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I just read Kulak's review of "India: The Worst Country on Earth" on his Substack, Anarchonomicon. https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/film-review-india-the-worst-country
I had never heard of this film and haven't seen it, but I have read other stuff from Kulak. While there are definitely points I take from his posts, I do not consider myself a confederate and find his takes to be pretty divergent and extreme from my own. His writing is solid enough I don't get bored so I consider him an example of "what a reasonably intelligent far-right person has to say." He might not be far-right, but I think that's how he identifies. I'm certainly no expert, I've read maybe 4 or 5 articles and I seem to remember him from Reddit...maybe? I would be glad to hear other opinions/warning/lauds.
In his review he claims the film is
Now that I know the film exists, will I watch it? No, I think it's unlikely. I don't really harbor Pollyanna-ish views on India that need to be rewired, but I also don't get into watching death, rape and destruction in my free time. I find it psychically damaging and can admit I prefer ignorance to knowing the true depth of human depravity. The review reminded me a lot of how people would describe "Faces of Death" back when I was a kid--another film I never had any interest in watching and remain largely ignorant of, aside from knowing it's just watching an endless string of people getting horribly killed.
I would like to know if people here are familiar with the film and what their general impressions are. I would also like to discuss some of the following:
Is it true? Can a feature-film length series of horrible phone videos give us an accurate view of what India is really like? I have no experience with the country beyond discussions with people who have been there or come from there and some low-level Youtube vids. Is this really the worst country on Earth? If so, what's the deal with the subcontinet? Is this level of degeneration directly tied to IQ? If not what caused India (I think there's some talk that Pakistan and Bangladesh are in the same boat) to be like this? If this is human degeneracy, what keeps a society from degenerating? Are we degenerating? Is India the future for everyone?
Is it perfect RW propaganda? Kulak's point is that it is so disturbing it forces Westerners to adopt an "Ohmygod the West is so much better than this I'll defend it with my life," attitude. I would suspect that hardcore universalists and "brotherhood-of-man-types" would find ways of countering the narrative, but I wouldn't be satisfied with, "it's just nasty fascist racists," if the truth content is high. Bad people can have high signal-to-noise ratio content even if I don't like it.
Is it really that bad? The horrible deaths and mutilation parts I might be able to stomach, but the accounts of the varieties of rape and abuse had me squirming just in their retelling. The scenes of ecological devastation and anti-sanitation sound almost as bad. Is India truly this decrepit and insane or is it just a white-power-washing of a place I'm meant to develop a revulsion towards so I have the correct opinon of H-1B visas? would watching the film bring me closer to understanding or just turn me into a gibbering racist? Should I go to India and see for myself? People I know who have gone there tell no happy tales so I'm biased toward believing it's as bad as they say.
Is it important? Will this film actually pin itself to history? It's hard to claim that "Faces of Death" was an important series of films from any kind of cinematic or virtue position, but it did make an impact and we remember it. Is it possible that even as pure culture-war propaganda, it's message might actually help people, either by protecting themselves when they're in India or forcing the country/global community to force some changes on the culture? Does something like 'India:TWCoE' need to happen to turn the ship? Does the left need far-right propaganda thrown in their faces from time-to-time? Does the West need to understand how terrible things could become if they don't reverse their own degeneracy? Is this an argument for AI control of humanity or will we necessarily revert to the mean where we use warfare, colonialism and slavery to force the best genes to emerge...like, are we simply doomed?
Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts, but it seems like pure, uncut culture war and I thought y'all might have more perspective on this than me.
I watched most of the film back when Kulak did the review of it, my impression is that it is cherry-picked but the parts that are cherry-picked are true enough. The parts that are true mostly relate to the lowest castes in rural India, although it's arguably an indictment of the entire civilization. High caste Indians though are clearly able to immigrate to the West and not engage in the degenerate behaviors like those portrayed in the film.
The biggest takeaway of the film is that Indians are fundamentally not a sympathetic people, to be charitable. The clannish, nepotistic, sometimes antagonistic behavior of Jews is tolerated because, on some level, the West is sympathetic to them after a long history together, Abrahamic ties, and yes Hollywood propaganda especially. That, and they are White-passing and talented so their engagement in that behavior is often inscrutable and has plausible deniability. The Indians don't have any of that sympathy, lack subtlety, and are not white-passing, so if they come here and act that way it is going to rub people very much the wrong way. The Indians coming here to draft on the preexisting Silicon Valley culture industry, which they did not build, and bringing with them a big dose of nepotism and Hindu nationalism, that is going to trigger a "Racism" response in people who have been thoroughly trained to have sympathy for Blacks and Jews. And then documentaries like this basically validate the racism.
As to whether the film will be important- well I've only heard about it through Kulak's writings and nowhere else. But I would agree that Indians seem poised to reintroduce racism into the Western psyche as greater contact only seems to lead to growing the backlash and a willing audience for things like this.
This reminds of something that happened in 2021 on Twitter. I think it speaks to your point almost exactly. I pulled this directly from a website that talks about it:
On September 26th, 2021, Twitter[2] user LILAVYVERT quote tweeted a TikTok video shared via a tweet[3] posted two days prior. The video shows a nightclub somewhere in India where many young, Indian people are dancing to "When that one song that comes on in the club." LILAVYVERT quote tweeted it, using the phrase "I know it smell crazy in there". The tweet (shown below) received roughly 51,600 likes over the course of one month.
LILAVYVERT's tweet, however, also received roughly 23,700 quote tweets over the course of one month. The quote tweets mostly revolved around LILAVYVERT's statement allegedly being racist. LILAVYVERT received the most amount of backlash from people of Indian descent. For instance, Twitter[4] user @pinkfr1day tweeted, "they going slur for slur in the quotes wow" and received roughly 22,600 likes. This tweet commented on and poked fun at the Indians and the African-Americans in the quote tweets and replies being racist or derogatory to each other.
The sheer volume of racist tweets coming from Indians was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Since certain speech on online was pretty heavily policed at that time, being able to see those tweets making their rounds was very cathartic. It's like the powers that be at Twitter couldn't handle it all. It was hilarious because the pure unfiltered racist vitriol coming from some of these people was so beyond what was normally accused of "racism" in the West that people were borderline speechless. It's precisely their lack of subtlety and the willingness of Westerners to tolerate it that aligns with your point.
/images/17361781215486736.webp
I literally don't think I've ever heard a white person say anything racist about Pakistanis, unless they were an actor playing a role. As far as I can recall, 100% of the racist statements about Pakistanis I've heard were spoken by Indians.
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You got reported for making it about the Jews again. I noticed it too - for real, dude, can you go one post (without using ChatGPT to generate some nonsense - don't do that again) without turning the topic to Jews? Like, I know that's your only reason for being here, but put some more effort into engaging with the actual topic. You have been told repeatedly to stop your single-issue posting, because you have become singularly obnoxious about it, and every time we ding you for it, you whine that you're being persecuted because we are protecting Jewish interests or something. When the reality is that every time you post, whether it's about Palestine or India or Japan or literally any country on Earth, surprise! It's actually about Jews.
This is just a warning, because it's been a while since your last tempban, but considering your usual pattern is to dip in, do a little Joo-posting, and dip out again when the rebuttals start piling up, I am warning you that this cycle is tiresome and will not continue. Everyone has their causes and their hobbyhorses and their topics of greatest interest to them, but most regulars can at least talk about more than one thing, and not insert their obsession into every single thread.
This warning doesn't make any sense, previously you all made the standard for the "single-issue posting" rule by looking through the first page of someone's comments, and if they were all about one topic they have broken the rule. I've been posting about a bunch of different issues, I am not single issue posting.
Jews are relevant to this discussion because we are discussing the reaction of Westerners to a new type of Immigrant. There are parallels between Indian and Jewish behavior and significant differences, which are relevant in a discussion about racist backlash to the immigration of that group to the West.
It seems like you've dropped the pretense of "single-issue posting" now and you just don't want me to talk about Jews, even in a comment where it's a point of comparison with another immigrant group. I am not single-issue posting, this is terrible moderation.
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Whether it's "true and accurate" is likely to depend on how representative the events in the film are of what's actually going on. You can easily cherry pick misleading examples of bad things in a mostly good country. On the other hand, you can pick things to give an accurate impression of a bad country. And both of those are going to look pretty similar in a video.
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I think the idea of showing the west what some places are really like is important and ultimately red-pilling simply because the regular media only shows certain aspects of the countries we’re importing migrants from and only generally the positive. The South Americans of media are poor people who just want to be like us. They don’t talk about the drug gangs and the corruption and the murders. They don’t talk about the poverty, the lack of education, or the strange cults (santissima muerte for example). Undoubtedly this is true of MENA and the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia as well.
I think honestly if we saw the end results of a lot of our “degeneracy” caused by our lax approach to education, productivity, permissive social norms, and embrace of sexual deviance we’d be much less okay with normalization of that kind of thing. Most of this is likewise hidden and we’re stuck trying to keep the lights on for the civilization with people less and less inclined towards doing the kinds of self control and work required to keep it all running, let alone building a future.
It's a peculiar form of shelteredness that I shouldn't fall victim to (since I'm the only member of this generation of my family who remembers living in an absolutely dysfunctional country) and yet do : this belief that what happens over there can't happen in America/the West.
Maybe thats why some of the disorder-promoting unforced errors annoy me so much.
I suppose, if you're pro-migration and define yourself against the "import the Third World, become the Third World " bros it's an easy trap to fall into.
It’s easy to get blinded to anything you don’t see on the daily. We’re becoming a low trust society without thinking about it because at least in the beginning, most of the rot is far enough away from the people who matter that they can afford to ignore them and simply not show people the problem. For the last 60 years or more there have been areas of America where people of means were urged to not go for safety. And for the last 30, we’ve been promoting sexual deviance on a scale that’s not really been seen before and now it’s creating insane results of kids being super sexualized at young ages, being so convinced they’re trans that they (enabled by the school system) are adopting new genders and being lead down the path to major surgeries that they can’t possibly understand well enough to consent to. We’ve promoted self esteem to the point that people no longer feel the need to improve themselves in any way. That’s before adding immigrants from places where they’re much farther down various paths to degenerate behavior or outright barbarism.
And I think a lot of people are noticing it a lot more simply because of the results of a low trust society invading their suburban enclaves. Now their stores are locking up expensive items because “Thou shalt not steal” is no longer an expected norm of behavior. Some of it is imported with immigrants, some of it is the rot of civilizational decline and the loss of norms that go along with it. But if you really want to get a good feel for just how close the frog is to boiling, go look at videos of city streets in any city in 1900 and the same streets in 2024. Philadelphia used to be a great place to live and you could walk the streets without fear. Now those same streets are boarded up and filled with fentanyl zombies and open air drug markets while the authorities say they can do nothing but distribute Narcan and clean needles. It’s getting worse, and while I don’t think third world immigrants are helping, I’m much more concerned at the moment with helping people to rediscover the pro-civilization memes that we used to take for granted.
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I’ve seen the whole thing. Like many male millennials, I discovered the “shocking, extreme, gory, etc.” parts of the internet — Rotten.com and the like — when I was in middle school, so I’ve developed a fairly strong stomach for this type of content.
Like everything Kulak posts, his description of the film and its significance is bombastically overstated, emotionally overwrought, but with a kernel of truth. The film does indeed make a persuasive case that there is a lot of fucked-up stuff going on in India. The only part that I found tough to watch was the part where people are literally eating shit, but obviously there’s plenty in there to trigger nearly anyone’s distress. The lower-caste people of the subcontinent really do seem to be profoundly dysfunctional and unpleasant, and there’s ample footage of their problems to cherry-pick and compile into a worthy propaganda reel.
