domain:academic.oup.com
2rafa
3m ago
India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper?
45% of Indians are agricultural workers. In England, that threshold was last fallen beneath around 1675. In America, it happened around 1880. In India, it obviously has yet to happen.
Everything is downstream of this. In the aftermath of independence, the Congress regime (and that is what it was) decided that adopting state-driven industrial policy in the socialist mould was necessary to overcome this. The result was chaos and food insecurity, because the huge mass of rural Indians still had extremely high birth rates. The response, because in a democracy every peasant farmer had a vote, was to invest a huge proportion of the state's resources into incentivizing those peasant farmers with agricultural price floors while also implementing a highly protectionist policy regime that prevented farm consolidation and agricultural efficiency, which in turn prevented urbanization at the degree necessary for the industrial transition.
The % of agricultural workers is the most important metric for understanding India. You can understand nothing without it and understand everything with it. India has a space program and tech outsourcers, but these are the equivalent of the royal astronomer or the imperial library circa 1237; they have not undergone the industrial revolution, let alone anything after that. Imagine a Western country in which peasants obtained universal suffrage around 1400, but which was too large and well-armed to be invaded. This is India. The masses vote themselves the most generous affirmative action policy in the world, with 60% of all government jobs and college places reserved for lower castes and tribes. They vote a huge percentage of the state budget to be devoted to minimum agricultural prices, which make staple crops more expensive in India than they are in the West, and halt mechanization, which further disincentivizes urbanization (because urban workers rely on cheap food). Interstate commerce is guarded by labyrinthine protectionism, all of which leads to the inevitable corruption.
Modi attempted some tiny, granular reforms. Tens of thousand of haggard peasant smallholders marched on Delhi. The Supreme Court, the only true authority in India, stayed and then forced the repeal of the laws (which the government happily accepted) for reasons of social order and societal stability. But India's problems aren't a result of any allegiance with America, which is limited enough as it is (it is if anything closer to Russia).
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
We are, of course, in agreement here.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
4m ago
If you think the US right wing, more importantly the nationalists among it are economically liberal these days you have missed a few political cycles.
The reason Trump wants tariffs so bad (independently of whether they achieve this end) is quite literally the opposite of your claim.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11m ago
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
Yeah I played it alone and it was kind of lame. Idk I got stuck at the part with the orcs in moria and just got super bored.
Rov_Scam
27m ago
If your budget is only $200, then you can't be picky about features. Hell, if your budget is only $200, offer that for the Trek, because that's about as good as you can reasonably expect for that price. The public has for some reason come to expect that a relatively complex item with a lot of moving parts, some of which need to be machined, shouldn't cost more than $500. It's like expecting to get a decent new car for $10,000.
SkoomaDentist
35m ago
Yeah. It's a "kill it with fire and nuke the entire site from orbit just to be sure" type of feeling.
I have no problem with closeup photos of plants, eyes, amphibians or lizards but as soon as it's insects or arachnids (and probably some arthropods), I nope the hell out.
I have to note: I am undecided on what's better for me. I argue for the sake of argument. I believe the current US policy will end up making everyone poorer and American global standing lesser, as in the long term it will guarantee a separate technological civilization existing and building in and around China. So, given how undesirable your hegemony is, maybe that's overall a good thing and I should shill for export controls. Maybe this mad bet on the AGI race will work and I'm wrong, though.
The traitor, the treasonous little worm
This made me smile. Very "nationalize SpaceX" energy. You do realize that your Hail Mary attempt at preserving hegemony largely depends on him? For some reason, Loyal Americans run their hardware companies into the ground. I do think he believes that this game will continue for decades, and China is not going anywhere, it's not going to critically fall behind, and so he wants to keep a piece of that market for the US. And that can be done.
China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.
The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold
Asinine. As it's said, "there is nothing to be learned in matters of faith". If anything, this describes Intel. No, market demand is not irrelevant, PRC corporations actually have incentives beyond 5-year plans, largely because they have slim margins. Americans really have worked themselves up into a frenzy with this doctrine that everything in China is massively subsidized and so can be unprofitable forever. It's not about subsidies, they're just more productive than you and have a more ruthless market, to the extent that the state is trying – and failing! – to arrest "involution".
