domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy.
The meaningful difference is that there is not just a policy conflict. There is also a relationship conflict. The relationship conflict is more important than the policy conflict.
Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.
Imagine what the response to leftist rent proposal might be if the standard conduct of of the leftist advocate coalition pushing / advancing / defending the policy in the decade prior did not also make public attacks on the moral and personal character if their opponents, upto and including ruining the career prospects of individuals and defending such action of their coalition peers. Imagine if the leftist coalition did (or did not) have a contemporary (or multi-decade) reputation of lying about policy concessions only to renege on them, and then accusing the opponents of being unwilling to compromise or actively being tyrants for insisting on- or enforcing- the earlier compromise.
It would matter relatively little what the current policy proposal is. Significant skepticism, suspicion, lack of trust, and warning to others would be warranted on the basis of past behavior.
The patters of past behavior are what establish a relationship, not just a policy, dispute.
Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.
Congratulations on not recognizing the common attribution error, and the implications that has for recognizing the differences in impersonal and personal relationships with groups of people that shape how people respond to actions by that group.
Your relationship with a [committee] of people you don't know, and with a [committee] of people you do know and have a relationship history with, are fundamentally different.
Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.
If we equivocate degrees of change, or great deal of incredibly significant social dynamics such as the nature of a group's selection bias and internal enforcement dynamics. Why you would want to ignore such dynamics which are very relevant to political faction hostility is not something we agree on.
For example, we don't actually expect a group to meaningfully change itself if the group is actively engaging in self-selection and ideological compliance actions for its induction of new members. A hobby group can remain a hobby group by recruiting and retaining members of the hobby. This, however, is a completely different organizational culture- and survivorship bias- than a organization that engages in ideological policing of its members. The more prone a group culture is to self-selection and ideological purity spirals, the stronger the survivorship bias can be expected to be, and the less relevant the changes are to central issues (as opposed to largely irrelevant non-central changes).
A organization which applies and maintains self-selection and internal indoctrination is over time going to be composed of true believes, willing conformists, or cynical grifters. 'The group will change' based on the relative composition, but the change on the willingness to act in line with the true believers does not change until outside pressure creates conditions so that the grifters see a deal elsewhere, and the conformists are willing to conform in a different direction.
That outside pressure, in turn, is [hostility].
Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.
Because you avert your eyes and do not acknowledge conflict beyond a policy conflict, and do not listen when people tell you there another sort of conflict taking place, and thus do recognize when different types of responses that are appropriate in different types of conflicts are appropriate because there is a different type of conflict going on.
See no issue, hear no issue, understand no issue that warrants issue-dependent response.
If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this,
And nor should it, because my comment is that your chosen paradigm, [vengeance/murder], is false and misleading. You do not challenge a false and misleading framing as such on the framing's own grounds, you contest the framing.
In turn, someone's insistence on false and misleading framings can itself be a 'knife' that can be used to 'join in on the murder.' After all, a willful framing that implicitly accuses the dissenters of being equivalent to Bad People- say an immoral murder- is a form of accusation. An accusation can be true or false, but if it is publicly repeated when false, it is not a just a lie, but slander.
I suspect you would concede, if pressed, that dissent to your preferred way of political conflict is not equivalent to murder. I think you would also concede that slandering your countrymen (and women) is an attack on the country that is composed by them. But by making the framing, you are already grabbing a knife and giving another jab yourself.
it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.
It makes no such assumption that you should 'want to.' It is expressing that "bad relationship" is the harm.
Your nation is a collection of individuals in multitudes of relationships. Your collective future is in turn entails both the character and the consequence of those relationships. If a community has strong and positive relations, then it can overcome even great disasters. If a community has weak and negative relations, it will fail to unite over even common challenges.
There is no common interest without commonality of the people with interests. Commonality of this sort is not categorical or imposed from the outside (or above), it is cultivated and perceived through the relationship people have with each other. It is what separates a nation from an accident of geographical proximity.