My mother and father traveled to the subcontinent on their honeymoon, and my mother found it a fairly distressing place. She’s spoken about the leering behavior of the men on the trains, how she felt as though at any moment they might begin pawing at her like a pack of hyenas surrounding a dying elephant. She complained about the shocking poverty she saw, the overall levels of filth, and the several times she witnessed people openly shitting in public areas. This was in the very early 90’s, so presumably some things about the country have improved since then. The footage in the film appears, based on video quality, to mostly be filmed more recently than that, though, so clearly many of the problems have not gone away.
I also want to take a road trip through India at some point — mostly to visit ancient architectural sites, and also to see some of the more modern architectural delights bequeathed on the country by British administrators — but I know I’m going to have to carefully plan my itinerary to maximally avoid exposure to the grosser aspects of the place. Maybe I’ll have more objective anecdotes to convey here once I’ve done so. It’s certainly not the worst country on Earth, if for no other reason than it still contains the remnants of a legacy of magisterial glory from its past, and enough intelligent and clear-eyed individuals who have so far committed themselves to preserving it. If they start blowing up Mughal and Zoroastrian monuments out of some revisionist Hindu nationalist vendetta, then I’d be willing to comfortably call it a contender for the worst.
agree. I find it over-the-top, but I'm still kind of glad it exists. I've lost the plasticity-of-mind to "go there" anymore.
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I was hoping to get your feedback @mrvanillasky as I was aware you live in India and have criticisms thereof.
My sense, and I think something Kulak tries to say in his review is that the film is aggressively agit-prop, the AI prompt-maker "Thames" is actively trying to make something racist. Yet another reason I will avoid the film. Still...sometimes there's signal in the noise.
American far-right dunking on Indian far-right? to what end? "We're the true Aryan race!" kind of stuff? I would agree that this would appeal only to 4-chan-types--I can't imagine anyone I know on the Left watching this, let alone even hearing about it. The problem is that as much as everyone wants to put 4-chan in the garbage, it's got lasting power and some of the stuff on there become common knowledge 10 years later. As a "normie" it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
One thing I'm really interested in is the 'big picture.' It's been pretty clear to me since the 90's that American culture and IQ have been dropping like a stone in the Mariana Trench. At 50 I have the perspective to see how much worse things are at a baseline level. Is India just the destination for any human culture that doesn't have perpetual warfare, slavery, famine, etc.? Is there any solution that doesn't require a "Final Solution", i.e. genocide? Do Indians have any sense that the situation can be repaired? I presume a leftist POV would be that education and female empowerment will reduce birth rates and boost the lower caste. The right..I don't know, they seem fine with dehumanizing the low-caste/class and forcibly sterilizing them. One can have empathy but what's the right amount necessary to fix the problem of human devolution?
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Why Sikh? Do they not have the same issues as Hindu Indians?
The Sikhs are generally quite unhappy towards both Hindus and the concept of India as a nation. I've met diaspora Sikhs in Australia and a complaint that regularly comes up is that at partition, the British gave the Hindus a nation, and they gave the Muslims a nation, but the Sikhs were screwed out of one, and Sikhs view themselves as just as important and respectable as Hindus or Muslims.
As such, Sikh separatism has been ongoing since before independence, and has at times led to insurgent or terrorist movements. The Sikhs have a strong internal feeling that they are not the same as Hindus or Muslims, and the more that Indian nationalism comes to be identified with Hindu nationalism, as it is at the moment, the alienated the Sikhs feel.
I would be entirely unsurprised to find some diaspora Sikh on the internet engaged in vicious anti-Indian ranting.
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My impression of the actual truth of the matter is that India is very much a third world country, or at least big parts of it are, but unlike Congo or Afghanistan it’s also part of the global system. We can’t stop information about third world behavior in the subcontinent from leaking out the way we do for Afghanistan without even really trying.
That documentary may be an effective way of putting this information into broader salience in first worlder’s minds, but ultimately third world behavior is simply off putting and disturbing to people used to civilized first world societies.
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I think Kulak had posted that here on the Motte too, and given that I have a rather high threshold for discomfort, I sat and watched through most of it. I'm going off memory, because it's definitely not worth watching a second time.
The short answer is: It's full of shit. Pun perhaps intended.
You're being treated to a lowlight reel lovingly amassed by 4chan of all the wretchedness and misery a poor nation of 1.4 billion people has to offer. Did the incidents depicted happen? I expect so, it's not trivial at all to deepfake all of that. I expect that budget was blown on free ElevenLabs credit.
It is however, not remotely representative of a single human's existence in the subcontinent. Or what you might observe passing through. It's as honest as compiling reels of SF fent addicts drowning in their own feces and triumphantly depicting it as an accurate representation of Americana as a whole.
For fuck's sake. I am often the first to criticize India, and am bearish on its future. That doesn't mean the country is a literal cesspit. It's a highly diverse, unequal nation where billion dollar privately owned skyscrapers tower over slums. The majority of Indians lead a difficult, but reasonably optimistic life, one that wouldn't strike a Westerner as being devoid of experiences worth living. We're poorer, we live in a corrupt and polluted land, we've got funny accents and an Eternal September to end all the rest when internet access became cheaper than bottled water. We're not savages, not en-mass.
No.
No when it's 4chan writing the script.
I can assure you that I have spent the majority of my life in the country having seen precisely zero gang rapes or public sexual assault (if someone got their ass pinched in front of me, I've yet to notice). The number of times I've seen someone defecate in public is a number between 1 and 3, and that's a conservative number because I can't rule out never having seen it. Let he in the West who has never seen evidence of human feces on the street cast the first stone.
The majority of Indians, even Hindus, have no truck with the consumption of cow feces and urine. They're fucking weirdos to the rest of us.
Let us be thankful that this particular example certainly doesn't.
If it's not obvious, it isn't that bad. I might be upper middle-class, but I'm not blind, and have used my fair share of public transport and gone out into the boonies and slums on many an occasion. It's not a post-apocalyptic movie out there, it's just dirty and congested.
Leave aside power-washing, unless you're using a backed up septic tank as your water source, you can't ridicule the country this badly.
I'm reasonably certain that even the terminally online would forget its existence in a week.
"Only a fool would take anything posted on 4chan as a fact".
Eh, probably not? What's the West supposed to do, tactical airstrike us with bunker-buster portapotties? India is dysfunctional in a rather coup-complete way, or perhaps AGI-complete.
Foreign aid is unlikely to fix our actual issues. Political pressure is of dubious utility, though like SF miraculously divesting itself of the homeless when Xi paid a visit, some foreign scrutiny can't hurt. Unless the West is willing to invade and annex a country where the average person doesn't have an utterly miserable life, what's to be done? We're not North Korea.
In a slower world, we would slowly keep rising up the ranks till we were comfortably middle-income. It seems unlikely events will play out that way.
Call me self-serving and biased if you will, but the kindest thing the more fortunate denizens of the West can do is let some of us on the raft. Selectively, with skilled immigrants first and foremost, I don't ask for charity. Indians Not In India are much luckier Indians on the whole. Fuck brain-drain, if the country wants to keep us, it better make it worth our time to stay. And a non-negligible proportion of those who could trivially leave, don't.
At the very least, I attempt to be a decent denizen of where I'm at. No street-shitting for me, though I can cop guilty to taking a leak on someone's fence at the dead of night after dragging myself home, subsequent to crawling more pubs than was good for me. An honest Scottish pastime, someone gift me a kilt already.
God bless you sir!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! It seems to mostly fit my priors.
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This was my first reaction too. It's got a bit of a Cormac McCarthy problem of the "gritty realism" of history consisting of the worst things anyone ever had happen to them.
Europe seems to have a far more common relationship with public urination than the United States. A Singaporean friend told me he was sure he'd be arrested for that back home. Americans generally try to find a side street or hide behind somebody. Spaniards just find a storm drain.
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I remember it was posted here a while back, and I think my response is still what it was back then - that misleading vivedness remains a fallacy. I knew long before this film that it would be possible to find an hour or two of footage of Indians behaving disgustingly. I am pretty sure that's true for every nationality on Earth. So in that sense the film offers no new information at all and I should not update based on it.
I'm not sure you're going to find may vids of Americans eating cow dung...maybe as a rare college prank?
I think the question "is it true for every nationality on Earth," is sort of the point. I'm less certain it is. I think India has special characteristics like, 1.2 billion people with an even larger gap in wealth than anywhere in the West. This opens the door for a broader range of pathological behavior--so in that sense, maybe if we all had a massive underclass we'd be eating poop too?
I think "should I update" is precisely the question. I wouldn't say I've got a high opinion of India, more true to say I think of it very little. But if India isn't "the Worst Country on earth" what is? Kulak sort of defends Africa as equally as poor but not as environmentally degraded or mad.
Anyway, I think there's definitely some bullshit racism going on in this video/review but there also is an important question about what elevates humanity vs. the depths to which we might sink: Eloi vs. Morlocks. For me it raises a longstanding and fundamental concern about the overwhelming power of human depravity, something I've worried about since I was a kid and 2 Live Crew was the hot thing.
The equivalent looney religious person comparison would be the subset of American Pentecostals waving around venomous snakes while speaking in tongues.
"This is what Americans think church is‽" Nope. Just a fringe few who we also think are wacky. But there's hundreds of millions of us, so there's plenty of wacky to fill a documentary of cherry picked crazed Americans.
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Sam Altman Is Super Excited for a Great 2025
Link to blog post
Yesterday, Sam Altman posted this short personal blog post. The material takeaway is summarized in this paragraph;
"AGI is right around the corner. Seriously, we mean it this time." Okay, I'll believe it when I see it and if that means I'm not worried enough about "alignment" and "safety" that's fine. Our robot overlord will smile upon me or he wont.
Sam's explicit assertion here will be debated on all the normal forms and tweet ecosystems. Thought pieces will be written by breathless techno-bros, techno-phobes, and all others. LessWrong is going to get out the Navel Gazer 6000.
None of that is particular alarming to me.
What is; the first 2/3rds of Sam's blog post.
This is because it is an amazing amalgam of personal-corpo speak that is straight out of a self-congratulatory Linkedin post. Here are some highlights (lowlights?);
This three were particularly triggering for me:
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing. It's "Everyone love everyone", "we're all in this together" , "we made mistakes but that's okay because we care about one another."
This is exactly the kind of corpo-speak that both preceeds and follows a massive round of brutal layoffs based on the cold equations of a balance sheet. Or some sort of change in service to customers that is objectively absolutely worse. I am deeply surprised that it seems Sam has truly adopted this at his most personal level. This was not a sanitized press release from OpenAI, but something he posted on what appears to be his personal blog. Sure, many personal blogs become just as milquetoast as corporate press releases if/when a person gets famous enough, but, in the tech world, a personal blog or twitter account is usually the last bastion for, you know, actual real human style communication.
I had another post a few months ago about OpenAI. One of the things that came out of the comments was a sort of "verified rumor" that Sam Altman is a pure techno-accelerationist but without any sort of moral, theological, or virtuous framework. He simply wants to speedrun to the singularity because humans are kind of "whatever" in his eyes. This blog post, to me, provides some more evidence in favor of that. He's using the universal language of "nice to everybody" which is recognized - correctly - as the sound the big machine makes right before it thrashes you. This follows a pattern. OpenAI was a non-profit until it wasn't. Mr. Altman went to congress in 2023 to beg for totally not-regulatory capture for his own company but for, like, you know the good of everyone.
