comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
2d ago
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
comicsansstein
2d ago
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity.
Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
comicsansstein
5d ago
If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.
comicsansstein
9d ago
Do you think that mathematical theorems are discovered or invented? I have a segue I want to make from this question (it involves a book that was popular w few years ago), but first I'd like to hear your opinions on that.
I have his name blocked on twitter so that not only do I not see him, I don't even want to see any mention of him. Much like with Tate or Candace, every single piece of information I get about this person is against my will.
Why would you care about statements like this? He's a troll, expecting a coherent action to follow from it is a fool's errand. He's not stating it as a serious policy, he's making mouth sounds (well, pixels on a screen) to get a rise out of people. In which, mission accomplished I guess, 3/10 made me respond.
comicsansstein
17d ago
I've recently come up with an even more biting definition that's guaranteed to please no one, yet I think fits most actual "use cases": fascism is using communist means to achieve non-communist ends.
(Paramilitary youth groups, mass surveillance, centralization of power, expropriation of private enterprises, media censorship, etc.)
comicsansstein
25d ago
Huh, I haven't heard of that one before, and up till this point, I thought I'd read pretty much everything he's ever written.
It contains nothing new, it's just a compilation of some of his short stories, in a chronological order.
The one good thing I can say about it is that it made me dislike Charles Stross less, because up until that point I had them mixed up and I thought Incorruptible was Stross'. About two stories in that compilation I thought to myself "wait, I recognize that brand of misanthropy" and the mixup resolved itself. If anything, this proves that this voice is strong enough to be recognizable across translation, as I read the linked story in original English. Btw, in mind mind that story kinda rhymes with The Giving Plague, only more edgy and worse.
Anyways, to Watts and people like him I'd like to present the following question: suppose you get what you want materially - the environmental issues get reversed and healed - but nobody get hurt and punished. Would you take the deal? Or is, as the kids say, the cruelty the point?
comicsansstein
28d ago
I've read a compilation of his short stories, aptly titled An Antidote to Optimism in Polish. I don't think your "mostly a joke" is actually a joke, at least for me.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Elissa Slotkin is a "former" CIA operative, right?
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Well, last week has certainly been busy when it comes to Polish-German relations.
A few days ago, it has come to the public's attention that Felzmann auction house was planning to auction off items looted from concentration and death camp victims: letters, documents, things like that. 623 items in total if I got it right. There's been an outcry, and the auctions have been removed. Now, some people are talking about forcing the auction house, or the "owners" it was acting on behalf of, to restitute the items back to Poland, but I wouldn't expect it to happen.
In general, there's a rather poor track record when it comes to returning art and historical artefacts looted by the Nazi Germany. The Germans established a new arbitration tribunal for that cause this year, and they (non-bindingly) endorse the Washington Principles, but in practice the federal government is trying to stonewall any claims by Poland.
Also, there's a bit of misdirection in the Western media when discussing the situation with the auction house: the items are being described as belonging to "Holocaust victims" and Jewish organizations are quoted (see e.g. CNN). While most of the auctoined items were indeed recovered from the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps, among the 600+ there were some also belonging to, or regarding, Poles (and I mean not even Polish Jews, ethnic Poles). Which brings me to my second point: history policy.
Broadly speaking, the German historical policy is to portray Nazi aggression as uniquely affecting the Jewish population, and to downplay the megadeaths suffered by the Polish one, to better insulate from possible claims by the Polish gov this way. The Polish historical policy is basically nonexistent. While the Germans managed to successfully control the frame and try to slowly absolve themselves generation after generation (see e.g. some German politician telling Trump that "Germans were the first victims of national socialism"), there is no one enforcing such frame control here, so self-hating Polish libs and progressives are eager to employ WWII both-sideism and try and drag as much responsibility for the holocaust on Poland as possible.
And that drive to self-debasement sometimes results in a very (darkly) funny situations: also last week, a film appeared on Polish state TV's VOD service. Among Neigbhors, a documentary from last year, where in WWII animated flashback scenes demonic Poles with glowing red eyes hunt down the hiding Jews, and in the ruins of 1944 Warsaw heroic German soldiers aid them. Twenty years ago, this reversal was being mocked in a satirical strip ("Herr German, strike the Jew, now!"), and now 2025 discourse is finally approaching 2006 satire.
(Also this week, I've learned that in 1991, Helmut Kohl's government was opposing Polish access to NATO, for reasons that largely echo current Ukraine's - that it would be "taunting" Russia. Plus ca change.)
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Not very often, but I do, thanks!
comicsansstein
4mo ago
My recommendation: pick something ridiculous to wear e.g. a huge hat, or a neon-colored suit jacket, or cowboy boots, or full cosplay of an anime character. Go for a walk in a crowded place. You will feel like you want to die for a moment (up to an hour or two), and then you will not. Probably.