If you break down that sense of commonality through negative relationships- regardless of whether that's actively attacking your opponents, or 'merely' turning a blind eye to the attacks by others because it doesn't interest you- then over time your opponents will learn that their interests are not so common with you, and stop perceiving such a strong relationship of commonality with you in turn. This manifests in things such as declining social trust, lower trust in shared institutions, and so on.
Whether you 'want to' end in a low trust society is irrelevant. It is a product of relationships whether you like it or not. In turn, you can ruin a relationship as much be neglect or dismissal of other party's concerns as anything else. A knife is still a knife.
FtttG
18hr ago
Note that tit-for-tat recommends cooperating until you are defected against. If there's no first defecter, cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat produce identical behaviour.
Regarding the orbital supercomputer, isn't that inexplicable if it's not military? Why would you need real-time processing, can't you eventually send the data to Earth?
The only scenario I can imagine where it'd make sense to do processing in space is if you need to track aircraft in flight, ship wakes or something urgent. Maybe it's on the other side of the world to your ground stations and neutrals won't let you use their equipment... Maybe you're being jammed and you need to send only short packets of data through. The cost of spacelaunch, radiators and bespoke equipment surely make processing in space uncompetitive compared to a data centre on Earth if its for civilian purposes right?
FtttG
18hr ago
When he's not being a thin-skinned emotionally incontinent manchild, Freddie deBoer can be remarkably perceptive:
Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions.
Soteriologian
18hr ago
I mean I tried Dark Souls after Elden Ring. I just don’t see it, man.
The collapse of a great society sentiment is there, yes, but the difference in depth and subtlety is the difference between a post on /r/collapse and Meditations on Moloch.
RenOS
something is wrong
19hr ago
People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."
The reason people say this is pretty simple, it's that Elden Ring's setting, to the DS veteran, mostly is just more of the same as has been done the last three times. It's just hard to really see Martin's stamp. You can of course claim that he has done it better, but this is quite subjective. There are a lot of arguments about that already, and everyone has their own opinion. ER is undoubtly a good game, but most of your post could be written equivalently for any DS game, including even the aesthetic design (well, maybe not DS2, as much as I think it is somewhat underrated) and, funnily enough, even Martin's quote. Partially for this reason I got bored with ER halfway through the game, though I'll certainly pick it up eventually again. As a DS veteran you just can't shake the feeling that you have already played this game 3+ times, with near-identical story beats, setting and mechanics.
No_one
19hr ago
A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)
You don't understand Marxism. This here was written by a guy who was a respected and prominent Trotskyist in 1930s.
NON-COMMUNISTS HAVE OFTEN upbraided communists for what are alleged to be gross inconsistencies in communist behavior. The charge goes as follows: You communists call for a maximum of free speech, free press, free assembly and other civil rights in the United States and other non-communist countries; but inside the countries where communists are in power you have suppressed, or virtually suppressed, all these rights. You uphold the right to strike in non-communist countries, and very often exercise that right in practice when you are in control of trade unions; but in the communist countries it is criminal, in some cases a capital crime, to strike or merely advocate striking.
If you were able to understand the historical dialectic—which, since you are not a communist, you cannot really do: only the living practice of communism makes possible a genuine understanding of the theory of communism—you would realize that there are no inconsistencies. In every case the seeming contradictories, in the reality of time and history, reinforce each other and fuse their dynamism into a synthesis at a higher historical level. The communist camp is the thesis which represents the historical interests of the revolution, therefore of peace, freedom, justice, well-being, and the future of mankind in the coming epoch of a truly human history. Anything that strengthens the communist camp is right and just and good. In the present transitional era of world struggle, of wars and revolutions, the use of civil rights inside the communist camp to publicize opposition to the line of the Party and the revolution would only express the intrusion of counterrevolutionary influences, of capitalist hangovers and imperialist interventions; the proper purpose of public speech and assembly is to support, strengthen and improve the work of the revolution, not to sabotage it.
jfx
19hr ago
The article is a bit all over the place. In my worldview advice for "goal achievment" (such as fitness, career) usually places itself on a spectrum between one-size-fits-all, but easily implemented and on the other end nuanced, but harder to implement.
