domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.
I don't know about that. As a fellow disillusioned-by-liberalism, I'd say it's much less about letting totalitarians get started, as that's a response from within the liberal framework, it's that liberalism itself is folly. You can't have "separation of church and state" or "neutral" institutions, you will always promote specific values. There are some values of liberalism I admire, but others I reject wholeheartedly, hence the conflict. I'm not a fan of them pretending to be tolerant, neutral, and above it all either, but the conflict would exist regardless.
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway.
This definitely seems to be the main explainer, but it seems to be missing something. No reply has yet even tried to explain why government needs to buy up and own private enterprise, something you would expect them to be able to do if they truly believed it was a beneficial and sound policy and were going to do it anyway.
So what's the motivator there then? I think some of it is just circling the wagons, a generic ex post facto justification for decisions that they otherwise would find alarming and dangerous for big government to do.
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as "our country" or "our citizens". Certainly I do not.
Well if you're no longer loyal to the nation that's up to you. But America is still my home and I want what's best for us and the citizenship.
Forming, equipping, and paying a police force is "stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption" in a number of ways. It's just that it's less stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption than not having police, given the situation we find ourselves in. If the situation were different, police might not be worth it. But it isn't, so they are.
Ok so having a police force isn't stupid, inefficient and counterproductive then. If you truly believe that the shifts on conservative policy are the same, then why not explain them on the merit?
Instead of "government has to own businesses because libs", you could explain how government owning businesses and directing corporate policy across the nation now improves the health of the economy after decades of conservatives saying big government and socialist control are bad the same way you can explain how police are good.
I observe that previous governments, Democrat and Republican, have chronically failed to exercise fiscal responsibility. I observe that attempting fiscal responsibility now will cost significant votes and political power, which will naturally flow to the fiscally-irresponsible. Therefore, I conclude that while I would strongly prefer fiscal responsibility, there is no way to get there from here, and so I abandon this as a political goal because it does not appear to be practically achievable. Therefore, I no longer care about fiscal responsibility or the debt, and I apportion my political priorities and values to areas where victory seems more probable.
Not pursuing something you find untenable as a policy goal is understandable. But do you now believe that ever growing debt is a good thing? Do you now believe our growing borrowing is a smart long term fiscal decision?
If you don't think you can convince other Americans to care at all it makes sense to give up, but it wouldn't make sense to change your mind just because of that.
And yet, the evidence has shown that they cannot prevent endemic free speech violations, nor even significantly impede them. When it mattered, they could not protect my speech in any meaningful sense, nor will they be able to do so in the future. Their impact is, to a first approximation, theoretical.
You're right, random civil rights organizations can not do much in the face of a population that keeps voting for and pushing for anti free speech politicians. In this same way they will have meaningful wins here and there against Trump, but ultimately unless we can get the population on board with traditional civil liberty and the first amendment, government suppression of speech will continue to grow.
The model they operate off, where only government speech controls impinge on the first amendment, is a suicide pact that I respectfully decline to involve myself in.
That's how the founding fathers set up our system, were they suicidal? No, they were forward looking revolutionary heroes. Their primary concern is government, and even today governments across the world are the most serious form of censorship. If you don't believe that, you can go look at other countries and you'll find it's government suppression of speech in Russia, in China, in North Korea, in pretty much every single dictatorship. Even in the freer nations, crackdowns on speech like the recent UK bill are government done.
magicalkittycat
11hr ago
Ok, you still haven't addressed a single actual point as to why doing bad counterproductive and harmful policy to the US makes sense as a form of vengeance, just keep justifying that you want revenge.
Pitt19802
11hr ago
Can I ask how old you are?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this reads like something I might have written between 20-25 or so.
I think a big part of transitioning from the academic universe to something approximating the 'real world' is that no one is going to walk you through life.
It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.
You get to decide the itinerary, you get to decide the score card too.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
11hr ago
More and Pompey didn't lose by playing cooperatebot against defectbot.
More never tried to fight the Reformation Parliament and the Succession Oath - it was as obvious to him as it was to everyone else that with the King's mind made up there was nothing to fight. Saint Thomas More was playing a different game, with the only prize worth having in his estimation not being of this world, so he decided that martyrdom was a better alternative to going along to get along.
I'm not going to litigate which of Pompey and Caesar defected first, but at the critical decision point they are both all-in on defection - Pompey just lost the resulting war.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
For most policy positions, the revenge effect is not there. If the other party bans abortion or immigration, you will not be tempted to do the same in retaliation.
The retaliation is mostly on procedural norms which get changed to wage the culture war. If your side is firing all the federal employees who support the other side, then my side will do the same whenever it is in power. If your side is deploying the national guard to unfriendly cities, then my side will deploy the national guard to unfriendly cities. If your side is rounding up residents and deporting them to El Salvador megaprisons without due process for having some tattoos which may or may not be gang related, then my side will interpret displaying a confederate flag as renouncing one's US citizenship and deport them to Venezuela, so your side will retaliate by doing the same for the pride flag.