Just because you hate the CCP really, really hard does not give you the license to spew bullshit. Being very confident doesn't help. It is not, in fact, possible to create a competitive ecosystem by decree, even if it's super-duper maximum pressure. This just takes too many people. I know DeepSeek has been asked to and declined to do serious training runs on Huawei due to immaturity of CANN stack. They have this choice, for a little longer. They're typical. There are maybe 2 Chinese companies doing large-scale training on Ascends, and one is iFlyTek, which has been on entity list since forever and has no choice; they haven't achieved much. Even Huawei themselves are yet to release a single compelling model, they literally can't keep top-tier people interested as they leave to companies like DeepSeek. Huawei has 200K employees, for reference.
On a smaller scale, we've seen this when Microsoft attempted to make Windows Phone a thing. Tremendous effort went into it, a formidable corporation was banging against the wall for years, subsidizing the app marketplace, and it all fizzled out. No developers, no users, no network effects, no future.
We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty
One of those "billions" is in China, can you really take credit for it? I call bullshit, mostly it's just post-WWII economic growth the nexus of which was the US for reasons of not being bombed out, not some profoundly benign and productive doctrine or culture or people. India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper? I am in your "sphere of influence", so to speak, and it really doesn't look like you're spreading prosperity around. In fact it looks like you have nothing to spread, you don't invest, your own riches are a speculative bubble and you mainly "supply demand". You're demolishing your nuclear infrastructure, you don't build anything except datacenters, certainly you can't boast of turning Pakistan into a solar-powered economy or something. Outside a few premium items like these very GPUs, your wares are non-competitive trash that people abroad have to be compelled to buy, you're even pathetically forcing third parties to share your tariff regime to cling to some markets (very funny in this context of "market share is useless"). Yes, in theory you could cheat with AGI, but ask yourself, if a cheat on the scale of AGI is needed to redeem your claim to hegemony, what do you, as a people, stand to contribute? Having created the solutions where you've got AGI earlier than others?
But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world.
This is a very tiresome talking point. They didn't have the benefit of a sane administration until 1978, after which they've consistently had the highest growth rate of all major economies. In any meaningful sense, including consumption spending, general QoL. GDP per capita comparisons are misleading. I've been reading on Taiwan recently and it seems that they're straight up having poorer lives than coastal Mainland Chinese in comparable population centers; like, they have higher costs of living and don't have meaningfully higher salaries. This, too, is Pax Americana; not even the smallest and most important clients can be sure to prosper. What else do we compare to? Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong? Please.
Now, history doesn't start in 1978. But nations change, even under the same regime and slogans. The US of today is not the US of 1960s either.
surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
I think this is just wounded ego. You're used to hegemony, it's part of your personal identity, and it slipping away, likely forever, is perceived as existential horror, with appropriate rationalizations. This sounds about as compelling as Russian noises about NATO threat and absolute rationality of going all in to "denazify" Ukraine. In reality Russia could well survive Ukrainian integration with the West, it was merely humiliating (and deserved, certainly so after 2014 when we've demonstrated our mettle in managing "people's republics") but not affecting the survivability of the Russian state, and the costs of war have already far exceeded any sane estimate for costs of doing nothing.
China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry
Like what, using AI to design floor maps? They're doing it already, it doesn't take a lot of compute. A rather contrived concern.
As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage.
The thing is, chips are very, very hard and ensuring the supply chain is all outside China has been one of the few truly great American political successes (not that it was hard, this chain was mostly complete when China was around $2000 GDP per capita) . The trifecta of ASML-TSMC-NVDIA (nevermind their multiple one-of-a-kind suppliers like ZEISS, and EDA software) will genuinely take China a decade or more to even approach. They will not have competitive chips. They will have (already have announced for Q1 2026) competitive systems, but those only exist because NVDIA is prevented from exporting the good stuff.
Again, I don't know what I should "rationally" shill for here. And anyway this might be too late. The US has clearly stated its hostility, burned the bridges, and will have to "lose", in a war of its own creation.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
56m ago
Long-term it’s probably true that this kind of immigration is good for the economy and makes the pie larger for everybody, but it’s just too much too fast.
It doesn't. Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add). US still has positive real GDP per capita growth, but that's probably due to US having a larger population able to absorb more immigration and the fact the US is still the centre of technology and innovation.