The technical merits and viability of AGI aside, the culture war angle here is that while many other groups are having meaningful open discussion about the future of economic, political, and social life with AIs/AGIs, Altman (and a few others like him) are using the cloaked, closed, and misleading language that has become the preferred dialect of the PMC. As I said, it is especially abundant right before they screw you over.
He is a startup founder with a record high burnrate with a product that isn't good enough to be a commercial product. He has to bring in lots of customers promising it will soon be better. He wants to speedrun to a point in which he can actually generate revenue that can cover his costs.
Chatgpt is not good enough to replace developers, lawyers or any other qualified profession. It is an alternative to google without the ability to insert advertising. Github co-pilot isn't great for overall productivity.
Chatgpt is facing scaling laws. The bigger the model the more power it draws. The size of the model required to be useful is too large for today's hardware and power costs. They can no longer make a model orders of magnitude larger. The datasets are too large to fine tune manually.
Sam Altman is pretty much begging for a nuclear reactor and enough GPUs to swallow all that juice.
We'll see I guess. DeepSeek trained a GPT-4 level AI for $6 million (admittedly employing existing LLMs). They have also made huge efficiency gains in inference, charging just $0.14 per million tokens as compared to $3 per million output tokens with a comparable Claude model.
Software is becoming more efficient much more quickly than hardware. We might not need those terawatt scale data centers until after AGI is achieved.
On a theoretical level, absent some sort of woo about quantum computation in the human brain, there's no reason why silicon shouldn’t be vastly superior to synapses eventually.
I think the phrase "quantum woo" vastly understates the potential impact of quantum computing on machine learning. The quantum algorithm zoo, for example, lists a number of quantum machine learning algorithms. Several of these get exponential speed up from classical algorithms, but even a quadratic speedup of grover's algorithm would be game changing at the scale frontier models operate on.
I agree that most normie use of quantum in the brain is "woo". And I also agree that it's not been established that the brain relies on any quantum effects. But there is actual legitimate research in these directions and it seems wrong to offhandedly dismiss it.
Viable quantum computing dropping today (or even in the next decade or two) would also break almost all extant (asymmetric) cryptography. Yeah, NIST just recently published specs for post-quantum crypto, but I expect it'll be a decade before those are universally supported. Maybe less if it happens: SSL everywhere happened fairly fast, but became a real priority almost overnight. But if quantum were something any well-founded startup could do, nation-state actors could throw some impressive wrenches into any secure networks for a while.
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I'm a huge DeepSeek fan so will clarify.
Those are their own LLMs, and they collectively bump that up to no more than $15M, most likely (we do not yet know the costs of R1 or anything about it, will take a few more weeks; V2.5 is ≈2.2M hours).
0.14/1M input, 0.24/1M output vs $3/$15, to be clear. There are nuances like 0.014 for 1M input in the case of cache hits, opt-in paid caching on Anthropic, and the price hike to come in February.
But crucially, they've published model and paper. This is most likely done because they assume top players already know all these techniques, or are close but work on another set that'll yield the same effect.
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I recently asked it to define "Chinook Trough" and it told me directly that nothing of the sort exists. When I explained that it does in fact exist (I spent too much time staring at the skymap over the Pacific) it changed tunes, apologized, and gave me a relatively clear definition. I only mention this as usually ChatGPT has been good at this sort of straight explanation query.
That's weird. Usually LLMs have exactly the opposite problem. I would find them infinitely more useful if the worst case output was "I've never heard of that" rather than confident-but-wrong hallucinations. I guess "that doesn't exist" is still in confident-but-wrong territory, but it's not the usual "yes, and" improv ad-libbing I see.
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Also, OpenAI had to raise prices to keep themselves from losing money on ChatGPT.
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I'd mostly agree.
It personally sets my teeth on edge to read something that clearly wants to inspire strong emotions in the reader or perhaps persuade them of something but doesn't actually speak of anything that is happening to be excited about.
Its the difference between saying "We've received and analyzed the test results which have provided us with an unparalleled depth of understanding regarding the intricate nuances of your overall health and physiological dynamics. The insights gained from this process are both illuminating and inspiring, offering an exciting roadmap for continued progress and optimization. We are deeply committed to partnering with you on this transformative journey, leveraging future interactions to refine our approach, enhance the granularity of our feedback, and will ensure you remain in top condition in the coming decades!"
(ironically, I used ChatGPT to generate the most corpo-speak version of that sentence possible)
vs. "The test came back negative. You're cancer free, congrats!"
The first just desperately wants you to feel good without delivering the information you actually would like to hear that would make you happy. The second actually gives you the reason to be happy because there's a tangible fact about the world that is 'good,' and you just needed to hear it said.
I also note that there are no concrete examples of how their products have improved productivity for any companies already. Either the examples they have are underwhelming or maybe they aren't allowed to discuss it? Otherwise why not talk about tangible achievements?
I'm increasingly annoyed when the AI 'insiders' will speak reverently about how they're instantiating a Godhead that will relieve us of all the miserable burdens of our mortal existence in the near future, but will get hugely cagey about how that's actually being done or why we can trust them do to his correctly. They talk about things in religious/spiritual terms when telling us what the future holds, but hew to corpo-speak and remain businesslike when asked about present status.
It reads like a particularly opaque sort of intentional hype cycle that might be mostly designed to inspire us to transfer tons of wealth to them before AI progress stalls out for a while.
Ironically, this would also describe the writing of AI/LLMs themselves when you prompt them to show any sort of character or express a "personal" opinion. At this rate Sam could get replaced by an actual AI halfway through the singularity and literally nobody would notice.
If I had to guess they feel the
AGIcompetition, current Claude is near-strictly better already and the recent Deepseek V3 seems quite close while being orders of magnitude cheaper (epistemic status: haven't tested much yet). If I had no big-dick reveals in the pipeline I'd probably look to cut and run too.It does, but at least with some prompt engineering you can get them to distill down to the actual informational content.
Perhaps that's the joke. This is him asking the latest GPT model to spit out his annual report and see if anybody calls him on it.
I already got suspicious when they released SORA to the wild, which is an impressive model but is now arriving late to the table in terms of publicly-available video generation capabilities.
OpenAI had what seemed like a 'comfortable' lead for about a year there, but if progress had remained exponential or even linear from the past models they should be running away with the game. Instead the other close competitors seem to be chomping steadily away at their lunch.
"When you see exponential, think logistic" seems to remain a useful rule-of-thumb. (I'm not sure of the source; I find only me when I search but I know I didn't originate it)
Yep. I may be wrong but I seem to recall that there was a brief period of time where a lot of folks in the space did genuinely think improvements would continue to follow the exponential curve even if individual jumps between new models were a little smaller.
Or at least were willing to hype it that way. I'm prepared to be corrected if my memory is faulty there.
There was certainly a 'vibe' that we might have activated the fast takeoff scenario.
For what it's worth, this is still the vibe, indeed more than ever, and I do not understand what was the change you're implying you have noticed. After o3, the consensus of all top lab researchers seems to be "welp we're having superintelligence in under 5 years".
I guess I'd call it a bifurcation.
I read the material that suggests all the pieces are in place to achieve superintelligence.
But I'm also reading reports that the most recent training runs are seeing diminishing returns. So making the models BIGGER isn't giving the same results.
Which certainly explains why OpenAI hasn't pushed ChatGPT5 out the door, if it can't demonstrate as significant an improvement as 3-4 was.
So improvements and tweaks to existing models are giving us gains in the meantime, it isn't very clear to me where the quantum leap that will enable true AGI/Superintelligence is hiding. Which is more a me issue, I'm certainly not an insider. I'm just seeing two sides, those who think moar compute is good enough, and those who think its going to take some tricky engineering.
And Altman sure isn't telling us what he's seeing. So my question is whether he's playing cards close to the vest to avoid popping the hype bubble or because he really thinks he's going to blow us away with the next product. Possibly blow us away in the most literal meaning of the word.
With the advent of inference scaling (o1 etc), those breathless articles about diminishing returns to classical pretraining are about diminishing returns to horse nutrition.
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Maybe O'Reilly's "It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal"? https://web.archive.org/web/20240114184321/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/sigmoidal-not-exponential.html
I feel like I've seen your snappier version elsewhere, though. Maybe it's an echo of "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."
The tricky bit seems to be that it's very difficult to know where you're on on a logistic curve until you're past the midpoint. Though with the limits of pre-training people started running into last year, the claim that we're on still clearly on the left side is more tenuous.
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As much as it is super important that we must never diagnose someone with a psychological condition without first paying a licensed psychologist, I've believed for a long time that Altman is a sociopath. I think this is further evidence.
Nobody in AI spaces talks like this, and he is very much "hiding his power level" in order to try to manipulate the midwits who run our country. He's done it before too. Altman recognizes that his best bet of becoming god-emperor, or whatever it is he wants, rests on having the US government make competition illegal. DeepSeek recently trained a near competitor for 6 million dollars (allegedly). The advantage that OpenAI has over its many competitors is precarious, and AI is unlikely to take off fast enough for one company to dominate.
But I'm less pessimistic than you about the possibility of near-term ASI. I think it's probable that AGI/ASI is less than 10 years away. The critics increasingly resemble the critics of evolution, worshiping the "god of the gaps" for the increasingly small things that AI can't do. The progress in the last year alone has been staggering.
What's currently stopping AI from contributing to improvements in AI tech, do you think?
Nothing. AI is already in the loop. Over time the percentage of code written by AI will increase until it is doing essentially all the important work.
Note that my prediction is >50% chance over 10 years so that's a relatively long timeline.
Here's what a short timeline looks like.
Yes and no. I use AI when coding AI, but it’s ultimately a souped-up StackExchange. It presents known information in more useable form. Right now, I wouldn’t say it’s contributing to improvements in AI tech in any meaningful way.
If it was, then AGI would already be here. Nobody is making that claim. I'm certainly not.
But if it makes existing human researchers 10% more efficient, then it's making a difference. Next year, 20%. Then 50%, 100%, etc... until human researchers are no longer necessary.
What I mean is, it’s a difference in kind rather than degree. If you have an AI that can code anything that’s been coded before with increasing speed and correctness, that will make human researchers more efficient but will never obviate the need for human researchers. For the same reason, it cannot foom, because increasing experiment speed is important but human ingenuity is still the bottleneck.
Code is a nearly solved problem, and I regularly see the leading models create correct output on the first try for things that haven't existed before, so long as you give them a reasonable spec.
That "reasonable spec" bit is a pretty big caveat, but the coding portion can be fully automated even today.
But producing ‘novel’ standard code is essentially interpolation in a very densely populated area of data. Research, by definition really, is extrapolation of thought into unpopulated space and as far as I’m aware LLMs can’t really do it.
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I don't think hobbiests and H1Bs using ChatGPT as a substitute for substack really counts as "AI is already in the loop"
Im also skeptical that a meaningful percentage if any of the code being written by AI constitutes "important work", though who knows some people get really into thier Gacha Games.
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I find it very unlikely that Altman wants money. He may want power, but I don’t think he’s truly driven by wanting to rule the world, at least that’s my impression from people who have known him. I think, like the first post suggests, he’s just gunning for the singularity and fuck the consequences. In a way, I respect it. Come what may, I’d rather we burn out in a glorious immolation led by a successor intelligence than in the mundanity of a GoF’d smallpox accidentally released by a Chinese lab or in nuclear MAD built on 1950s tech. We’re better than that, at least.
Immolation would be great, we all dream of a quick extinction for our children. But we're going to get Allied Mastercomputer - deep down you know it.
The nice thing about building AI via training on human text is that it increases the odds that the resulting superintelligence will care too much about humanity to just let us die.