Of course, it is hard to play tit-for-tat with perfect proportionality, because situations are not symmetrical. So things escalate over time.
functor
12hr ago
I have a metal water bottle which got squashed. I filled it with water and put it in the freezer and it popped back out.
cae_jones
12hr ago
Ultrasound is in a weird spot because it's evolving from a "nobody in the ED to can do this" to "we are starting to train everyone from day one to do this because its safe and cheap" but we are in the middle of that process. Wouldn't be shocked if in 5-10 years most PCP offices were doing it.
Wasn't there a story recently about a farmer getting in trouble for doing his own Ultrasound on his cattle? It made it sound like it's taking longer than it should to liberalize for reasons that sound ... guildy?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
12hr ago
· Edited 12hr ago
(None of these are exactly my own views. This is an ironman post.)
Okay, so, you've probably heard of rabies. It's an incurable disease (at the very least it used to be, and it still is once symptoms appear) spread by biting that makes people bite others and be violent and semi-mindless in general. In real life it's also invariably fatal, which drastically cuts down on humans' ability to spread it to >1 other humans. But imagine a rabies that didn't do this - rabid people didn't die of rabies (or of thirst), they just stayed violently insane for the term of their natural lives. Imagine further that we didn't have a vaccine against it (this was even true until recently). Call it super-rabies. Or peeps. Or the Zombie Virus.
So, let's say that with the incubation period and everything, 5% of your population caught super-rabies before your government got around to noticing and acting. Now, what are you going to do about it?
- You can't just let super-rabid people walk around until they bite someone. Proof: since such a bite transmits super-rabies and you're letting the bitten person walk around in turn, this doesn't deplete the supply of super-rabid people walking around free to bite people (and indeed it will increase unless your response to a bite is instant, as some will bite a second person). Everyone will get infected, no more civilisation.
- You can't imprison them. You're talking about 5% of the population, and you can't either stick them with each other (well, you could, but they'd likely kill each other) or put them individually in less than the most secure facilities (because they'd bite the guards/staff, which will gradually increase the amount of people you need to imprison, not to mention the question of who'd volunteer to take that risk). The expense would bankrupt society, and then they'd escape and civilisation falls again.
You have to kill them. The lunatics already gone bitey? Mow them down with machine guns. The ones potentially bitten? Imprisonment for the incubation period, kill them if they go bitey or if they offer the least resistance. People protecting the super-rabid? We don't have time for this shit.
Yes, they're still human. Yes, they're innocents, insofar as they didn't choose their damnation. But you don't get to have a society that cares about respecting innocent life if you don't have a society. This is a state of exception; you mop up the existential threat as quickly as you can by whatever means are necessary, and then you go back to enjoying the sweet fruits of your bitter, bitter labours.
In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.
That's one viewpoint. Another is that SJ is not itself an exceptional threat, but is an obstacle to solving other exceptional threats such as WWIII or AI by forcing every single discussion onto simulacra levels 2 and 3 (e.g., the initial SJ reaction to Covid of "the real issue is people using worries about infection as excuses for hating Asians!") or just by it directly focusing excessively on internal, day-to-day political squabbles and missing things that haven't come by in a while. (One thing that I will note about this viewpoint is that it's quite time-dependent. Mounting a massive anti-SJ crusade weakens you in the short-term in exchange for strengthening you in the medium-term; if you think crunch time's imminent, as I do, it's too late.)
Yet another is those that actually, seriously, have given up on liberalism. SJ's excesses have convinced them that liberalism was a mistake. They actually have come around to believe those SJ tracts about how you can't have a free society without banning a bunch of ideas; they just think SJ itself's the weed that needs to be removed. And, well, it's not like there's nothing to the claim that SJ is the same sort of thing as the Nazis (by which I mean the literal NSDAP). Try reading the Wikipedia article on Gleichschaltung, for instance. You couldn't just have a youth club in Nazi Germany; it had to be a Nazi youth club. You couldn't just have a bowling club; it had to be a Nazi bowling club. Now, go SJ-spotting around the Internet, or real life, particularly in June. You can't have a nerd forum in the SJ internet; it has to be an SJ nerd forum. You can't just have a medical establishment; it has to be an SJ health establishment. Those subscribing to this viewpoint think that liberalism is just letting these kinds of totalitarians get started. (NB: while I use a popular SJ infographic for demonstrative purposes that claims to talk about Popper, I am compelled to note for educational purposes that this is not what Popper actually said. But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
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.
Do you think people who criticize Nayib Bukele question the effectiveness of his policies?
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
It seems very likely that everything you’re saying is true but thé limited NHS budget wasn’t getting stuck with the bill(thé Italian government and the pope were gonna take care of it). What this actually looks like is petty bureaucrats being thin skinned self important control freaks- again, thé NHS wasn’t being forced to treat them, wasn’t being asked to pay to treat them, was merely being asked not to prevent seeking treatment in a foreign hospital.
It only connects all the major cities of the world if
- It can fly supersonic over land. At the moment the discussions between Boom and the Trump admin are on the basis that they will only be able to fly supersonic over CONUS if the boom doesn't reach the ground, which means slowing down to Mach 1.3 and increased fuel consumption. The politics of Concorde was that countries that didn't build it were disinclined to be generous about letting it fly in their airspace, and Boom will face the same problem with countries that are not the USA.