(Link shows me and now-wife at a friend's wedding in 2021. Since your case is pretty severe, I'd recommend to start smaller than that.)
comicsansstein
4mo ago
I can't stand the Main Character Syndrome people have about the USA and its foreign influence. Moldbug wrote the same bullshit near the war's beginning, that the Ukrainian government is a puppet and that poor Russia was forced into a war.
Other countries and their interests actually exist, they're not extras in your show, and every single country in the region did everything they could from the very first day of regaining independence in 1989-1991 to distance and defend itself from Russia, and we can always see what happens when you don't do it: Belarus. They ally with the USA not because of nefarious CIA mind control tentacles, but because it's the way to be shielded from the Russian influence, western Europe led by Germany certainly can't be trusted with it.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
I care, because my mobile OS is built with people who don't know how a filesystem works in mind, and is therefore trying to obfuscate from me the difference between a local folder with pictures and an album I uploaded to Picasa in 2010. The images from old scouting trips are pushed to the front, and the folders I want are hidden behind multiple screen transitions. I probably wiped some photos from 2023 because of a dialog asking me if I want to "fix" a problem with the memory card, conveniently omitting that said fix involves formatting it. A system for adults would tell me what is actually happening, but hey, no difference between cloud a local so who cares, right?
And that's not even getting into the weeds of a cloud provider running an analysis on every photo and piece of text uploaded, so that the social wrongthink score can be calculated.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
My grandmother was born in Przemiwółki, a small village near the Polish city of Lwów, which you probably know as Lviv. My grandfather was born a bit more to the west, in Żółkiew (Zhovkva). There's a family story about how his father and father's brother became estranged for life after the modern nationalities started to crystalize and one chose to be Polish, and the other an Ukrainian - Tolkien's story of Elrond and Elros comes to mind.
Anyways, the known Poles living in those regions faced a simple choice as WWII was drawing to a close - flee, or die at the hands of UPA. There might be some octo- and nonagenarians left who consider themselves Polish deep in their hearts because of the stories one of their parents told them, but that's basically the end of it.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Part of the iterated problem is that some people will leave, and those are the people most willing to take a risk and make sacrifices for a better life, which in the long run reasonably approximates more successful people. We are now witnessing the result of some four hundred years of this process.
Thought hip-hop has a negative influence. 2008 is basically an eternity ago for the purpose of those discussions.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
I'm finishing a short story collection by Peter Watts, aptly titled "An antidote for optimism". I don't know man, I just don't get misanthropes on a fundamental level. The cynics, the antinatalists, the degrowthers - he's all that and then some. And I resent the probable riposte that it just means that I'm not enlightened enough to see the human and universal condition for what it is. Sometimes it feels like people like him or Von Trier or Herzog treat/use depression like a contagious vector - trying to spread it around to dull their own pain.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
If you don't mind me necroposting a bit, can you give an example of a person who was discussed on KF pre-cancellation? I'd prefer not to have to wade through their material wholesale.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
I'm halfway through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. So far, I'm mostly surprised by how unpleasant and unattractive everyone is, compared to the adaptations. Also seemingly worse at keeping secrets than me, even though I'm not getting paid to do it.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here. A bad faith poster in this forum may cherrypick sources and cite only the studies already favorable the their viewpoint, but they're still citing and searching for and reading [abstracts of] studies - which puts them miles ahead of a median person, who gets their entire memeplex wholesale from a medium of their choice.
Now I'll give you, this leaves "regular" red tribers in a worse position - Fox et al just has a worse quality of journalism than NYT or WaPo, or whatever you thing the "default" blue tv station is. Or so I've heard, I'm not an American and I've seen <15m of Fox News material in my life (I try to never watch it, just so I can angle-shoot someone who would accuse me of getting my viewpoints from there).
But yeah, if I may be a bit self-indulgent, you arrive at a space where people are in the top ~5-2% of striving to be up to date on the news and research, and proclaim that a core tenet of their affiliates is "proud, resentful ignorance". People are taking it personally, even if they probably shouldn't.
A perfect microcosm of different faction's approach to knowledge would be 2020. In the beginning, you get grays and "high reds" freaking out about approaching epidemic, while the mainstream and progs are mocking them for being weird techbros, telling people to celebrate freely in the streets, and "justtheflu"ing it. Then the epidemic arrives, and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. The reds get locked in the "low" mode, so they inherit the "just the flu, bro" position and insist on folk medicine, evidence be damned. This is the source of the supposed March-April switch of the positions - there was hardly a switch, it's mainly different demographics. The blues find themselves in a more truth-aligned position, until they too err catastrophically for ideological reasons (telling people to go out and protest in June).
tl;dr As i/o on twitter put it, the worst of the right are retarded, the worst of the left are mentally ill.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Substituting "like" for "feel more affiliated with":
Rightists tend to wildly overestimate the number of minorities in their countries, be in gender, sexual, religious, or ethnic.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)
And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.
And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?
(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)
Notably, Chuck Norris facts were a more popular variation of earlier Vin Diesel facts.
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