The scary thing about building AI via training on human text is that it increases the odds that the resulting superintelligence will care too much about humanity to just let us die.
On one hand we can create AM with all the baggage that that entails, on the other we could create Mother from the movie I am Mother. I honestly hope for the second one, as it will bring a better humanity at least.
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Altman is, first and formost, a bullshit artist. I dont think he's "hiding his power level" as much as he's just trying to hustle credulous VCs and substack readers for influence, attention, and funding.
As I pointed out the last time Altman came up as a topic, there are legitimate applications for LLMs that OpenAI is well positioned to deliver (and make bundles of money on in the process) but when it comes to pushing the boundaries of machine learning and perhaps developing true AGI Sam Altman is not that guy, and OpenAI (at least in it's current form) is not that company.
There are serious limitations to OpenAI's model that are not going to be solved by throwing more petaflops and training data at the problem. The latter especially as the training data become increasingly poluted with OpenAI's own output.
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Recent concerns about an AI Winter (just prior to o1) have been greatly exaggerated. That being said, I expect AGI to come somewhere between 2025-2033 (70% CI) and by 2029 (50% CI) despite everything Altman says.
The man can't be trusted farther than you can throw him. Leaving aside his tone in this blog post that also raises my hackles (especially the section regarding his coup and counter-coup, which is an excellent example of using Many Words to say Nothing), he's a born politician with no clear convictions who seems particularly adept at outmaneuvering sincere nerds.
Zvi, over at Lesswrong, has quite a few posts on Sam's duplicity and insincerity, but anyone with eyes can see the facts on the ground regarding his pivot with OAI, going from an open-source non-profit to uh.. whatever it is now (Microsoft's bitch).
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I don't think it makes sense to treat Altman as a PMC apparatchik, though I agree that the blog post is written in that dialect. He just doesn't want to scare the hoes, the hoes here being normie investors and consumers excited about being able to cheat on their homework easier. That dialect is meant to be comforting and create a sense of normalcy.
One thing to understand about the folks at OpenAI etc is that they've thoroughly drank the Kool-Aid. Any communication coming from them has to be assumed as adversarial, and looking for honesty about intention or scope, if that honesty would interfere with achieving that goal, is a fool's errand.
Phrasing it as the precursor to the "screw you over" step is kind of right, but potentially misleading. Altman isn't hoping for the conventional "take your money before riding off into the sunset laughing at the rube" kind of screwing; he's thinking about dominating the light cone and paperclipping it with his values.
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Matt Levine's latest reminds us that there is no objective definition of AGI, but that "deciding" that they've achieved AGI allows them to trigger certain contractual provisions. So, on the one hand, such talk can be to pump up the hype chain... but it could also be laying groundwork and making threats for hardball negotiation.
If you read that closely, Microsoft was careful - OpenAI can't declare AGI until they've returned $100bil to them from profits.
My read of the text was not that. There is an economic interest in OpenAI and a commercial deal. The economic interest is just that whatever happens, AGI or not, Microsoft makes up to ~$100B if OpenAI makes a bunch of money. The commercial deal ends when OpenAI "decides" that they've reach AGI.
Frankly, it would even be weirder if it was the other way around. People still kind of think that "achieving AGI" is some sort of factual state of affairs, even if it's ill-defined. It sort of doesn't make sense to define AGI in terms of revenue/profit. I mean, I guess someone could, but I don't think that's what they've done here.
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Summary of the Lex Fridman-President Zelensky interview
https://youtube.com/watch?v=u321m25rKXc&t=1142s
This interview has attracted a lot of controversy in the weeks leading up to it, as Fridman has said that he wanted to conduct the interview in Russian, which they both speak fluently. Zelensky did not want to conduct the interview in Russian for symbolic reasons that are probably quite easy to understand. In the lead up of the interview, Fridman has a 10 minute introduction in which he tries to justify why wanted to speak Russian, and then the first ten minutes of the real interview is him trying to convince Zelensky. His main argument is that if Zelensky speaks Russian, an interpreter would not be needed, and more of Zelensky's wit and dynamism would come through, and that there wouldn't be a 2-3 second delay in their communication. Fridman even made a warning popup saying "2-3 second delay!" when Zelensky began speaking Ukrainian and it was being interpreted. I've only seen one other Lex Fridman interview, with Milei, but there were no such warnings and disclaimers despite how it was live interpreted between Spanish and English. Zelensky does say he can explain some concepts in Russian if Fridman wants clarification but refuses to do the interview in general in Russian. Zelensky says he's also fine if Fridman speaks in Russian the whole time or switches between Russian and English. Also Fridman does understand a bit of Ukrainian himself but is not fluent.
Everyone I've seen, including Zelensky and myself, has seemed rather confused/upset by Fridman's very strong desire to do the interview in Russian, since the symbolic concerns seem to obviously outweigh those. Especially since using an interpreter is not really a big deal. Especially for a Lex Fridman interview, his interviews are known for him getting really excellent guests, but he just asks them a few vague guests and do 95% of the communicating themselves. There's little benefit to Fridman understanding Zelensky slightly better when all the listener's are going to get it dubbed anyway. Adding more fire to people thinking Fridman is a Russian sympathizer, in his introduction he goes out of his way to emphasize the nuance of the conflict and that he just wants peace for both sides. Many people would call the Russia-Ukraine war a fairly one sided war of aggression by Russia where peace could be achieved whenever Russia decided to withdraw from Ukrainian borders.
Points:
In general, I got the impression Zelensky was trying hard to flatter the people he needed too and put Ukraine in the best possible light. Not that I can blame him, given his position. Lex Fridman seemed really weird in how he seemed very sympathetic to Russia but not outright saying that, despite how obvious it was.
It’s not clear to me at all why these “symbolic concerns” should “obviously” outweigh the fairly straightforward practical reasons why an interview conducted in a language both participants speak fluently would be more intimate, more personable, and less stilted than one conducted via interpreters. And in this situation reinforces one of the central arguments of the Russian-sympathetic side; having Zelenskyy conduct the interview in the language he grew up speaking would inspire uncomfortable questions about why he grew up speaking Russian, despite growing up in Ukraine (supposedly a nation with deep historical pride and cultural distinctiveness), and why (as I understand it) he only felt compelled to become fluent in Ukrainian as an adult.
I don’t have a strong dog in the Ukraine-Russia fight, and I have assiduously avoided wading into previous Motte discussions of the conflict, which have shocked me with their low quality, contentiousness, and total lack of intellectual charity. I’m just pointing out how Zelenskyy’s “symbolic” posture in this interview could be fairly described as a method of maintaining the polite fiction — Ukraine has always been culturally distinguishable from Russia, Ukrainian cities don’t have any deep Russian history, Russianness has always been imposed upon Ukraine, etc. — which the larger global community has been asked to respect since the invasion began. I can understand why he’s doing it, but can you understand why it doesn’t strike neutral observers as “weird” for Fridman to want to put aside that artifice for the sake of what he hoped would be an incisive interview?
I think you nailed it with why does Zelensky speak Russian first?
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine. Speaking in Russian does have some symbolism, and the symbolism is “I’m not your enemy”. Refusing to even speak the language of the people you are supposedly fighting a war over certainly signals something.
Imagine Mexico invaded the US because El Paso, TX votes to secede from the US and rejoin Mexico.
What would be the symbolism if the Governor of Texas, in this thought experiment, spoke Spanish first, but refused to talk to the people in El Paso in that language, but instead insisted that he and by extension they, all spoke English.
Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.
If these Ukrainian people are so intent on fighting to keep control of the Donbas and Crimea, then why the need for conscription?
If he gives them up for nothing, the likelihood is he’ll be overthrown and killed.
So what's the plan? Just keep the war going until there's nobody left to kill him?
If I am in his position, the plan will be to keep the war going, stay in power as long as posible using the war til I die
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(1) Fight until the army collapses
(2) Cultivate stab-in-the-back myth that the war was eminently winnable if Ukraine had gotten just gotten more aid and gotten it faster
(3) Flee to a friendly country
I mean I don’t blame the guy, if he didn’t do it the hardliners would shoot him in the head and get someone who would.
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Give them up for something. EU membership and sufficient security guarantees, and put the contested territories in legal limbo so the god Terminus doesn't set down his lines.
The positive path forward for Ukraine goes through the EU, a Poland type trajectory economically, and perhaps using their vast store of veterans in those Cossack fantasies they have sometimes for cash and political capital.
If in 20 years Ukraine looks like Poland and Russia looks like Russia, contested provinces and people will be trying to join Ukraine.
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Why believe that, when the disputed territories are disputed on the basis of Russian fiat beyond any sort of linguistic borderline and an ethnic dispute that resolved to 'we deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation, you are misled russians'?
And previous claims that Russia had no territorial disputes were later reversed?
And that war-start propaganda- including the pre-emptive victory lap way- identified Kiev itself in the realm of disputed/contested (vis-a-vis the weath) and mocked anyone for thinking Kiev wasn't part of the Russian claim?
The war did not start over a dispute over border territories. The war started as an attempt to take over the country in it's entirely. All of Ukraine is 'disputed territory,' it's just that much of the disputed territory is beyond Russia's military-industrial capacity to take.
This raises a more interesting question: is it better to die as a Ukrainian or to live as a Russian? Suppose Zelensky decided to capitulate unconditionally on the 25th of February. How many people would Russian occupying forces have killed? Right now the documented deaths stand at 68+ thousand.
All of them, since they'd die as russian also because everyone dies regardless. Same as how every Ukrainian would have still died if Russia didn't invade at all. Since net death over time is the same, you can either quibble on the timeliness or you can quibble on the nature, but trying to do both is often smuggling a conclusion. 'Is it better to die a Russian or die a Ukrainian' would be a more like-to-like framing, let alone 'Is it better to die killing for Russia or die killing a Russian.'
As far as nature goes, the Tyrant's Peace dilemma has always been a false dilemma, because submission doesn't escape the fate supposedly avoided (death), and the submission to the tyrant entails the consequence and the usual depravities of being used by the tyrant to fight the next war, which repeats the same dilemma except the conscript is on the other side fighting for rather than against the warmonger.
LNR and DNR were being bled white even before the war, and Putin's revanchist ambitions went well beyond Ukraine. It's not like Ukrainian human dignity mattered any more than the Russians Putin has pushed into his sunk cost fallacy meat grinder. Putin's stupidity was always going to end up getting a lot of people killed, and would only grow in scale of risk if Ukraine had validated his myopia. If he had the ability to invoke the Ukrainians as his canon fodder before the Russians of Saint Petersburg and Moscow regions, he would, and we know because he did just that when he had the means.
Your stance also explains why Palestinians keep losing to Israel, but keep rejecting its (steadily worsening) peace terms.
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Any regime installed by Putin would work pretty much like the current Russian system: a few oligarchs (picked for personal loyalty, not competence) own monopolies on most resource extraction.
Generally, those states favor rather simple production processes for most of their revenue where some goon can be put in charge, not complicated ones where they depend on some nerds with questionable loyalty. Competitive private enterprise is only tolerated while it is too small to form a power base.
Now, I will grant you that Ukraine certainly had its share of oligarchs as well, but they were at least in the process of transitioning out of a kleptocratic regime. If they become a puppet state of Putin in the way Belarus is, they will be stuck in that state for the foreseeable future, which will leave most of the population poor. This has some QALY costs.
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In such a scenario, what makes you think Putin would either respect the ceasefire (see point 7 in the OP) or not just use the time to prepare and re-arm for another invasion?
Where does this logic lead you other than genocide of the Russian people and complete destruction of Russia as a nation?