The difficulty to effectively (thus correctly) implement advice IMHO relies on entirely separate traits of the recipient:
- level of prior competence
- level of "ability to comply", aka willpower, aka conscientiousness
- level of self-criticism, aka ego, aka parts of neuroticism
Thus a one-to-many advice approach will deliver mixed results at best. Competent teachers and coaches through talent and experience are able to identify these levels in their clients/students and will adjust advice accordingly. In the age of social media in most places online, advice will be captured by the masses, who are most of the time, very incompetent and very weak-willed. An example of this is the so called "beginner-trap" in fitness content with 80%-90% of monetarization targetting beginners.
FtttG
19hr ago
For clarity, when I said "no argument here", I meant that I wasn't disputing that many MAGA types are calling for their opponents' heads. My point is that I don't think this observation in and of itself disproves that MAGA types are making the game-theoretic-optimal choice at this point in the decision tree.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
19hr ago
I disagree with WITS as measure
What metric do you prefer?
There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck.
This has to do with tariffs how? Would the truck have had better sightlines if it were American-made?
The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair.
This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.
The general collapse of the affordability of housing.
This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.
The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?
Because the rumors of the death of the old social contract are exaggerated, and because you want to build a world that is better rather than worse for your children. If you do want to build a better world for your children, but just disagree what "better" looks like, then sure, let us discuss specifics. Particularly the specifics around tariffs, which I note you have still not given a concrete defense of. But if you are so far gone that you care only for the suffering of your opponents, if you have no positive vision for the world, then I agree that there is no value in talking to you. It's not like either of us is particularly influential.
The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually.
You're glowing. Might want to get that checked out.
It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?
I mean, I'm already a number on the spreadsheet. So are you. Such is life in the modern analyzed world. I don't think there is any time or country in history I would prefer to live in than current America, even given the problems we have now. I expect, absent a civilization-ending catastrophe, this will remain true. I am worried that something precious is being lost, but the "something precious" is "the crown jewel of the world" and not "a serviceable nation" - I expect the decline to look like what Britain has gone through.
Anyway, are you planning to defend the tariffs as being good at accomplishing some specific concrete policy goal that you care about accomplishing or no?
TIRM
19hr ago
My insurance charges all policyholders enough to pay on average $2000 for this procedure, or a copay of $2000 if we are imagining patient out of pocket. I’d say that’s rather the point of insurance. There’s some tiny chance of true financial disaster and they charge all of us a bearable portion of that small chance.
Tenaz
20hr ago
I mean, "work harder and smarter" is good "advice" in this sense for at least 95% of people. Heck, "Make all the right decisions and don't make mistakes" is even better; 100% of people would benefit from that.
Advice is more than just [things it would be good if people do]; there's a sense in which it actually has to be useful, insightful information. In this much more relevant sense, most advice is bad, because it's not useful or insightful.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.
I have seen this argument before, where literally in the same sentence somebody can say that other people argue about morals, while he just wants what is good for people. You do realize, that moral philosophy on basic level talks about distinction between what is good and what is bad? As soon as you use the word good or bad, you are making a moral argument.
There seems to be certain myopia for many people, where they hold some moral positions without acknowledging them as such. They pretend that their morality is objective and rational, not even warranting defending it - as if they read it from facts of the universe, they gleaned it from the proton number of atom of carbon, or from trajectory of Jupiter or something like that. It is similar trick adjacent to Russel's conjugation in much of leftist thinking - our moral philosophy is true and fair and outside of critique, while your moral philosophy is just a hideous ideology.
georgioz
20hr ago
Sure, there can be a weird twist when in let's say 50 years what constitutes an undesirable group can change quite radically. The unpredictability of lebanonization of a country.
