domain:dynomight.net
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
The Soviet Union had no western style prisons
Of course they had. Well, not "western-style" - much, much worse - but they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisons_in_the_Soviet_Union The problem was that building a physical prison - with walls, doors, grates, beds, plumbing, etc. - was too expensive and too slow for the number of inmates the NKVD machine needed to process. So most were directed to "camps" which were much cheaper to maintain (and way worse to be in, of course).
That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from.
Err, no, Vory as a socio-cultural phenomenon existed way before the Glorious Socialist Revolution. But, since Soviet style mass imprisonment was not practiced in Russia before, at least not in the way USSR practiced it (look up how the revolutionaries sentenced to be deported to remote areas were handled by the Tsar - they were basically free to do whatever they liked there, including access to firearms for hunting, with the only requirement to periodically check in with the police. And yes, they were allowed to be accompanied by their wives, too) - the fertile ground for development of real comprehensive mafia-like structure only appeared with Gulag. Though given that many other mafias also started gaining power at the same time (e.g. Cosa Nostra, which existed way before, but started to become really powerful in the US by mid-century), I wonder if it's not part of some larger trend.
That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.
It didn't matter too much, it was hell regardless of who was around - it was designed and implemented that way. Of course, none of the above establishes that the majority of Gulag inmates are career criminals, as claimed, that point remains unproven.
Lorian_Aristedes
17hr ago
Here in Australia we’ve seen the latest example of ideological purity movements devouring themselves. What I find interesting about this particular case is that, to me, it accurately represents what seems to have happened in a lot of left wing movements over the last 20+ years.
Co-founder and former Queensland state leader of The Greens party, Drew Hutton, has failed in his appeal to his own party to reverse the revocation of his life membership. Hutton helped found the Greens with Bob Brown, both in Queensland (1990) and federally (1991), the initial ideological basis was for creating a party with “a historic mission to try to push the world to a more sustainable footing”. The parties platform that I recall, growing up as an Australian in the 90’s, was for combatting climate change, stopping deforestation, protecting fisheries, reefs and banning live export of cattle and other stock.
But both Bob Brown and Drew Hutton have long since departed from the front lines of the parties political battles. In their place we have seen a succession of leaders that promote environmentalism, but increasingly campaign on social justice issues. A party that (until the recent federal election) were making the majority of their electoral ground in inner city electorates (inner Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane).
Hutton was embroiled in drama from a twitter post (what else could cause so much drama) made over a year ago, which led to him being labelled a trans-phobe and promptly to the revocation of his life membership after he refused demands to delete the post and the comments below it. Today it was announced that the year long appeal process has not landed in his favour, but is in fact keeping with the original revocation. But if he’s espousing hatred and division online while somewhat representing his political party that he cofounded, then surely that’s a just result?
My initial thoughts were along the lines of “grandpa didn’t keep up to date with the terminology and unknowingly crossed the line”, however, after a bit of research it becomes clear that Hutton didn’t even make the hurtful comments, rather that he “provided a platform for others to do so”. Which after further research, revealed that he had publicly questioned his Party in their actions of removing membership from a different member for voicing concerns over a proposed amendment from the NSW Greens to change “pregnant people” from “pregnant women” in an upcoming act.
Interesting. I’ve run out of steam now, it’s a been a long day on site, but I wanted to post this and hear what other thoughts The Motte have - Australian and International.
Links:
Note: reposted to this weeks thread as I foolishly did not check the day of the week.
FtSoA
17hr ago
Well, can you? The closest we have seen to an attempt to get it over a country with a modern multi-layered air defense system was in fact Russia over Ukraine, and it failed.
Does Iran not count as having a modern multi-layered air defense system? They had S-300s, so second-tier Russian tech, which is mostly Ukraine had when the war started.
Of course, the question is to what extent the conclusion should be "Russia sucks" and to what extent it should be "this is a hard problem"
Russia does suck quite a lot. But it's not proven how well say the F-35 et al can do against the S-400 by either the US or Israel with top-tier SEAD. But since, somehow, the fucking Turks have a couple of batteries I'm guessing we have a pretty good idea of how to take 'em out at low risk.
but it's not like Ukraine can fly manned planes close to Russian-held territory either.