This is the exact logic that the US has used for every ridiculous war we've gotten into for the last 70 years.
You can stop a nation from invading its neighbors without committing genocide and destroying the nation. The US has also done this, for more than 70 years.
Do you sincerely believe Putin would just stop at Donbas and the Crimea, with no further designs on Ukraine or any other neighbors?
let's see
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How many other countries has he invaded since the Ukraine war began? If he had any interest in other territories, why hasn’t he tried to take them?
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It's worth pointing out that the breaking of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines did not require the genocide of thier respective peoples.
I think it's true that the Axis war machine was broken without genocide, but after the war both nations had their borders redrawn at bayonet-point, with Germany being split in two and millions of Germans forcibly relocated. Hundreds of thousands of them died and others (including civilians) were sent to forced labor camps. This policy was (in part, at least) approved by the "big three" (UK, US, USSR) during the Potsdam Conference and wasn't just something the Russians "got away with" after the Iron Curtain came down, and Western countries, including the US, UK, and France used POWs as forced labor until the late 1940s. Similarly in Japan, the Kurils were occupied by Russia with American assent and the Japanese inhabitants removed. It seems fair to say that no genocide was committed, but it might be worth remembering that what we would today call ethnic cleansing was a part of the Allied postwar strategy.
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Ummm... Maybe not the complete genocide of their peoples. But certainly the destruction of millions upon millions of civilians, the castration of their independence and self respect as nations, and a permanent pall of suspicion cast over any effort to emerge.
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A whole range of possibilities. There are choices between "give them what they want" and "we have to exterminate them all".
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And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here? You talk about Ukraine using conscripts but Putin doesn't even have the political capital for that. His first draft was limited to outlying areas and provoked a mass exodus, and he won't even consider drafting out of Moscow or other major cities. He's resorted to using North Korean mercenaries to retake occupied areas inside Russia. Doesn't Putin have an obligation to prevent the deaths of young Russian men?
Because he demands the west to spend money on him.
And why shouldn't he? His country is at stake. That's more a question to be leveled at the people who he's asking for money and not at Zelensky.
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Since 2022, Putin has been pushing for a regime change in Kiev. What he is trying to do should be familiar to any player of Paradox games, it is building an empire. If you simply appease such people, you might get a few years of peace. But sooner or later, they will come for the next slice of territory, and then people will again argue "just give them what they want to stop the fighting".
I don't give much of a damn about Donbas and certainly none about Crimea. A peace deal where Putin gets them and in return Ukraine joins NATO (so that he can't come for the next Oblast in a year) would seem preferable -- but will not happen because Putin is not willing to let Ukraine move outside his sphere of influence.
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This reminded me of a question I had: how well did Mannerheim speak Finnish?
Apparently he started seriously studying it quite late in life (i.e. at 50, when he returned to Finland from Russian active service), but most sources I've seen say that by WW2 he knew if quite well. He retained a notable Swedish accent (it's obvious to me from a clip like this), but it's generally these days just seen as a part of his mythos as the last true aristocrat in Finland.
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This certainly has been true in the western Ukraine, but I don’t think it has been true in the East. Pre-war, less than 20% of population of Donetsk Oblast spoke Ukrainian at all. Given that pretty much all Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian too, probably less than 10% of all conversations happened in Ukrainian.
If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.
Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.
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Does he? Even if he magically manages to reconquer the 2014-2022 LDNR, Ukraine has no real need to cater to them. Other Russian-speaking cities have accepted Ukrainian as the primary language even if Russian remains common. Those who can't accept that are free to pack up and leave.
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The symbolism in this case is "I am, indeed, your wayward little brother as your propaganda has been claiming all along, and only persisted in having my own language out of spite and stubbornness".
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Putin used that cultural and language similarity as an excuse to invade and kill Ukrainians. I think artificially exaggerating the cultural and language differences so Putin has less of a cassus belli and ends the war, and doesn't pursue future ones, is very valid.
Again, you’re asking everyone to just play along with these retarded polite fictions, in the belief that if everyone just converged on the right metapolitical narrative, there would no longer be any compelling material/geopolitical reason for conflict. Any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region would be well-aware of the extremely complicated cultural, linguistic, and political realignments within the patch of territory currently known as “Ukraine”. Putin’s casus belli isn’t made any more or less valid by Zelenskyy refusing to conduct an interview in a language which everybody already knows that he speaks. Nor is Ukraine’s desire to resist forceful reabsorption into the Russian Federation made any more or less justified by crafting an easily-falsifiable narrative about the proud and independent history of the Ukrainian/Ruthenian-speaking nation. None of these things are actually materially important.
We aren't discussing any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region. We're talking a podcaster and a podcast audience, who are in turn being used to shape the perceptions of an even less informed broader audience whose opinions have collective weight and impact on American policy makers decisions.
These framings are actually materially important, because the go on to shape the material inputs for the capacity to wage war.
Part of the insight 'war is politics by other means' is that the extension of policy into war also entails the inverse- politics is war by other means, because politics is what establishes policy that governs the conduct of war.
Policy may be boring, it may involve a lot of non-material elements, but it absolutely is materially important, hence why every serious power-building or power-seeking institution in the world invests non-trivial amounts of effort and thinking on information advantages. Part of information conflict is the language you choose to pursue it in- and that is a choice, because the choice itself has impacts.
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Sure, but the masses buy the first narrative someone with a modicum of credibility sells them. Find a friendly historian, find a friendly journalist, have the latter cite the former and voila: Russian was never spoken by more than 5% of the population of Ukraine, citable on wikipedia. Find a friendly linguist and friendly journalist, and you can create the West-East Slavic Languages or add Ukranian to the Western Slavic ones. Again, a single article in an Reliable Source is all that is needed for wikipedia to consider it a fact on par with the Earth being round. And since most people will not delve to discover and possible dissent, a consensus among the masses can be manufactured by a wikipedia editor, skilled in the art of wiki bureaucracy and lacking in appreciation for the truth.
Records can be destroyed, and lied about. Have a reliable source claim Zelenskyy speaks Russian at such a low-level he is unable to discuss politics live, and it will believed by the masses whos willingness to research the truth ends at wikipedia, if that.
See above.
But lets ignore the deceivers, and focus on the language nationalism. In many Slavic countries the idea of a Nation (not as a synonym for a country) includes at its heart a language which is a distinct property of the members of a nation and which is meaningfully distinct from other languages. From the Spring of Nations a crucial demand was to be allowed to speak ones native tongue, usually associated with the peasentry, in official everyday business with the state and in parliaments also. This is probably the history, particularly within the context of Austria-Hungary, Zelenskyy is much more familiar with than Americans who never had to think about their native tongue and the wider society and any possible conflicts between them. And it is not like such conflicts do not exist today: A lawmaker just a few months ago protested to make Greenlandic an official language in the Danish parliament by making a speech only in Greenlandic, and ommiting the legally demanded Danish.
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The language of a single podcast of course isn't the sole hinge on which Putin's justifications turn. But it is a small piece. I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian. And very slightly less valid if he doesn't. Putin talked about the medieval history of Ukraine and Russia being one country to Tucker for so long because that type of thing does matter to Putin, and to many other Russians.
For what it's worth, I recall literally zero episodes of anyone in my life going on about "actually Ukraine is just Russia" before the war. On my screen, people were perfectly fine having it as just a quaint almost-Russia, similar but separate, until the TV turned on the propaganda tap.
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Hard disagree. Annexations to culturally unite a people are /so/ 1930s. We don't do that any more. If Olaf Scholz was to invade Austria, which shares a lot of cultural history with Germany, that fact would not make it better or worse than an invasion of the culturally more distinct Poland.
Want to unite your people in the 2020s? Let them vote to join you, don't invade.
Tell that to Putin then, cause that's exactly what he did
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If propaganda isn't materially important why are both sides doing it?
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Pretty much every time, not just here. I haven't seen any place anywhere that isn't completely on-sides, as it were. Same for Israel/Palestine. You will never see my opinion printed on the Interwebz. All cost, no profit.
Be the change, I guess.
In my experience, the clever both-sides arguments are usually appeals to the status quo.
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These symbolic concerns are a price to pay for interviewing a serious politician who has to care about the image he presents to the world. It is entirely possible that for Zelenskyy, the interview would have become net-negative if conducted in Russian.
I suppose if you were to interview a US politician, even one in favor of cannabis legalization, they would refuse a joint during the interview, even if that would make the interview "more intimate, more personable, and less stilted". They would correctly conclude that a podcast of them being high would not play well with their voters. Likewise, Zelenskyy can not afford to look Russian.
If Friedmann is more interested in having cozy intimate interviews than having interviews with relevant statesmen, I am sure there would be no shortage of Ukrainians willing to talk with him in Russian, just like he would have no problem finding some random pothead willing to smoke a joint during the interview.
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This is negotiating- Zelenskyy doesn’t want to give up occupied territories, but he probably has to. He needs something to show for it, like security guarantees.
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My review: I also spent my Sunday afternoon listening to this. I rate my experience as a 4/10. If you're interested in listening to world leaders give a speech for 3 hours, go for it. Zelensky does share some novel anecdotes. The latter half becomes tiresome.
Lex Fridman's previous interviews (that I've seen) left a better impression. I think he takes most of the blame. Lex asks very similar questions. He "has a dream" that peace can happen if Trump, Putin, and Zelensky gets in a room. Okay, great. That's answered.
It also includes the same problems as Tucker's Putin interview. Though I would rate that one as a 7/10 for peculiarity. If a president wants to blabber, dodge, and stonewall you for 3 hour's, there's not much you can do. Unless you're a great interviewer. Then you find find a way to mine an interesting vein. For that I consider much of this interview as bloated or even wasteful.
Lex has sympathies, but he also wants to be open-minded, heterodox guy. Like Zelensky I found the "can you forgive him" phrasing juvenile and poorly designed. What was he expecting there?
For Zelensky's part, I was taken by just how direct he was in making this appearance a love letter to Trump. I would expect some flattery, but so much of his answers contained an appeal to US support-- and Trump himself. That was the goal no doubt. It was new for me to hear his (official?) position now includes the option to cede occupied territories for security guarantees for what Ukraine has left. Unless I misheard that part? Negotiations may happen in 2025. That'd be good.
From what I read, it sounds like the security guarantees would be a precondition to entering negotiations, not a bargaining chip. As in, if he enters negotiations with the security guarantees already in place, it makes his negotiating position much stronger.
I'd have to go back and listen, but I didn't understand it as a "we won't talk until" precondition. He was laying out that for negotiations to be worth anything, for anything like a ceasefire to be entertained, then meaningful security guarantees must be met. Might be saying the same thing. I came away thinking he would consider (or said he would) conceding territory for something like NATO presence. He didn't say that directly, but that was my impression.
He contextualized it with the Budapest Memorandum. So he spoke at some length about the kind of "assurances" that would not be acceptable for any form of peace to occur. Maybe he's spoken like this for awhile, but that signal alone: a suggestion lines could be frozen and and concede territory was a new thing for me to hear from him.
If his aim is to get Trump involved and on board, then seen as willing to negotiate is a precondition for that to happen. We'll see.
A lot of it was also veiled threats of what might happen if Ukraine didn't get a good enough deal. Grieving Ukrainian families might turn to terrorism against Russia. Or Ukraine might have to develop nuclear weapons (could they?).
Nuclear latency (the time taken to acquire a nuclear weapon if a blank ish cheque is given and the government says go) is low for any country with nuclear reactors. Ukraine has several, as does much of East Asia. Under a year most likely, though there would be external signs that other powers would pick up on, probably.
