marinuso
2d ago
Iunno.
Judges are people and people are not necessarily fair or without bias. Ideally, a judge is fair and without bias, but ideally, this goes for a qadi or a dayan in much the same way.
I would rather not allow immigrant or diaspora communities to establish their own law systems, but that's not because I think those law systems are necessarily unfair, or more so than ours, though of course they may be. It is because I think we should remain in control of our own countries. For this same reason I would rather not allow companies to do the same thing either.
But it is historically quite common that a contract would specify under which of several competing legal systems any disputes would be resolved, and this would make complete sense if there are in fact multiple competing legal systems.
marinuso
2d ago
having the good sense not to post tiktoks mocking it
This does make the difference. What people do in private as individuals doesn't matter all that much. But they are actively ragebaiting on behalf of their whole group; not only did they think this was a good idea but their group seems to accept this kind of behaviour. They are going to get it back in their faces.
If there were career women going around celebrating in public that their babies cry and claiming this was women's empowerment, then no doubt people would start gaining opinions on women having careers. But they don't do that.
If you're obviously part of some group, no matter which one it is, then your actions will reflect on the group as a whole, unless the rest of them actively and visibly act to stop you.
(This is a more general principle: if someone misbehaves and his family doesn't seem to disapprove, you will think badly of the whole family, and this is still true in a homogeneous society without subgroups.)
marinuso
18d ago
Singapore is a small city-state where everyone is living in each other's laps already, and to add to that most of its housing is government-built. ~80% of people live in public housing, which gives the government a lot of control over housing allocation without having to force any private landlord to do anything. Someone who moves from one end of Singapore to the other can still easily see his friends, go to his job, etc. This is also already an officially racialized society with everyone's ethnicity being written on their ID cards.
European countries are much bigger and lack all of these things. There's no official ethnic registration, at best there's the "migration background" thing that only goes back one generation. It would have to be established. Is it time to riot yet?
In the Netherlands, only about a quarter of people live in public housing. Over two thirds own their house. The remainder live in private rentals. You would have to nationalize the housing stock, or regulate housing sales to the point of de facto nationalizing the housing stock. Is it time to riot yet?
Also in the Netherlands, the big cities are majority-minority already whereas much of the countryside has few immigrants, and when they do, it's Poles. Equalizing the population would mean making people move far away from their jobs and families. They're not going to like that. Is it time to riot yet? Etc.
marinuso
18d ago
I mean, you can't really force it. You would have to break up their communities by force and reeducate them, in a "kill the Indian and save the man" kind of way. Perhaps it is not physically impossible, but it would certainly require the kind of cruelty you are trying to avoid here. Probably more cruelty than remigration (even deporting them all) would entail. Arabs are not Malays. They need to, fundamentally, stop being Arabs if they are to be individual members of Western societies.
The Middle East is the area of the world that has been multicultural for the longest time, it being the crossroads of continents. And what kind of culture survives such churn while keeping itself intact? One that is extremely clannish, inward-looking, and outwardly hostile to the point that individual members can't defect because everyone else hates them and will reject them. There are multiple cultures in the Middle East but they're all like that and even the Israelis, who used to be relatively European in their outlook, are in the process of becoming exactly this.
The other alternative, besides this and remigration, is to accept that multiculturalism is here to stay and make it official by organizing something like the Ottoman millet system, which seems to be what Brainwavez was getting at. Keep everyone apart and make interethnic interactions into explicitly ethnic interactions, so that the entire community can be held accountable for the actions of the members, so that in turn communities will police their own rather than risk collective retaliation. In other words, prison rules. And this would mean for Europeans to adopt this Middle-Eastern "multicultural" mindset.
But the fiction that we're all individuals before the law, part of the same society, cannot keep standing forever when it is so clearly not the case anymore.
marinuso
18d ago
I was made to take years of French, never got any further than slowly being able to struggle through a newspaper, and have since forgotten all of it. My English, however, is decent.
The difference is that I actually use my English. I grew up watching American movies. Higher education is in English and office jobs require English. Bilingualism comes naturally if you are in a situation where you need to speak two languages.
Nobody is going to retain any Spanish unless they need it, except some language nerds. And anyone can (will, indeed) learn any language if they must, but not otherwise.
marinuso
1mo ago
Americans of all flavors are the infamous for being mild in their celebrations
Really? Over here Americans have the reputation of being loud.
If you can't be loud and in-tears after an emotional moment for your team, then are you even a real fan ?