I disagree with WITS as measure: it doesn't matter if dates and feta cheese are duty-free if it's averaged out with protectionist tariffs for trucks and other heavy industry. Tariffs aren't even the whole story when it comes to protectionism. There are subsidies, designated country of origin, etc...
But that's beside the point. There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck. The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair. The general collapse of the affordability of housing. I could go on and on.
The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?
I expect the business owners and manufacturers to be unhappy about the tariffs: their profits are made at the expense of the people and communities they live in. Skin in the game is a good model of demonstrating sincerity, provided that access to the table is possible. It hasn't been for a very long time. Well, now our problem is your problem. The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually. Whether it be putting soldiers in your streets or giving you bloody shaves by taxation, the end result is the same. Pay up, liberal. What are you going to do, write an angry letter to your congressman?
It didn't work for us: why would it work for you?
It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
20hr ago
No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads.
I do have an argument - that's what "dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch" looks like.
When Russia invaded and Ukrainians started referring to them as "orcs", that does not detract from their defense being a reluctant tit-for-tat. That sort of language is what you need to hype up a collective, and coordinate actual defense.
To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective. Alice and Bob are playing iterated prisoner's dilemma and raking in money by cooperating with each other. One turn, Alice hits the defect button and makes more money than Bob. Bob says "what the hell" and Alice says "sorry, my finger slipped". Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too. But if he does this, Alice will realise that she can occasionally hit the defect button and face no repercussions for it. So in the long term, it might make more sense for Bob to hit the defect button in the next turn in order to send a credible signal that defection will be punished: if he doesn't, he's incentivising Alice to repeatedly defect in future. Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
A member of the Red Tribe may not think it's in the best interests of the country if Blue Tribers get fired from their jobs for opinions they expressed privately, a fate which befell many Red Tribers (or even insufficiently ideologically pure Blue Tribers) between 2009-16. But they may also be aware that, if the Blue Tribe faces no repercussions for the cancellation campaigns they wrought in the period, then they're bound to give it another try as soon as the boot is back on the other foot (as it inevitably will be sooner or later). From a game-theoretic perspective, the best solution might well be sending a credible message that "if you do this to us, we WILL do it back to you, so don't do it to us in the first place and we'll all get along just fine".
The obvious rebuttal is that there's a missing mood and the Red Tribe aren't dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch: they're baying for blood. No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads. But I refer you to The Whole City is Centre. Evolution gave us a set of instincts which approximate the game-theoretic-optimal choice that a learning algorithm would naturally arrive at by trial and error. The fact that two people learned how to play iterated prisoner's dilemma using different algorithms doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference in the course of action they would opt for at any point in the decision tree.
My point is just that the only difference between you and the pro-punishment faction is that you are following an explicitly-calculated version of the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and they are following a heuristic approximating the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and their heuristic might actually be more accurate than your explicit calculation.
When Alice hits defect and Bob hits defect in retaliation, his blood is pumping and his face is bright red. If Alice was playing against ChatGPT and hit defect, ChatGPT would weigh up its options and calmly, dispassionately hit defect in retaliation. But both Bob and ChatGPT hit defect in retaliation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
and it looks like Gavin fucking Newsom will probably run for president in 2028 on a platform of owning the right and probably win and continue the escalating clownworld cycle.
And my point is: corporate needs you to find the difference between these pictures.
What's supposed to be happen in an alternative universe where Trump is not trying to top them? Newsom was discussed as the heir apparent to the Democratic throne before Kamala was even done losing. Is it "the platform of owning the right"? For one, are you sure they wouldn't be running on it anyway? Secondly, what is the difference between them running on that platform and not running on it? Biden was running as "le reasonable moderate", and look how that turned out.
Listening
21hr ago
they're at least faster than the other guys.
More "less stridently involved in politics" I think. Lackey always liked to talk more than her skill could support.
I doubt they'd have to refuse nominations today.