As a general comment, a lot of commentators seem to miss that other countries than the US/NATO have agency, and this is one ways this crops up. If the US truly throws Ukraine under the bus, as some suggest would somehow both be the moral thing to do and in the USA's own interests, both Ukraine and other non nuclear powers would need to look to their full defense within a short period. Nuclear weapons might well be a part of that, and other countries are watching too. Zelensky himself may also have limited room to resist those calls either, Ukrainians I know have settled into an awakened wrath of Kipling fame, including those actively in the conflict, there's still a lot of fight there.
"I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God." Oleksii Yizhak - who apparently was dropping rhetorical fire too.
Typically once the US becomes aware of non-nuclear armed country's latency period being actively shrunk, steps to... lengthen it again are harsh and immediate.
I suggest that Russia probably has more-than-adequate intelligence assets in Ukraine to become rapidly aware of such activities (don't they de facto run a lot of the nuke plants?) and has substantial heretofore untapped capabilities that they would bring to bear in such a case. (there's already a pretty big exclusion zone around Chernobyl; what's a few more!?)
Russia's untapped capabilities here are pretty much just nuclear, their conventional force isn't enough to disable any significant section of Ukraine's industry - that's rather why we're here. And any strike on a nuclear facility is not a trivial act, it is one that would lead to incredible blowback - literally - across Europe. It would be very difficult to prevent all these small countries from acquiring weapons outside of diplomatic pressure, which abandoning Ukraine and thus undermining all your other commitments would remove any leverage across all these small non nuclear states.
It's unlikely to be a key factor in the current war anyway - Russia is likely to win or lose over the coming year conventionally and nuking your way out of sanctions isn't going to change that. It's more setting the scene for the next war - security guarantees or nukes I guess to underpin Ukrainian security. Russia has them, and if America does not wish to pay for Ukraine's guarantees isn't this the better option for thrifty US isolationist nationalists without a dog in the fight?
Only if they don't care about the (literal) fallout -- this is absolutely a red line for Russia, and I'm not even sure how unreasonable that is.
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Fridman is one of the worst popular interviewers of all time. Even his interviews with highly interesting people are either very boring or much less interesting than hearing them talk on their own, which is terrible exactly because the purpose of a good interviewer is to get the person to say/admit something interesting.
It’s actually interesting that he challenges Zelensky a bit (I assume because he still feels some kind of kinship/sympathy for Russia) because he almost never does this on any other interview.
The real enigma is Fridman’s own popularity (which is the reason, along with him being a generous interviewer, why so many important people come on his show). Why do so many young men like him? Rogan has a whiff of charisma, interesting stories of his own, a charming everyman’s naïveté and an act that works well with a lot of interview subjects. Fridman sounds like someone who doesn’t care reading from a script, like a high school student forced to give a speech or chair a panel, which is insane for one of the world’s most prolific interviewers. He’s not masculine/dominant and “alpha”. He’s not cosmopolitan and well-read. He doesn’t have the smooth-talking flow of a seasoned hustle bro. He’s just nothing.
He's interesting (YMMV and obviously does, but I find him super engaging) and he tries to be open minded when he talks to people. I will never understand why people criticize him saying "oh he never pushes his guests". That's a feature, not a bug. I can't stand interviewers who just badger guests trying to get them to say/not say certain things. Lex has some questions to set up discussions, and then he just tries to listen to people and understand them. He does push back on occasion, but mostly he's trying to see things from his guest's point of view (even when you can tell he doesn't particularly agree with it). That is rare and enjoyable in this day and age.
I more or less agree, but it's one thing to not antagonize your guest, or try to catch them off-guard, and another to add basically nothing and just have them talk their book. I think a great point of comparison is his interview with The Zuck vs the one from Dwarkesh Patel. While they're a bit apart in time, so there were some developments between them, they're both generally very friendly, but Dwarkesh just gets so much more out of Zuck by actually engaging him on the subjects he's talking about.
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That's what he's selling.
I don't know how he got the first few but a popular platform that'll let you go off for a few hours is probably quite attractive to guests. And then it's just a snowball.
Finkelstein, for example, almost certainly went on his show cause he'd finally be allowed to confront Benny Morris with minimal interference. And I listened cause I wanted to see it, and so on.
Oh I don’t think his popularity with his subjects is surprising, anyone with a huge audience who isn’t politically toxic (and Friedman isn’t, his own politics seem vaguely lib-right but he doesn’t push them) is going to have people who want to be heard. It’s his audience that’s interesting.
Sure, but isn't this just the Fallon thing but for YouTube?
Some people have audiences. Others have the audience of whoever they can get on that day, provided they're bland enough to not turn them off.
Fallon is in the bottom quintile of top interviewers but I’m sure in person he still comes across as awkwardly charming, he can make some median people laugh, he’s not even in the same league as Fridman.
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Fridman's job translating his guests is pretty good. Plausibly his behind the scenes management, making getting on his show a seamless experience and other such hidden work, is where he shines compared to other podcasters. But that's just speculation
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I expect this view won’t be popular on here, but I think the fact that Fridman is a Jew helps a lot. Fellow Jews like Netanyahu and Zelenskyy feel more welcome on his podcast rather than going on Joe Rogan, for instance. “Fridman is one of us.” That gives Fridman entreé to a lot of interviews with powerful Jews that non-Jewish interviewers might not get. Hence why his podcast has accumulated so much popularity.
There are a lot of charismatic Jewish interviewers out there. Fridman’s Jewishness is probably largely incidental even if you believe claims about nepotism etc since he built his following pretty organically and clearly attracts guests because of it rather than because of his connections, the following came first (which is surprising), and many of his big guests that drove his following (Musk, Peterson) aren’t Jewish (some were of course, but I don’t know that they’re out of proportion with the percentage of important people who are Jewish).
You can’t make the case, for example, the way you could with, say, Seth Meyers or indeed with Zelensky himself, who were Jewish comedians hired by Jewish producers and eventually given big shows (whatever you think of their merits). I’m not saying either case was ethnic nepotism, but the allegation holds more than it does for Fridman, who largely built his following organically and on his own.
As far as I’m aware, Seth Meyers is only 1/8 Jewish (through his paternal grandfather) and I’m not sure that he was even raised with any connection to Jewish culture. He grew up in Michigan and then in New Hampshire. His wife is Jewish, and they’re raising their kids Jewish because of her, but as far as I’m aware everything he’s said about it is that he doesn’t think of himself as Jewish at all.
Fair enough, there actually aren’t a huge number of Jewish talkshow hosts, Maher and Stern and Jon Stewart are I guess.
Jimmy Kimmel would be the other obvious one. (EDIT: Actually, no! Another one like Meyers who just looks and acts Jewish. A crypto-gentile!) And then Larry King, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Ricki Lake before that. (Also Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, if you consider those talk shows.)
Terry Gross from NPR's Fresh Air comes to mind as probably the best of the pure interviewers. It's a testament to her skill that most of the interviews of hers I've listened to aren't of people I'd normally seek out on my own but happened to come across when flipping through the dial. Larry King just wasn't any good. His philosophy was that he should be in the same position as the average audience member who didn't know particularly much about the subject and would go on a journey of discovery or whatever, but in reality it seemed like he used it to not only excuse his lack of preparation but to make it a point of personal pride.
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I am going to make myself sound about 30 years older than I am, but there were also David Susskind and Joe Franklin
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Genuine question, did he? Did he not get a huge Rogan boost?
Yeah, but that’s only non-organic if you’re implying Rogan invited him on for a non-usual reason, I would say.
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It continues to blow my mind that he manages to get interesting guests. He's infuriating to listen to and seems like a very slow thinker. His lack of verbal fluency despite being ashkenazim is the most convincing argument against HBD that I've ever seen. I also don't actually think anybody likes him particularly - his major strength is that he gets interesting guests and then shuts the fuck up, but I think if he just made an interview show where the guest got to talk and he was completely silent he'd actually be more popular.
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Success in many fields is largely about just showing up.
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I really hate Zelensky's attitude that the world owes him or Ukraine and makes demands. Dude is a fucking beggar. He should behave like one.
Judging by your past commentary, you probably could have stopped before the apostrophe.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong about his position as a beggar, but I also doubt it would be an effective tactic. It’s not going to win him more support from his base, more materiel from his backers, or better terms from his enemies. He gains more by playing the confident, defiant underdog.
And his attitude towards his benefactors (and since my country is one of those, means I unwillingly support him) is the reason I hate him. And his way of talking do rub a nice chunk of Europeans the wrong way. I am also annoyed that no one has bitchslapped him already to show him his proper station.
What a nasty opinion born only out of overconsumption of russian propaganda. What do you mean " Zelensky's attitude" ? Are you calling his expectation that the west will finally act decisively about russian aggression "attitude"? Both the Europeans and the Americans have been way too slow and way too timid in their support and that is a fact. Their fear and cowardice will cost us in the future and the success of russian propaganda in individuals such as yourself is a part of why they are so slow to act. Would you have called Churchill a beggar when he used to call Roosevelt to increase aid? What a horrible mindset.
The attitude that his war has anything to do with us. I don’t think it does, and in fact it’s hurting our other interests as we bleed our coffers to support a country too up its own arse to actually negotiate a ceasefire with Russia. He’s bleeding his country of men for pride, and insists that he needs our money to do it with.
Totally incorrect. The war definetly has to do with us and you really need to spend some time to rethink this deeply. A russia that has shown it's willing to attack and bordering a NATO country is a massive problem for us because it would inevitably result in them vying for more down the line, this is really simple stuff and I don't understand why I have to mention it. The 2nd point you get wrong is the fact that this bleeds out our coffers, nonsense , I suppose you are American? The shit you guys have given is peanuts for you since not only it isn't alot as an absolute number compared to your GDP but it's also not even hard cash most of the time but equipment you will replace anyway. In any case spending some money is better than a massive war with an emboldened russia down the line. Unless you want to just leave NATO and let Europe fend for itself? Which frankly considering how affected your opinion is by russian propaganda I wouldn't be surprised.
Lastly, Zelensky is the one bleeding his country of men for pride? Is this a joke? Why are you even in this forum if you can't even comprehend basic stuff ? How can you possibly say something like that when it's Putin that started this war , and it's Putin sending his men in the slaughter over , at best for your POV , a future threat for russia , at worst simple conquest and control of ukraine ( news flash , read some history , it's the second). In any case you are clearly badly informed If I were you I would read up some more before exposing myself like this next time.
Ukraine should never have been given any inking of joining NATO. Had we left them alone and not supported the color revolution, there never would have been a war in the first place. We’re bleeding ourselves white to support Ukraine, a country with no vital security or economic value to either Europe or the US. Worse, we’re repeatedly crossing Russian red lines meaning that we’re doing all of this and risking nuclear war to do so. And Zelensky has long refused to accept reality and negotiate a peace plan — mostly because the man believes if he can just convince us to give him just one more weapons shipments, he’s going to take back Donbas and be a hero to his people. In reality, he can’t take back the land, because he’s down to running a draft by kidnapping old men off the street and shipping them to the front. He’s almost out of Ukrainian people to throw into the meat grinder.
All of the above is why us giving Zelensky endless money and weapons is a bad idea. This isn’t and never was our problem, and the only reason it ever became a problem is that we supported a revolution and then decided to dangle NATO. Membership in their faces. It doesn’t change the reality on the ground and it doesn’t change the enormous cost of this war. And it doesn’t give Ukraine anything that NATO needs
Every time I hear this...line of thought I feel frustration with some black amusement mixed in.