An adult should have a sense of decorum, certainly in public.
You would think that goes twice in this day and age when everything you do can be filmed and immortalized and put on TikTok for all to see.
marinuso
1mo ago
I'm not an American, but it seems the losing side did, grudgingly and for the most part, eventually accept the legitimacy. Not everyone, but enough. The majority at least, and the Republican Party as a whole.
That said, at least when seen from across the pond there was enough weirdness that, if the same thing were to happen in e.g. an African country, everyone internationally would've said it was sus. I'm not assuming there was enough fraud to actually change the election. I'm perfectly happy to recognize Biden's win. But none of it looked good, and I would expect better from a first-world democracy.
marinuso
1mo ago
It's interesting to see how this attitude differs between Europe and the US. Most of Europe generally has more restrictive abortion laws than the US, even after Roe v Wade was overturned. The Netherlands has a two-trimester limit on elective abortions, and this is the most liberal in the EU (tied with the UK, but it is not in the EU anymore). Some places, like Poland and Malta, ban elective abortions entirely, on religious grounds.
But medical abortions, including if the child has Down's Syndrome, are always allowed. If your child has Down's Syndrome, that's a valid reason for abortion, and pretty much nobody would say otherwise, including conservatives.
marinuso
1mo ago
Democracy cannot work unless you can convince the loser that they lost a fair game. That's fundamental. Otherwise there's no reason for them to keep playing along. Elections need to be essentially flawless.
marinuso
2mo ago
Imagine this justification used for crimes:
[state]: pay the fine for running a red light
[person]: but i didnt run a red light
[state]: Well someone ran that red light, and we can't let it be known that running red lights will go unpunished. You were nearby and I've already captured you, it would be too much work to go get the real culprit if it turns out it wasn't you.
This exact scenario is the case in most of Europe. If a car runs a red light, the owner is fined. It doesn't matter who was driving. It is the same for speeding. The reason for the law is exactly as you said. It would be hard for an automated camera to find the driver (maybe less so now than 20 years ago though), but it can just read the license plate and check the registration.
marinuso
2mo ago
Everyone wants to stay in power. This includes even democracies. The more dissent against the system there is, the more repressive said system will need to be. Communism just doesn't work very well, causing more dissent and thus needing more repression.
China is a good example. Maoism was totalitarian. Today's China is much less repressive, not because the Communist Party has embraced individual rights in any way, but because they simply don't need it as much.
Since they let go of the strict communism, they went from being as poor as Zimbabwe to being the closest thing the US has to a peer competitor. As a result, people don't generally feel like they'd be better off by overthrowing the system. And ambitious people can throw themselves into making money, rather than the only outlet for ambition being scheming either within or against the Party. There is less need for repression, and therefore there is less repression.
Capitalist-ish dictatorships generally have better economies and more outlets for personal ambition than do traditional communist dictatorships, therefore the latter are going to need more repression just to keep going.
marinuso
2mo ago
To add to this, everyone and everything is always being influenced by outside actors. That's part of living in the world, you are not alone. Being able to deal with the rest of the world is simply a requirement.
It's actually quite remarkable how much the Soviets and their satellite states found it necessary to close off their societies. In the modern day, only North Korea does it to that extent.
marinuso
2mo ago
And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it"
The Turkish language doesn't even have gendered pronouns.
Well I can't actually write code, so this way is a lot easier for me!
Fair enough. I've had AI do things for me that I don't know how to do. I wouldn't stand behind the results, especially if I can't even judge them, but then again, that differs per use case. E.g., I'll use it for translating something from a foreign language if I want to read it, but I wouldn't use it to translate something I'd send out under my own name if I can't at least check it.
I note that people (and I've caught myself doing this too) tend to be bullish on AI when it comes to fields they don't know well, but bearish when it comes to fields they do.
3 MB of code is a fair bit I think, that's a lot for anyone to write.
That's only a little less than my employer's entire biggish, legacy enterprisey SAAS product with 20 years of history, if you're counting just the code. (Edit: at least the back-end. Probably about double if you count the front-end as well, but still.)
Are you counting assets such as graphics or really just the code itself? Perhaps the AI has simply generated really inefficient code. But hey, if it works.
marinuso
3mo ago
Mine? Yours?
From what I've seen, the answer is 'yes'. And if the differences are too great, you just split the church. That's how you end up with small villages with three churches. And some of the really devout people don't go to church at all. They know it all themselves anyway.
marinuso
3mo ago
You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.