(I've heard rather pointed "heteronormative" puns. I'd not trust to good will if it came to that.)
comfortable
21hr ago
Currently playing (among other things) Etrian Odyssey HD. I'm considering making a longer recommendation post about it, maybe in the next fun thread.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
21hr ago
· Edited 21hr ago
Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?
The rest of the world doesn't do it, with the exceptions of India and Brazil. In those two cases, yes, they're being stupid. Here is the latest official WTO stats for effectively applied trade-weighted tariff (WITS) for the top 10 countries by GDP - most data seems to be sourced from 2022 reports as far as I can tell:
| Country | WITS % |
|---|---|
| United States | 2.2% |
| China | 3.3% |
| Germany | 2.8% |
| India | 12.0% |
| Japan | 1.9% |
| United Kingdom | 3.6% |
| France | 2.8% |
| Italy | 2.8% |
| Canada | 3.4% |
| Brazil | 8.0% |
As of now, the average trade-weighted tariff for the US is sitting at about 16%.
So no, this is very much not a standard policy, which is why I'd be interested to see someone sincerely defend it as a good policy rather than as a way to own the mean libs by burning down the house we all live in.
Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.
... but Americans do benefit from free trade? Can you find me some examples of business owners or manufacturers in the United States who are happy about the tariffs? Because as far as I can tell nobody with skin in the game is very happy. Happy to be proven wrong here.
What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing?
Then you can join the tankies over in the "deeply unserious people" corner. "Destroy the current order, I'm sure somebody has a better plan" has not historically been a successful strategy.
If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?
Realistically? Make sure I have non-dollar-denominated assets, stay within my decidedly not destroyed blue enclave, and be sad as I stop being able to take pride in my country. As they say, there's a lot of ruin in a nation.
For a lot of political principles, you'll have a coalition made up of people who sincerely endorse that principle, and people who contingently endorse it so long as it's convenient for them and will abandon it at the drop of a hat when it no longer is. Annoyingly, the members of the latter group often masquerade as members of the former and even do such a good job that members of the former group are taken in by them.
I'm a principled free speech absolutist, as a consequence of which I sincerely believe that Mahmoud Khalil should be able to disseminate Hamas propaganda on college campuses without the federal government weighing down on him (or Kneecap waving Hezbollah flags, for that matter). During the period 2009-16 (and to a lesser extent 2021-24) I was under no illusions about the conservatives railing against "cancel culture": I knew full well that a significant proportion (perhaps even an absolute majority) had no interest in free speech as a general principle and just wanted to be the ones doing the cancelling. I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the Dixie Chicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush. It's a lonely life being a principled supporter of free speech: there aren't enough of us to be a real political movement on our own, so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip: Democrats when Trump is in the White House, Republicans when Newsom is; Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are. It's all the harder to be a free speech absolutist when prominent organisations which used to share our values (e.g. the ACLU) faced a choice between sticking to their guns and going under, or staying alive by skin-suiting themselves, and opted for the latter.
(I will cop to a bit of Schadenfreude about how short-sighted many of the arguments progressives were making in defense of censorship between 2009-16 were. I routinely pointed out that the "it's a private company, they can do what they want" argument was bound to come back to bite them in the ass sooner or later - this was several years before Musk's Twitter buyout. A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
21hr ago
The Blues, even in Europe, were much more bloodthirsty when they thought the original loss to Trump was just a fluke.
I'm not necessarily talking about bloodthirstiness. I think there were some lines in terms of policies that sound good but are in fact disastrous that nobody crossed prior to 2020, and then the left went performatively insane during covid, and then the Trump admin is trying to top them in performative insanity and succeeding, and it looks like Gavin fucking Newsom will probably run for president in 2028 on a platform of owning the right and probably win and continue the escalating clownworld cycle.
Maybe you're right and that won't happen though. I hope you're right.
So, they only broke the norms a bit by removing Trump from the ballot and charging him with a hundred felonies?
Sure, I say only remove half of them from the ballot and charge the Democrats with eighty felonies each. Let's de-escalate this shit!
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