The pie technically does get bigger, but the number of people who eat the pie outpaces it. Liberal politicians love it, because it does technically grow GDP even if it makes their countrymen individually poorer. I'm reminded of the fact that Boris Johnson increased immigration ("Boriswave") because he wanted positive press coverage from the Financial Times. Any GDP growth is probably captured by the rich anyway, due to the wage suppression caused by immigration among other things.
Maybe once upon a time immigration does increase GDP (per capita) when immigrants were of a higher quality, able to integrate well, and came over to work and had no expectation of being supported by the state. Those days are long gone.
5434a
58m ago
The aerial photos looked like a lot of people, but then consider that Glastonbury Festival is supposed to be 100-200,000 attendees. Using that as a comparison I'd say ~100k is a lot more credible than 1 million, and 3 million (Glastonbury x >10) is total bollocks. Even the anti Iraq war march only claims 1 million.
Re political discourse, there seems to be an ongoing process of the window shifting to encompass more right leaning views and less left leaning/woke views. I'd say it started with the BBC dropping Stonewall in 2021 and the ruling on Maya Forstater's case in the same period. Now it's moving beyond trans scepticism to include anti immigration and the sort of birth rate discourse I've been reading here for years.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I think that one key difference is that your landscaper worked hard to be able to afford that 80k truck, and the fact that it's probably a business expense if he's using it for landscaping and he's making payments that come out of company revenues complicates matters further; relatively poor people who own businesses often have surprisingly expensive pieces of capital equipment or real estate that they wouldn't otherwise own. But even if that's your landscaper's personal vehicle, he didn't just get the money for it as the result of one meeting that didn't involve him doing anything other than making a few phone calls. Asking for preferential treatment during a bidding process probably doesn't result in much more work, if any, than the person with authority has to do anyway. Your landscaper probably does a lot more work for a lot less money in the normal course of business than a corrupt public official does. $2,000 requires at least a solid week of work for most people. There's obviously a premium if the work is illegal, but how much do small-time drug dealers make? What's the overall risk of being caught? The Homan case didn't even involve as much risk as a normal case—if Trump wins and he's in a position to act on the bribe, there's a good chance Trump will kill the investigation. If Harris wins or he doesn't get the position in the Trump administration, then there's no case against him because you can't bribe someone who doesn't have the power to do anything (I will gladly accept $50,000 from anyone here to give them favorable treatment in government contracts). When you break down all the contributing factors and ignore the moral dimension, it would be more surprising if he didn't do it for the relatively large sum of $50,000, which is a good chunk of most Americans' annual income.
plural
1hr ago
I've always felt the way Mulder describes it in War of the Coprophages on the X-files about most insects that are big enough to fully make out their body parts. Zooming accomplishes the same effect.
Mulder: No, no, no. I’m not afraid of them. I hate them. One day, back when I was a kid, I was climbing this tree when I noticed this leaf walking towards me. It took forever for me to realize that it was no leaf.
Scully: A praying mantis?
Mulder: Yeah, I had a praying mantis epiphany and as a result, I screamed. And not, not a girlie scream, but the scream of someone being confronted by some before unknown monster that had no right existing on the same planet I inhabited. ... The mysteries of the natural world were revealed to me that day but instead of being astounded I was repulsed.
jkf
1hr ago
A provincial premier in BC was brought down (in part) a while ago because some shady builders in his neighbourhood built him a porch and then wouldn't send him a bill -- it was never clear whether or not there was actually anything in it for the builders, but I remember being like, "man, I could build a deck too -- is that really all it takes to get politicians on your side"?
2rafa
1hr ago
I doubt it was more than about 200,000. 3 million was obviously laughable. Aerial footage suggests fewer than at some of the largest Gaza protests, which police estimated had ~300k protesters. The largest ever protest in the UK was against the Iraq War, police estimated 750,000 people attended, there was little aerial footage but from some pictures of the route it does appear substantially larger.
Atian_1
1hr ago
This is true in my experience. I know anti-vaxxers pre-covid. They were largely new-age types, very liberal before woke was a thing, and hypochondriacs/against letting their children play outside much. I will say they were anti-doctor visits/checkups though. But like the OP said maybe not if there was something really serious like asthma.