That sounds like more work than just writing the code yourself. It sounds like training an intern.
With the big difference that an intern will learn (at least ideally) and will need less handholding over time. The LLM does not learn, at least not directly from you showing it things.
marinuso
3mo ago
marinuso
4mo ago
Part of it is just the election system. The first-past-the-post election system leads to a two-party system, because having more than two candidates favors the most dissimilar candidate. Consider e.g. the 1992 American presidential election. Bill Clinton got 43% of the vote, Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 19%. The majority of the population voted for a right-winger, but a left-winger was elected, because the right-wing vote was split between two candidates. To prevent that, people with somewhat similar political stances all have to get together to back one candidate, if they want someone they can live with. Thus you end up with only two parties.
If the population were to shift, the parties would just shift along. For example, if the American populace became much more left-wing as a whole, at first the Democrats would win. But the radicals in the Democratic Party would be empowered, pulling the party further left; meanwhile the relatively more conservative people in the Democrats would get pushed out and join the Republicans, pulling that party to the left as well. Soon enough a new equilibrium would be reached. Even if an entire party does collapse, a new one will take its place.
In European parliamentary systems you get a different dynamic, because the parties are assigned seats proportionally to their national votes, and they have to form a working majority only afterwards once the election is over. So you can vote for a small radical party if you feel like it without wasting your vote. They'll get a few seats anyway, and depending on how the rest of the election went, they may pull the resulting coalition into the direction you want. The result of that is that you get a lot of different parties instead of just two.
marinuso
4mo ago
We have written sources from the Classical world on down where people express grief over losing children.
Any written sources from the Classical world that have come down to us, concern only the top ~10% of society, if that. Your average illiterate peasant wouldn't have left a gravestone with an inscription for us to find; he couldn't have if he wanted to. (And not just because he was illiterate and couldn't write a message, that could be - and sometimes was - fixed with a standardized template; mainly he couldn't have afforded the stone or the services of a mason.)
Do note: we have an epitaph or two for dogs from Roman times. This doesn't tell us anything about the common Roman experience. All it tells us is that there were at least a few people in the entire Roman empire, during its entire existence, who could afford a stela for their dog. (It may well have been conspicuous consumption rather than any actual feelings; or perhaps it was both.)
We have stones for dogs today, too. Even in rich Western countries it's not common, but it does exist; maybe in another two thousand years, when our civilization has fallen and another has arisen, someone will dig one up and write a treatise on it. It will say absolutely nothing about our society today.
I think we tend to flatter ourselves by comparison with the past; we're a culture that has legitimised abortion as a human right
Before they had abortion, they had infanticide. It was common and normal in the Roman Empire. The Christians tried to ban it, they banned it over and over and over again for a thousand years, which tells us people didn't listen to the ban and kept doing it.
There's places where it still happens today, despite the availability (though perhaps not accessibility) of medical abortions. Every once in a while, a third-world immigrant still tries to expose their baby even in the West, and then everyone's shocked.
On a discussion forum in particular, you care that there's an actual person behind the post, who actually holds whichever view they communicated, and who can respond to follow-up questions. That's what discussion fundamentally is. Ideally, of course, it shouldn't matter how that person edits his posts, but it does matter that the posts are his in a real sense.
Even before AI, we cared when this wasn't the case. People would pretend to hold views they didn't, or be people they weren't, in order to rile people up, and we'd call them trolls and they'd get banned. Note that even in that case there is a gray area. If someone's not too bad of a troll, and his posts are good enough discussion fodder, he might be tolerated for a while, even though people know he's a troll.
But being a troll by hand takes effort, and that limits the amount of trolling. Meanwhile, LLMs have caused a flood of "content". Marketeers, advertisers, Onlyfans girls, influencers and the like often euphemistically(?) refer to their output as "content" and to the thing they do at their jobs as "creating content". The problem with LLMs is that it's become much too easy to create "content" in this sense.
If you want to be a troll nowadays, you just turn on your LLM and let it flood the place.
If you have a working LLM detector, or even something close enough to it, I can understand a rule that says "whatever it flags, is banned". Yes, it's possible to use LLMs with good intentions and/or with good results. And you may even apply leniency in such cases even when it's obvious someone's using an LLM. But its main effect is to drastically simplify the job of a bad actor.
marinuso
4mo ago
if small groups had the ability to make deadly, highly infectious pathogens.