Does Ukraine have even a smidgen of the air combat power e.g. the US Marines have?
People tend to forget that one of the Syrian civil war's proximate instigating sparks- the events that might not have been necessary but helped push uncontrolled protests into violent rebellion- was a sniper campaign against protestors.
This is / was a more common suppression method in the broader autocrat toolbox in the early 2010s, especially Russia-aligned. In theory, you can not only use the the violence from the snipers to take out key organizers, or to frighten / scatter crowds, but you can even use it as a pretext to send in armed forces to 'protect the people,' including escalating your own use of force.
In practice, government snipers backfired terribly in both Syria (2011) and Ukraine (2014). Digital media distribution, more capable phone-cameras, and now adays drones make it far easier to publicize/highlight/share the presence of snipers emplaced for longer periods of time. Once the presence of the snipers is known, it changes the political context and response vis-a-vis an unknown shot from unknown source.
That may / may not be 'stupid,' and the Arab Spring challenged a lot of underlying assumptions, but it an inclination towards a certain sort of murderous brutality.
FtSoA
17hr ago
Losing civil wars has consequences. Both China and Taiwan have a "one China policy" I do believe.
Taiwan is in reality a rogue province that exists only because the US could keep the ChiComms from finishing out the civil war. It's doomed to being reabsorbed, if present trends continue.
In contrast, Ukraine is a sovereign nation, which was recognized by all parties at the time, and is making things very nasty for the Russians.
In both the international law sense (kinda fake) as of 1971, and the force of arms sense (ultimately the main thing), Taiwan is not much of a country as would be made immediately clear as soon as the US stops giving it strategic ambiguity as a defense.
ResoluteRaven
17hr ago
Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin.
I wouldn't say that the language differences between Malaysia and the Mainland are that great, certainly not compared to the variation within China itself. You could find plenty of grandmother-granddaughter pairs from Fujian (and more from Taiwan, while we're at it) that would sound about the same, as their ancestors all spoke Hokkien. Perhaps the youngest and most highly educated generation of Mainlanders are converging on a Beijing accent regardless of hometown, but such a change has only just begun and will take decades or perhaps centuries to complete.
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
17hr ago
Honestly, I was(/am?) still on the fence about the Assad gas attacks because it would be such an insanely stupid thing for him to do, but I'm more inclined to believe he makes incredibly stupid decisions since he lost in the way he did.
The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps. If you were a murderer, rapist, thief or gangster, you went to the same gulag complexes that the political prisoners went to. That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from. That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.
FtSoA
18hr ago
It doesn't work like that. Threats don't have unlimited range and effect.
Did I claim they did?
Or are you misreading what I wrote?
The Russians can't likewise say 'end all arms support tomorrow and Starlink too or we'll nuke X, Y and Z'. The US would call that bluff.
Have you not observed various rightwingers very, very concerned about calling that bluff?
I'm not making up a guy to get mad at. Very real thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/04/ukraine-russia-nuclear-war-fears
https://time.com/7295939/russia-iran-israel-us-war-nuclear-catastrophe-trump-putin-khamenei/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/russia-ukraine-nuclear-war-putin-threat/672491/
It is not at all accepted that the US would trade New York for Kiev. Credibility is based on proximity of target, perceived value and the provocativeness of behaviour to be deterred. It depends on many factors.
No shit. Consider that you're trying to condescend to someone who already knows what you're trying to explain.
Wait, are you a non-American trying to lecture me about how threats and deterrence work? The very nerve.
...no?
I may not be understanding your quote from the thread correctly, but I may not have been clear. In the quote you are citing of me, I am referring to what I believe was the WSJ account that reported that Germany was warned of the Ukrainians before the attack occurred, as well as post-incident reporting.
'We are warning you of what someone else is thinking of doing to you,' followed by 'we think the people we warned you about did what we warned they considering, which just happened,' is substantially different than 'we are warning you of what we are doing to you so you can minimize the harm we are doing to you.'