NATO is problematic, if not irresponsibly hostile, while very literal aggressive expansionism from Russia itself, when it's not outright 'dindu nuffin', is complicated and needs to be understood in context, and it's their backyard, and nothing is ever black and white like that, you know.
All of this, and more, is possible at the modest price of dramatically lowering the standards to which Russia is being held.
One would be forgiven for thinking that Russia in this frame is something akin to a rabid dog that just can't be blamed for trying to tear every careless passerby's throat out. I almost agree, though somehow the proposed solution always amounts to sticking one's head in the sand, sending thoughts and prayers to those unable to afford the luxury, and hoping everything will work out somehow, while simultaneously trying best to create the impression that this is the tough, sober, "realist" approach to international politics.
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Hello, and welcome to the—oh. Not your first rodeo.
Please familiarize yourself with the rules, particularly personal antagonism and consensus building. What seems like a fact to you may not be so obvious to others. You should make your best case and convince them whether or not your opponent is nasty or horrible.
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Are you surprised that no one routinely bitchslaps you to show you your proper station within your country? You're acting like a slave who has attitude about his master, someone far above him, not treating another noble, also someone far above the slave, in the manner the slave believes the master should. He's the last one to be asked.
You can accept the polite fiction that most people do that you aren't a commoner nobody (considering you don't have a word in how much taxes you pay), and give up all talk of "stations" and "attitude" and "bitchslapping", or else consider praising your masters for being much more merciful than they could be, before you scold them for being merciful to people you dislike.
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In a sense the US does. The US/Britain forced Ukraine to consistently talk the most hawkish stance and reject negotiation with the promise that the US/UK would have their backs. The Ukrainians are slowly waking up to that they are effectively taking the role the taliban had in the 80s. Their job is to be thrown under the bus for America's interests.
Negotiations went nowhere because Russia's terms would leave Ukraine as good as defenceless. I wouldn't characterise this as hawkish any more than I would characterise someone that strikes back in self-defence a violent person.
Funny how Palestinians are supposed to accept being truly defenceless while Ukrainians are defenceless if they have 50k troops.
The violent people overthrew the government, shelled the Donbass for 10 years straight and have been pushing for wwIII for the last two years.
Reality is funny at times. The punchline is that Russia and Israel are not analogous in what it takes to mitigate invasions.
Yes, the Russians are bad for having done all this with their NovaRussia intervention, and these are indeed a good three reasons why the cease fire without mitigating the longer-term Russian threats to Ukraine is liable to be both unstable and a longer-term cost to the Americans and Europeans.
We could even add the Russian attempts at pushing a self-coup during the Maidan Revolution, where their attempt to lead the Ukrainian government to purge members and supporters of the Ukrainian government including the unilateral authorization of lethal force after the sniper campaign led to the president fleeing to a hostile country before he could be justly impeached or tried as would be expected in other states.
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While it is certainly a talking point of the US-out-of-North-America crowd that the US funded the Taleban against the Soviets, the organization in fact did not exist until the mid-90s.
The Taliban as a banner did not exist until the mid-90s. I'm pretty sure the large majority of the notables who founded the organization in the 90s came up fighting the Soviets as mujahedeen.
Which is true, but not the same thing, especially as their enemies also fought the Soviets as mujahedeen.
I knew someone from the area. He was not anti-American that I knew of but noted that the Taleban were direct descendants of those groups trained by the American and gained their military success thereby.
So were many in the anti-Taliban northern alliance.
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Is he not behaving like a beggar? He's spent the last few years asking for, campaigning for, and I would say begging, for aid. He knows that Ukraine's chances in the war depend on Western aid, and he has acted accordingly, investing a huge amount of time and effort in visiting Western countries and making the case for more aid as strongly as he can.
How should he behave? Do you think he should be more self-abasing? Why? Would that help? I suspect most Western countries would rather deliver aid to an ally that seems, though in need of assistance, nonetheless committed to the fight and strong of will.
He is behaving like a member of /r/ChoosingBeggars . He speaks like he is entitled to EU and US weapons for free, to EU and US boots on the ground, like he is entitled to use them how he sees fit, he is entitled to security guarantees and membership in EU and NATO.
He dares to makes demands, to criticize us ...
Zelensky is just prettier Greta Turnberg while in drag (check his old videos), but with the same abrasive attitude towards the world
Your cultural chauvenism / fragility is showing.
If whichever collective 'us' you are trying to appeal to has such a fragile ego as to take offense at a lack of groveling obeisence, it frankly deserves critique and contempt for being offended at a lack of groveling obeisance. Not only is it a sign of a fragile ego that will be perpetually offended, and thus safe to dismiss as 'Pope insists Catholicism is one true faith,' it's also indicative of an inept understanding of international relations (where performing ritual humiliation of yourself for benefactors is poor strategy) and strategic self-interest (where requiring ritual humiliation of your benefactees is poor practice).
Given that groveling is both a bad strategy for the state doing it, and a bad strategy to demand it for the state that might receive it, any 'us' who wishes to insist upon it deserve a good deal of criticism and demands to stop such ineffectual, shallow posturing that primarily benefits ego.
No, come on. He came to the UK a year or so ago and had a shopping list, he was going around pointing at our stuff that he wanted. His attitude is completely inappropriate for someone who is, ultimately, asking for us to willingly give him things that he is in no way entitled to by default. Respect, courtesy and self-restraint are not weird, oversensitive expectations at any time but especially not when you're demanding tens of millions of pounds worth of other people's military equipment. ESPECIALLY not when we've essentially destroyed our economic base in retaliation for Putin's attack.
As a side note @Dean, you're welcome to disagree with anyone you like on any basis you like but you've really started to slather on the contempt in your comments to people. Not only are you taking the least charitable possible view of what people write, but you're also clearly stating that the only reason that anyone could hold their perceived opinions is stupidity or ignorance. None of us are going to win or lose the Ukraine war from our keyboards, and I think that you would have more interesting and more worthwhile conversations if you took other people's views more seriously.
The UK (well Boris) is in large part personally responsible for the war dragging out as long as it has so that he could get his little Churchill moment. There were contemporary rumblings that even the US was surprised at how gung-ho he was being and how vigorously he was dissuading Ukraine from any kind of non-maximalist deal in mid/late 22.
True. Another fine mess he left us. Boris had moved on by the time of Zelenskyy’s visit, I think, although I know that’s always complicated in international affairs.
I guess being British myself, I don’t consider Boris == UK as I am personal proof he’s not. Plus Zelenskyy is a big boy and responsible for his own decisions, I’m sure he knew the situation in the UK. We don’t have the military or economic strength to provide long-term large-scale assistance if we wanted to, and his behaviour frankly dissuaded me from wanting to. I’ve said it before but we don’t need allies who treat us worse than our enemies.
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A european political culture where a response by the largest member of the community to an invasion is helmets is, by darwinian necessity, a political culture that cultivates its interactors to be willing to press beyond initial public offerings if they want to maximize their gains, particularly when their stakes are survival. Particularly when members of the political culture are prone to hyperbole as a way of deflecting requests- such as claiming they have destroyed their economic base in retaliation for Putin's attack.
(No, you have not. Particularly if you are speaking the language of pounds instead of euros.)
In international and thus cross-cultural affairs, being clear about your wants and needs, and especially when something is insufficient is a form of being respectful and courteous. People who want to help you can't effectively help unless they understand your position, playing coy 'you should know what I mean' is itself a form of passive-aggression against those not part of the same culture-set/communication-style. This is why one of the fundamentals of cross-cultural communication is to favor clarity over culturally-specific forms of communication (including slang, puns, humor, and so on). What is polite within a culture is not the same as what is polite between culltures, and in absence of shared understandings do not expect them.
Similarly, requesting ('demanding,' if you prefer) more than you will receive is also a form of accepted diplomatic request. A patron may always wish to be asked for less, but the request it provides political advantage to the government to still send 'insufficient' material while maintaining the political advantage/perception that their reasons are reasons of stewardship (husbanding resources with consideration), military responsibility (not giving out more than can be afforded), and sovereignty (not giving exactly what was requested), without exposing less polite realities (national inability to do much more due to decades of systemic underinvestment/mismanagement, internal political divisions that might have electoral consequences). It communicates that you recognize that you will not get everything you want, while approaching negotians with someone signalled to have both value (what they can offer) and agency (the right / position to say no and publicly assert their own interests).
Note that these merits can invert and be presented as flaws if pre-coordinations are done so that the beneficiary only asks for what the benefactor has already agreed to give- an appearance of 'giving them whatever they asked for,' 'not using our own best judgement,' 'not showing restraint when our economy is so bad,' and so on. It would be downright rude to put your benefactors in such an unflattering light... if we care about other people's frames of manners.
Now, these sort of considerations may not be your idea of diplomatic respect and courtesy, but this is where we get back into various forms of cultural chauvinism, such as projecting one's own social expectations to outside cultures and expecting them to align with yours. Particularly when someone is part of a subset of larger audiences who do not share the views, and for whom deference to one could be an offense to the others.
This also where we can get into the distinction between claimed standards and actual standards on various sides of the beseeching / beseeched relationship. Such as, for example, the interests of a patron state who wants to maximize the political value / public credit they receive for the minimal amount of actual investment- i.e. those who want to give token donations when they have considerable ability to give more. Or the reasonable expectations of donor and recipient states abroad- of which 'humility' is often as unassociated with patron states as 'respect,' 'courtesy,' and 'self-restraint' when dealing with their beneficiaries, even though respect, courtesy, and self-restraint are typically reciprocal virtues.
But none of this is the case for Lizzardspawn, whose position over the years has not reasonably simplified to simply wanting Ukraine to act with respect, courtesy, and self-restraint as understood in the general global international relations domain.
And when they provide more serious views with based less from positions of their own contempt of others, I do indeed find that interesting and engage accordingly. Hence why my interactions with even the people I disagree with vehemently on some issues is neutral to amicable on others.
When after years the latest round of yet another condemnation of [insert perjorative adjective][insert pejorative noun] is neither interesting or charitable, as with most posters the response is either ignored or countered based on interest in the topic and letting the bailey stand unchallenged in the public forum.
Objection! This is a least charitable possible representation of what I have written.
In no framing did I say that the only reason anyone could hold their perceived opinion is stupidity or ignorance- I attributed to Lizzardspawn specifically (by form of pronoun address) reasons of cultural chauvenism and/or fragility (which are not synonyms for stupidity or ignorance).
That Lizzardspawn is assessed to have a position for [reasons] does not claim or imply that other people can only reach the same position for the same [reasons].
This belies an assumption that taking certain people's views more seriously would lead to fewer, rather than more, unflattering critiques of their position or person.
This is The Motte. It is a war metaphor for a reason, and while it is a place that aims for light over heat, light is often unflattering, and can make the subject of it appear worse with more of it.
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I think Zelensky is trying to obtain as many effective weapons for Ukraine as possible, and he is behaving to try to maximise that. Would a more grovelling approach achieve more of his aims, or would it just be better for your ego?
The way I see it, he's using all the influence he has to try to get as many weapons as he can, and I struggle to see why he should choose a less effective strategy. If you think Western leaders ought to drag him across the coals a bit more, blame them, not Zelensky himself. Blame the people setting the price, not the one grabbing the bargains while he can.
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I’m not sure we should be involved in a “security guarantee, simply because it’s going to be an endless stream of aid given out to Ukraine and it’s not in our interests. We need tge money at home.
It's in the US' best interests to punish rogue states that engage in expansionist wars. Providing weapons to Ukraine is a relatively cheap way of doing so. Better to hold the line here instead of next time Russia expands into an US ally. Better to make an example of Russia than to let Iran or China think they could get away expansionism too.