- They release a plane with long enough range for trans-Pacific routes. (Overture has a planned range of 4250nm and LAX-Tokyo is 4768)
- The economics of an all-business class service (which requires 80% occupancy, mostly at full-fare, to break even) work out on enough routes. Apart from a long history of failed all-premium operations, the big problem they face here is the lower supersonic premium on eastbound flights - a 4-hour supersonic TATL is too short to work as a night flight but doing it as a daytime flight means that you lose 5/6 hours work time to the time change. A flat bed on a subsonic night flight offers a lot of people a better value proposition for their $3500. Concorde had to sell cheap eastbound tickets as a bucket list experience to fill the plane.
Right now the only city pair which has supported an all-premium flight sustainably is London-NYC*, and it currently doesn't. The British Airways Babybus is a pretty direct comparator to what Boom would be offering (all-premium service marketed to full-fare business travellers that offered significant time savings by running from London City and pre-clearing US immigration while refueling in Shannon), and the economics was marginal. (It was cancelled during the pandemic and never reinstated). As well as the problems selling enough full-fare business class tickets to keep the plane flying, there is the issue that most of the airports that might welcome an all-premium flight are slot-constrained, and a 777 makes more money out of the slot than a small all-premium flight.
You need fat point-to-point routes to make Boom work, which are long enough for supersonic flight to be worth it, short enough to be within range, and mostly over water. On day 1 that means the premium trans-Atlantic city pairs only. Business travellers won't use a less-than-daily service, and the whole point of flying supersonic is lost if you end up with a layover when a non-stop subsonic flight was available.
It's a great product (assuming they can actually build the Symphony engine, which I rate as a 70% shot) and if they do sell a $7000 LHR-JFK return I will probably fly it. But "Concorde at a third to half the price" gets you regular supersonic service on 10-20 city pairs vs 1 - not a transformation of the airline industry similar to the 707 or the 747. Boom are not proposing to change the physics of supersonic flight or the economics of the airline industry.
* London-NYC is comfortably the busiest long-haul city pair, with about 40% more seats than London-Dubai in 2nd place (overflies densely-populated Europe so probably not supersonic-friendly) and almost double number 3(Paris-NYC). Number 4 is London-LA (out of Overture range if they have to slow down over land) and number 5 is Singapore-Melbourne (dependent on Australian government permission to make sonic booms over the Outback). Tokyo-Singapore and Seoul-Singapore would be perfect supersonic routes if they were fat enough to support daily service, which appears to be marginal.
TeknOShEeP
13hr ago
Metalworking? No- despite the popular misconception water and ice are considerably more compressible than essentially all metals. You'd probably want something more along the lines of Dexpan, which when mixed with water can (according to the tech specs) provide 18 ksi of compressive force, which might be enough to form some softer metals like copper or aluminum.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
Yes
See, for example, this reddit explanation of the unique vertical level design of DS1. Imo none of the other entries, including ER, have done it quite as masterfully, even if they clearly were inspired by it. Which is fine; They have done other things better.
Edit: Btw, DS3, since you mentioned it, is probably my least favorite of the bunch. DS2 at least tried a bit more to do its own thing. DS3 returned to the roots, yes, but in the process feels the most like a rehash of DS1, but invariably worse since a copy never reaches up to the original. That's imo one of the reasons why ER was deliberately given a different name, marketed as something different and has at least some clear deviations in the design, such as the open world.
There is also the element in which, since the DS entries are explicitly intended to be different iterations of the same loops, makes them work together better than alone. See this post which in my view - despite me agreeing that DS3 is a weaker entry! - entirely misses the point of the DS3 design: By the time of this iteration, the cycle has been going on too long, the fire has been lit too often, so that the sacrifice has to be ever greater for but a sliver of the greatness achieved earlier. The message is clear: This time around, just lighting it yet again will not be sufficient. You have to find another way. It's deliberate.
Edit2: I also think, since, as you mentioned, a lot of the design choices are easy to miss & somewhat subject to interpretation, DS games are especially susceptible to the tendency to always like the first game of the bunch you played. You'll always be more willing to look into all the details, all the theories, etc. the first time around. The more you play, the more you tire of it, so you'll miss more and more on average.
FtttG
13hr ago
It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.
More than that - it's a known issue of every system that agents who are optimising for seeking, maintaining and consolidating power within that system will outcompete agents who are optimising for anything else.
FtttG
13hr ago
“When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while.
I would love to hear some specific examples of occasions on which Democrats went high while the Republicans were going low during the Obama administration.
JTarrou
14hr ago
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!
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
14hr 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
14hr 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
14hr 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.
Sometimes it is interesting to which depths this phenomenon runs, how self unaware people can be. Famously Marx extensively used the word ideology as a pejorative descriptor for ways ruling class keeps workers in the dark in the class conflict. Of course he piled all that criticism while keeping Marxism itself outside of such framework, as if it was implicitly true and correct stance and thus it could not be considered an ideology by definition.
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