The new post-covid antivaxxers are conservative folk that probably do let their kids play outside/in the dirt more than the average "pro"-vaxxer, but I don't think these are in any studies yet.
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
It would be a much more worthwhile post to delve into why these YouTube 'philosophers' of yesteryear stopped doing what they were doing.
One thing to note would be that almost half of these creators stopped doing what they were doing because of altercations with voices that were further to the right.
Such as Kraut organizing a secret discord server to finally lift the veil on scientific racism once and for all, and in the process torching every single 'liberal' ethos one can think of. Down to meticulously deleting every single negative comment on the videos he made on the topic. Videos that were full of errors, both factual and conceptual, that left one wondering how on earth this man ever captured anyone's ear.
Or Sargon, who championed the freedom of speech of rape jokes all the way to national television in the name of an already established political party. At a time where most right of center minds were fixed firmly on the mass rape of young British girls at the hands of immigrants. Becoming publicly known as 'UKIP rape joke man'. A mass rape that Sargon claimed was always going to happen regardless of immigration. As if there was some invisible hand in the sky that doled out rape to meet a quota. I think it's fair to say Carl Benjamin has moved on to much greener pastures with traditionalism rather than holding on to his half baked 'Liberalist' philosophy.
To that extent it's hard to understand how most of these guys ever got anywhere outside of just being loud voices that spoke against feminism in an appealing accent (or not, Vee and Layman sound terrible). But considering how obviously out of depth they were when it came to anything that wasn't a howling feminist, I think we are better for them being gone. Hell, maybe they didn't even do anti-feminism all that well either. How would one know?
Regardless, Asmongold does the slop better, and there are plenty of right wing voices that do genuine political content better. I don't miss the awful political commentary at all, which was only designed to tactfully place somewhere safe from the 'extreme right' and the 'lunatic left'. Without ever saying or believing anything relevant or real.
3472094371
1hr ago
I'm a sucker for such scenes as
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1hr ago
Casually following, mostly through osmosis not actively pursuing, I believed the protesters claimed 3mil attendees, the official number is ~110k. The official number has some smart-looking analysis backing it up, the protesters have drone footage that certainly seems to show a lot of people, but frankly I have no idea how to estimate large crowd sizes. My instinct is to believe the smaller number, if only because in almost every protest I can remember ever hearing numbers reported on, the police reported number is usually several times smaller than the protest leadership's claimed number.
KMC
1hr ago
What, did he decide to take a piss sitting down and the other boys made fun of him for doing that?
My impression is that the class was doing a bathroom stop on the way back/to from some out of class activity (PE? Music?), and he was told to line up with the boys. This really upset him, although I'm not sure if it was at the time or he exploded when he got home.
And yet from your description he has hair long enough to 'wear it like a girl', and is not only patient enough for someone (probably a girl he gets along with) to paint his nails, but not be troubled by what it means.
To be fair, I had long hair until this year, and his older brother has even longer hair, never cut down his back, which he never wears like a girl. I figured that was enough to demonstrate that long hair isn't just for girls.
It's his mom who does his nails, I'm not sure there are 4 or 5 year olds I'd trust with nail polish.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
2hr ago
The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line
Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
unlike scientific theories
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
As a thought experiment, the Internet in some ways looks like large-scale direct democracy (literally upvotes). Beyond the tractability questions of direct democracy a few centuries ago, the form of government is also generally acknowledged to suffer from known issues like tyranny of the majority, or even by particularly motivated minorities. Which seems a lot like what we see going wrong in online culture, in my opinion.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2hr ago
I for my part would certainly appreciate such a post.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available.
I do find myself thinking about abstract political questions (usually steeped down from current issues, but abstracted from the immediate contextual details) from time to time. Maybe I need to start a list and write a couple of paragraphs to make a top-level post occasionally.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
ASMR
EWWWW!
That's another of those things that causes instant ctrl-w for me. I'm not bothered by those sounds in the real world since they're only occasional but that entire video format deserves to die a quick but extremely painful death.
Yes? You'll never catch me defending the tariff retardation.
The world is positive sum. Abetting your enemies, however, is likely negative sum. At any rate, it's negative for you.
Yes, this is also retarded. Two retards don't make a right.
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