Then we'd have to mostly punish ourselves though.
For what?
Last American clay gained on the battlefield was the Pacific Trust Territory taken from Japan, and we didn't start that one.
Perhaps the Indian Wars?
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Iraq was a bad war, but not expansionist. I think there should be a norm against invading to remove dictators, but it's okay that that's weaker than the norm against conquest.
I'm not sure which other wars you'd be referring to.
Ah so if you don't overtly annex the territory but control it in everything but name imperialism is okay? So also China invading Taiwan would be entirely ok since most countries recognize the one China policy and Taiwan as part of China?
Just like Putin has his ass out now, the west had their ass out in 2002
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The US does not control Iraq in everything but name, and did not control Afghanistan in everything but name. There were legitimate elections.
Everyone knows they're separate even if there's a legal fiction otherwise
I think that legal fictions are important! If "everybody knows they're separate even if there's a legal fiction otherwise" in your personal life, you're still legally bound to your spouse until divorce proceedings are finalized.
The United States arguably should not have recognized the Chinese Communist government specifically for this reason.
Either "lol international law and treaties aren't real," in which case maybe things like Iraq and Afghanistan (or Ukraine or an invasion of Taiwan) were bad but they arguably weren't illegal, or any aggressive military force that a nation, including the United States, takes that is not in self-defense or approved by the UN Security Council are a violation of its obligations under both the UN Charter and, if the country happens to be a NATO member, Article 1 of the NATO charter, where all parties agree "to refrain in [its] international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations."
Now, someone is going to arrive and explain to me that there is some argument made somewhere that international law allows one to contravene what seems to be the
absolutelykinda clear language of the UN and NATO charters. To which I say: it sounds like legal fictions are important. (But to which I also say: if you can launch an offensive military operation without UN approval and the UN General Assembly condemns it as a violation of international law but the UN Security Council never does anything about it because the member launching the operation sits on the Council, then maybe "lol international law and treaties aren't real.")I happen to think that international law and custom is good and that it was arguably an absolutely massive mistake to tie any of that to a body as dysfunctional as the United Nations. But nobody forced us to sign the UN Charter or the NATO Charter.
You know what, you've convinced me that China militarily going into Taiwan would not be bad because "wars of expansion are bad". They could fairly call it a police action in domestic territory or whatever. I still think it'd be really bad because China is a dictatorship and Taiwan is a functional democracy, and I want more functional demcracy and less dictatorship.
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Yes everyone knows, they all know parts of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria were always part of Israel as well, but everyone knows Crimea was never part of Russia, just as Taiwan was never part of China. We've always been at war with Eurasia.
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This.
While the Ukraine war has not be a resounding success for Ukraine, it has been a tremendous success for NATO security interests. The value of military strength is always as that value relative to your opponent, diminishing your opponents forces by a factor of two is about as good as increasing your own forces by factor two.
As long as the Ukrainians are still willing to do the dying, we should cynically continue to support them with materiel.
Exactly. I could not ask an Ukrainian to die fighting for NATO. But if they wanted to do so anyway, I'm more than happy to provide them the weapons to do so.
They “wanted to” in the sense that they are hauled off in unmarked vans by draft officers and kept on the line of contact by blocking detachments that will shoot them if they try to leave.
This is worth remembering. National security concerns or whatever are important, but perhaps the horrors of war and the suffering of those forced to endure it is at least as important.
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Two anecdotes about language barriers:
Baseball's Carlos Beltran, the Mets slugger and Astros cheater, complained when he was part of the MLBPA union reps that Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki got translators paid for by the team, who staid with Ichiro at all times and translated all questions in interviews. This despite the fact that Ichiro, by the end of his career, he spoke decent English, although many players weren't aware of it. Meanwhile Latin players like Beltran, many of whom had educations that effectively ended in the eighth grade when they were signed to a minor league contract, were expected to just learn English, and forced to give interviews in English on the field after games without any help in a language they barely spoke. As a result, Japanese players typically came across sounding the way Ichiro did: "He crafts his public portrayal similar to the image he projects on the field: a technician, a warrior, a Ph.D. in stoicism;" because he was able to carefully consider his answers as they passed through a translator, which were then relayed back to the interviewer in perfect English. While Latin players often came across stupid, dimwitted, smiling and athletic but not particularly bright. Beltran hated that he had all these thoughts about baseball, and couldn't express them to anyone, and when he was a prominent star he pressured the league to start providing Spanish language staff on each team to help Spanish speaking players get more comfortable giving interviews.
When Elie Wiesel's Night came out, it was written in both French and Hebrew. In theory, they're direct translations, made by the author himself. But, the devil, as ever, is in the details. For example, when the camp is liberated, the English (which was translated from the French) contains an incongruous line about the young boys going to the village to "sleep with girls." Meanwhile, in the Hebrew, the boys go to the village to "rape German shiksas." Wiesel preferred one meaning for his Jewish readers, and another for the Gentiles. Who knows which, if either, is the truth, it's hard to picture recently liberated concentration camp victims getting up to much either way. But it sure changed my opinion on Wiesel's veracity.
Either could be the case here. Going through a translator gives Zelensky an extra couple seconds to think, and collect his answer before giving it. It helps him sound the way he wants to sound. Further, if they were using Zelensky's translator, he would use Zelensky's preferred language choices. If they did the interview in Russian, then presumably the English translation would be produced by Friedman himself, who would choose how to present Zelensky's words. Or, it might be that Zelensky prefers to present different information in English than to Russian speaking audiences. Not that it won't be translated into Russian/Ukrainian, but fewer Ukies will consume it, and if they get offended at what he says, it can be put down to translation.
I listened to a good amount of the interview while plowing snow today, before I got too tired of it. I like Lex, but he beclowned himself in this one. If you want to tell the guy he lost the war, fine, but I couldn't stand his stupid "But all I want is PEACE" bit, or his ridiculous "I just have a FEELING that Putin wants to talk." Why do Americans all seem to have this weird thought that they know what Putin wants to do? The translation also seemed terrible, the whole thing was disjointed. Zelensky was...fine I guess? Pretty boring.
I still have yet to have heard a peace plan better than my plan:
RETVRN TO TRADITION: Why NATO should seek to install Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on the throne of Ukraine
The government of Ukraine cannot end the war with Russia in a position where Russia could renew the war in the future. As the permanent neutering of Russia is impossible or inadvisable, most commentators want to provide Ukraine with some kind of security guarantee from the USA/NATO/PRC that will prevent future Russian aggression, but negotiated in some unspecified way that it isn't just adding Ukraine to NATO, which it is basically assumed Russia wouldn't accept unless, as above, Russia was permanently neutered, which, as above, is impossible or inadvisable. Another problem being that Ukraine tried that shit once already, with all nuclear powers guaranteeing the integrity of Ukraine's borders, and we've seen how much that was worth when the bullets started flying. Given that Ukraine had non-alliance security guarantees in 2014 and in 2021, it does not seem like they would successfully repel Russian aggression. So how do we tie Ukraine to the NATO powers in a way that is genuinely credible and will be viewed by Ukrainians as a binding guarantee, but isn't article 5?
Let's look at how the Concert of Europe in the 19th century handled this: Constitutional or absolute monarchy was held to be the best form of government, and when a new country was formed, they would simply install a monarch from another royal family. The monarch's had no necessary special relation to their new domain, the first king of Belgium was originally considered for the job of king of Greece, which went to another German monarch instead. King Charles and his sons are descended from the Greek royal family [through a switch in royal houses en route] on his father's side, so it's family tradition to say: Prince Harry should form a mercenary corps, join the UKR forces and take Crimea, then Harry and Meagan should be installed as Grand Prince and Grand Princess of Kiev while naming Archie as Ilkhan of Crimea and heir while engaging him to the daughter of Ukrainian General or politician.
Harry does have some military experience in combat, and he's still young enough at 38 and popular enough, that he could credibly recruit a military force of thousands of veterans from the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia to join him in this venture. I think there's still enough weird tradition to get guys from the Commonwealth countries to want to ride out with a rogue devil-may-care prince into combat. He could get the money to fund their equipment and training from his friends Oprah and Tyler Perry and by selling the TikTok rights, or the CIA could fund it covertly, whichever, just get all the money for the full shebang of western toys. Take his fully equipped brigade of western veterans, go to Ukraine, and put up a good show. I don't think Harry is actually that bright, but he could find a bored retired general to handle the actual conquering for him.
At the end of the war, like our ancestors before us, the international community gets together to name Harry and Megan Grand Prince and Princess of Kiev. Now if Russia invades again ten years from now, do you really think that the UK is going to sit idly by and watch their King's son, their heir's brother, Diana's son, get thrown out? Maybe the UK public doesn't much like Harry and Meggan, but watching a close relative get deposed is just getting cucked as a kingdom, no way [Keir, or whoever] lets that happen. And is the US public going to let a celebrity BIPoC diverse prince and his valid mentally suffering actress mum get tossed in the tower? No way. We often mock the 19th century Royalists obsession with installing monarchs, but this was the purpose. It tied the new country to the international community by blood. In the same way, by creating a British ginger king and a halfrican American queen, Ukraine can guarantee that the two most important countries in NATO will have their back. And we'll be free of their podcasting project.
You're welcome, Lex. Propose it at the start of your next talk with Zelensky. It'll make for a better episode.
Note that Prince Harry is the great-great-great-great-grandson of a Russian Tsar (Nikolai I - Konstantin Nikolayevich - Ol'ga Konstantinovna - Andreas tis Elladas - Philip of Edinburgh - Charles III - Harry of Sussex).
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If I had a nickel for every time someone had proposed expanding the British Commonwealth as a way to address a geopolitical question, I'd... have a bit more than two nickels, but it is odd how many there would be in the 21st century alone.
I don't actually know enough about the Commonwealth to know if that's what I'm proposing or not.
But outside trolling, the solution is going to lie in some answer that is greater than Budapest and less than NATO. Where is it? I don't know. But I would have liked to see Lex try and give one, if he's going to bang on about praying for peace. At the least it would have been more interesting.
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While I'm sure the symbolic reasons are a consideration, isn't it possible that Zelensky just wanted the interview to be in English to maximize the odds that an English-speaking audience would see it? I'm sure there's a lot of casual followers of Fridman who might give an episode a skip if it was entirely in Russian with subtitles.
Lex Fridman always dubs foreign language podcasts in english, and the process is quite smooth. I don't think there'd be any fewer listeners. Especially because Zelensky did spend a lot of the interview speaking Ukrainian. And in his own justification to Fridman, he said it was about the symbolic and nationalist value.
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Not everybody noticed that Lex's Russian is actually poor. He is a native Russian speaker but his vocabulary is stuck at the level of 11-year-old and is not sufficient for discussing complex and abstract ideas. When speaking Russian, he takes long pauses and uses simple sentences. Somewhere he even mentioned that he is not fluent in Russian.
Zelensky's Russian is much better but clearly he decided against it, apparently he thought that it will not improve his chances to be better accepted by Russian speaking community. He explained that he tried speaking in Russian shortly after invasion in 2022 and no one listened to him. He is probably right. While translation is less effective than direct address, Ukrainian is actually similar sounding to Russian and if a Russian speaking person has a positive attitude towards Zelensky, he will enjoy listening to his Ukrainian (it has some nice sounding vibes) while reading subtitles.
Zelensky is also right – if someone doesn't want to hear, he will not hear what you are saying, regardless which language.
I think this is a Lex problem, not a Lex-speaking-Russian problem.
Do you speak Russian?
No, I was just calling him unintelligent.
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