think this one is likely to be an issue. Also, in practice, these restrictions are almost always predicated on market share & revenue and again I don't think open source software has to worry about this.
You seem to me to have a set of implicit standards about the Good which I'm not necessarily disagreeing with but would like to lay out in more detail when we are, ultimately, discussing banning things people like doing.
To me, you seem to be saying broadly:
- Healthy-for-the-body things are hard and good for people
- Socialising in the real world is hard and good for people.
- 'Passive entertainment' is more fun than those things at least in the moment.
- Therefore 'passive entertainment' must be banned or heavily restricted...
- ...in order to encourage healthy activities and socialising.
As a former and still-occasional weirdo loner whose idea of paradise is still often a big library and a lifetime to spend in it, I guess my first question is whether you see inherent value in passive entertainment that needs to be traded off against health, instrumental goals, and long-term sources of satisfaction/happiness, and/or whether you are suspicious of passivity and consider strenuousness and discomfort as a moral good in and of itself?
An awful lot of women don't actually care, though, except for the implications to their status. I met a very beautiful girl through a friend and she confided in me that her dating-app match had just messaged making it clear he expected her to put out on the first date (in about four hours time). She raged and vented for some time: did he really think she was the kind of girl who would do that?
You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.
Corvos
4d ago
Contra @MadMonzer I would say that Britain isn't a proposition nation any more than England/Scots/Wales is. It's an ethnic one with multiple very similar ethnicities. There doesn't have to be a lot we agree on (though there are certain serious disagreements especially around religion) but we are used to each other. You don't need shared memes with your brother for him to be your brother. You don't even have to like him. You just have to dislike him for long enough.
Corvos
5d ago
Oh also, a solid chunk of employers did not give WFH.
Possibly sensible. It's always been known in the army that the way to prevent panic / morale issues in times of high stress is to make sure everyone's too busy with work to think. Getting them out of doors and busy in the usual environments might help - from the UAE's perspective of course.
Corvos
5d ago
And as Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fill the time available". Just as mechanisation in the office did not mean "gosh, now I can get all the letters typed in the morning that used to take all day to write by hand, I can go home at twelve o'clock now with my work day over!" but rather "now there is even more work to be done because now instant replies to letters is the new expectation", so with housework.
Fewer hours, but not fewer expectations. Someone pointed out that women now spend more time with their children than 1950s full time housewives, and that's just one of the 'expansion of expectations' - now you have to manage all the extracurriculars your child/children should be doing, for one thing.
It's kind of sad, isn't it? One of those things that makes me think mankind's problems are inherently unsolvable.
Corvos
6d ago
I felt the same about Childhood’s End. Some part of it has got to be down to the two world wars and a visceral sense of ‘anything must be better than this’ but there have always been people who would prefer not-humanity to humanity. More extreme members of the environmental movement for example.
Looking at what's been happening in Ukraine, Iran and so on, I think that you'd (plural) be incandescent. It would immediately form the basis of huge volumes of war propaganda against the baby-killers for domestic consumption. Diplomats from the UK would be dragged in front of a mike and ask why they aren't doing more to stop innocent American children being slaughtered. Meanwhile any unfortunate civilian casualties abroad would be targeting accidents resulting from the enemy's perfidy in leaving children next to their bases, unlike the US which is (..now) doing everything possible to get them out of harm's way.
That just seems to be how war is.
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