Or rather, if warning someone of third party hostile intent is evidence of responsibility, I'm not sure I can contribute anything on the subject.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18hr ago
I was just about to write that description of you.
ResoluteRaven
18hr ago
If being highly literate is the standard for knowing a language, then the vast majority of people in the world do not even know their native language. This is not to mention cases where someone's mother tongue lacks a literary tradition or even a writing system. It seems to me that in practice most people equate "speaking a language" with something like a B1 level on the CEFR, though your typical Anglophone would probably start saying they speak Spanish or French at an even lower level than that.
I do agree that most people underestimate how hard it is to get from that basic level to high literacy e.g. it would probably be easier for me to learn half a dozen (related) languages to B1 than to get to C2 in my heritage language despite the enormous head start of having literally spoken it at home my entire life. At the end of the day though, language is a tool, and what matters is if it serves its purpose i.e. if you can sing lullabies to your children in your mother tongue, haggle at the market in your local trade language, and read a book in the literary language of your imperial overlords, then you can have a fine life without bothering to "fully learn" any of them.
JarJarJedi
18hr ago
If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.
JarJarJedi
18hr ago
Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?
I'd say more likely any person who would end up in this situation would be a criminal with the probability > 95%. I mean to set off the whole thing, the person obviously needs to be black, poor (a cop may arrest an affluent looking man, but much less likely to manhandle him), drug addict (otherwise he wouldn't die) and with poor impulse control (otherwise he'd just quietly go into the car). And it should happen in a large city, otherwise it'd be impossible to make a huge deal out of it. The chance that a person with such profile, statistically, doesn't have a record is not very large, to be honest.
And I am sure that- in your superiority and/or boredom- you will no longer waste your time responding to any of my posts that are not directly to you ever again.
In return, I will continue to strive to do the same for you.
Do you feel like these snarky comebacks add anything, impress or convince others?
Your example was actually a fair skit for showing the limits of a hyperagent mentality.
The short discussion, as much of a caricature as it starts as for Agent A, is rather more damning for Agent B, the supposed reasonable party and hyperagent proxy. By literally having a discussion that does not include an intermediary Agent C who perpetrated unspecified war crimes, whose existence is acknowledged but also dismissed by Agent B in favor of prosecuting Agent A on implicit rather than even explicit responsibility, it demonstrates the hyperagent theorist failure and inclination to unjustly allocation punishments and sanctions on the basis of convenience and accessibility, rather than agency is the nominal crimes.
There are interesting angles, historical examples, and differences/hypocrisies that could easily be pointed at. After all, at no point does Agent B ever actually assert that Agent A had any knowledge of, issued any direction for, had any operational control over, or ever voiced any support for. Agent B's accusation and prosecution of Agent A as the responsible party could run word-for-word even if Agent C actively deceived, defied, circumvented, and even defected from Agent A in order to commit the war crimes. Agent A is responsible merely for having supported Agent C at some point, not for having supported Agent C for the purpose of the atrocity alluded to. There is no criminal intent required, or even awareness.
The allocation of responsibility to Agent A by Agent B is fundamentally uninterested in the agency, moral responsibility, and moral culpability of Agent C. Agent B merely treats Agent A as the hyperagent on the basis of providing support, regardless of the degree of support (A is not claimed to be the decisive supporter), the exclusivity of support (A is not claimed to be the only supporter), or the restrictions that were attempted (A is not claimed to have taken not mitigations). Agent B, in doing so, begins to validate the nominally farcical accusation by Agent A that Agent B is naive, simplistic, and ignoring cause and effect.
If it was intentional, it was well done, with multiple levels. If it was not, that was my error, and I apologize for confusing you.
JarJarJedi
18hr ago
- Tried Annihilation Score the second time after a break, but then caught myself thinking "why I am forcing myself to read a book which I clearly hate? I'm not even paid for this!" and dropped it. Probably done with Stross for a while.