They don't and they won't. Things like that, just like making nuclear weapons, require a bunch of physical infrastructure that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of effort to build, and you certainly can't just build it unnoticed. Even if you can ask ChatGPT for the recipe and it just spits it out, there's nothing you can actually do with it. What we're really relying on is that random small groups don't have the resources to do these kinds of things.
that does not mean that there aren't a few Xs that the overlords really do need to prevent us from doing.
They can't actually stop us from doing things.
They can arrest us after the fact. Normal people behave because they care about their reputation and about the consequences of their actions (even if just the "I'll be arrested" part of the consequences). But that does not really work on crazies or fanatics. They don't care.
If we really do, somehow, get to the point where random small groups can easily produce deadly pathogens, we're in trouble anyway. For example, look at what Aum Shinrikyo managed to do. The cult was disbanded and the leader executed afterwards, but that's afterwards. If they had managed to make something really deadly, they wouldn't have been stopped in time.
Yes, except that it's not the pop culture. That's just a bonus. The need is much more basal than that.
In the Netherlands for example, you will need English for any kind of higher education, even when the classes themselves aren't in English, the textbooks and articles will certainly be. You will need English for any office job. Advertisements, shop signs and other public texts are written in English more often than not. Computer software is usually in English. The Internet is, obviously, mostly in English.
There are two languages in common use, and you need to know them both; not knowing English is almost as bad as being illiterate. That means everyone is constantly getting a lot of practice, also outside of school. It means the benefits of having good English are very obvious, and the friction of not having it is bad enough that it'll motivate you to practice more if you need to.
In fact this may be a good way to describe it to an English speaker. It is quite like literacy. You don't acquire it naturally at home, you need to be taught it. But then, society presents you with a lot of text, even if you do not seek it out. Society expects you to be able to read information in that format, if you are to participate to any degree. You are always reading and often writing. Perhaps not capital-B Books all the time, like the literature teachers who complain that "kids don't read anymore" would like you to, but Internet forums, manuals, street signs, official forms, labels in the supermarket, text messages, someone's blog, your co-worker's E-mails, and so on. You get all that practice in, and as a result most people end up fairly decent readers.
Imagine if you had no use for reading, and you never actually used that skill outside of a specific "reading" class in school a couple of times a week. You would never get anywhere near decent at it, and you would forget it as soon as you're out of school. I have an actual real-world example of this exact thing happening, the Laotian literacy campaign of the 1980s.
An intensive adult literacy campaign was initiated in 1983-84, which mobilized educated persons living in villages and urban neighborhoods to bring basic reading and writing skills to over 750,000 adults. Largely as a result of this campaign, those able to read and write had increased to an estimated 44 percent. According to the United Nations (UN), by 1985 those able to read and write were estimated at 92 percent of men and 76 percent of women of the fifteen to forty-five age-group. Because few reading materials are available, especially in the rural areas, many newly literate adults lose much of their proficiency after a few years.
You can, obviously, go into what is essentially a pre-modern village and teach the peasants to read, certainly to the point where the guy from the UN will be willing to count them as literate. But they're still pre-modern peasants whose lives haven't otherwise changed. They've never needed to read anything, they still don't, and they have no access to reading materials, save perhaps a few government pamphlets about literacy. They have no real reason to seek out any more reading material, nor any real way to do so. How could they even know what exists? So they just forget it again and when you go back to the village after a couple of years, they'll all be illiterate again. (I bet nowadays, all those villagers have cellphones and thus retain their literacy.)
And so it goes with language instruction at school. It's not that school does nothing at all: English is not my native language, I did have to be taught the basics. I remember not understanding the cartoons on the TV. You don't get there by osmosis unless it really is your native language. But once you do have that basis, it becomes self-reinforcing given all the societal exposure.
At one point I knew enough French to say 'where is the bathroom?', and I could recite the conjugation tables. There may well be French books worth reading, but I never got to that point. I could struggle my way through a newspaper article at one point. But why would I want to read a French newspaper that badly? I needed the high school diploma, not the French. My French is now just as nonexistent as the literacy of one of those Laotian villagers.
Unfortunately the EU is nowhere near this transparent.
Americans have congressmen to yell at. The MEPs, and indeed the European parliament, are basically for show, as the latest Chat Control vote shows.
Laws don't matter either; Russian media were banned by decree (and ISPs forced to implement blocks) even before The Motte existed as a separate website, and there is still no actual legal reason why this should be so.
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