- Read Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, which, unsurprisingly, is an overview of how racial classifications work in the US. No partisan politics (well at least not noticeable to me, with all my biases), just a meticulous description of the whole thing. I thought it's a mess but boy was I underestimating it by orders of magnitude. Truly eye-opening, though not in any optimistic way.
- Started Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and got about halfway so far. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but so far it's going surprisingly well, even though I'm getting a bit of "show about nothing" vibe.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
You’re trying to have it both ways. You claim that Antony Blinkin and the State Department do not speak for Ukraine, then you turn around and list all the ways that they have MASSIVE LEVERAGE over Ukraine. So which is it? Are the documented statements by official representatives of the American government that Ukraine will have elections when they have Crimea (read: when pigs fly and the sun rises in the west) a legitimate statement of policy of not? Why should I ignore the rantings of Ukraine’s very rich, very influential benefactor that could scotch their war effort on a whim?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
I may or may not be an AI skeptic by your definition - I think it's quite likely that 2030 is a real year, and think it's plausible that even 2050 is a real year.
Absolutely not, at least by standards! You acknowledge the possibility that we might get AGI in the near-term, and I see no firm reason to over index on a given year. Most people I'd call "skeptics" deny the possibility of AGI at all, or rule out any significant chance of near-term AGI, or have modal timelines >30 years.
I agree that LLMs are missing something, but I'm agnostic on whether brute-force scaling will get us to undisputable AGI. It may or may not. Perhaps online learning, as you hint at, might suffice.
Still, LLMs have a tendency not to actually coin new terms, and to fail to use the newly coined terms fluently in the rare cases that they do coin such a term (which is probably why they don't do it - if coining a new term was effective for problem solving, it would have been chiseled into their cognition by the RLVR process).
I wonder if RLHF plays a role. I don't think human data annotators would be positively inclined towards models that made up novel words.
Thank you for taking the time to respond!
Tiber727
18hr ago
Ukraine is already too weak to attack Russia by choice, and that's not going to change no matter what the outcome of this is. I don't believe this is actually Russia's condition.
As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.
I would contend that Russia would also not accept this proposition, but even without that contention you already make it sound like a nonstarter.
If another country were actually willing to face Russia, they could do so right now. At this point, I think that if almost anyone but the U.S. said that they were sending troops and kept those troops in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't actually use nukes.
JarJarJedi
18hr ago
Yeah that's why pretty much stopped playing - to have a good game takes at least a whole weekend, maybe longer, for pretty much every game I'd enjoy. And I can't justify spending that much time to myself. I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it, but probably won't do anything like that again for a while.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19hr ago
Acquiescence+aftercare from the US was reportedly that the Americans told the Germans before the attack, as well as soon after.
My opinion is Biden could basically call Scholz and say "I hope none of your folks are working on these pipelines of yours, because we're blowing them up tomorrow".
@dr_analog, you got your wish!
That's good! You'd probably have a vision problem if you did. One typically does not see stunning rebukes of foreign, and former, political appointees who are providing rhetorical, financial, and military support to your own side.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
19hr ago
If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.
What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).
Both! One does not need to speak for someone to have influence over them. There is no contradiction of Ukraine not wanting to needlessly offend the Biden administration (not doing a stunning rebuking a gesture of support), and the Secretary of State not speaking for Ukraine.
Of course not. That's not how national policies work, particularly when the American government representatives saying so is no longer an American government representative, and has been fired / traded out for someone willing to execute a new policy.
Aside from that rantings are safely ignored in general, because Antony Blinkin is not Ukrain'es very rich, very influential benefactor anymore. He is, in a sense, an unemployed bum.
Blinken's influence was tied to his status-at-the-time of being President Biden's Secretary of State. While the Secretary of State, Blinken had substantial sway over the Biden administration's dispersal of material and monetary aid. This is why he was very rich- as rich as the American government cared to be- and very influential- with influence at the highest levels of the American government.
The status went out the door when current Secretary of State Marco Rubio became the very rich, very influential benefactor that could scotch their war effort at a whim. Rubio has not, to date, taken any position on the urgency (or infinite delay) in Ukrainian elections. When he does, he is not bound by Antony Blinkin's preference or prior statements.
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