Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Ragabul]

The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars

Interesting analysis of online culture war trends starting with New Atheism morphing into feminism morphing into antiracism. It offers some tentative hope that the antiracism thing might die off though I'm somewhat skeptical because those others had much less institutional buy-in from corporations and entertainment and so on.

[Ragabul]

Fudan University Opening up a Branch in Hungary

This is a defense written by a Hungarian conservative on why allowing Fudan U (a prominent Chinese University) to open up a campus in Hungary is a good idea. Love it, hate it, whatever. It is not a viewpoint that stands a chance in heck of penetrating American news for the most part.

[Alienmorph]

The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars

Interesting analysis of online culture war trends starting with New Atheism morphing into feminism morphing into antiracism. It offers some tentative hope that the antiracism thing might die off though I'm somewhat skeptical because those others had much less institutional buy-in from corporations and entertainment and so on.

Corporations and entertainment just have lose some more money, plus they need some time to gradually get rid of the ideologs, because kicking out all the idiots in one go would look really bad. But there's already companies that have implemente "no people who wants to be activists first" policies, and I can only imagine the backlash stuff like those cultish documents recently leaked from Disney "diversity and inclusion program" are gonna cause will speed up the process, too. As for everyone else... "getting cancelled" is kind of already becoming a meme for a lot of people who aren't obsessed with Twitter and the likes, and many of the clickbait websites who have been fueling the flames of cancel culture are going out of business. It's probably going to take a few more years, and get nastier and nastier the closer we get to the end, but sooner or later this well be just another born in USA witch hunt we'll be ridden off. At least I hope so.

[Ragabul]

I hope so too but I've gotten really pessimistic. They seem to have pretty much all the universities, most prestigious news organizations, the publishing houses, tech companies, & Hollywood. So basically all the people whose job it is to come up with ideas and culture and disseminate it.

At this point, my best hope for it to die is for it to become as stifling as the 1950s and for some up and coming group of teenagers to go hippy on it.

[Alienmorph]

It's heading there. Like I said, I don't think we've seen the worst of it. At the same time, people are pushing as hard against this whole reverse puratinism nonesense as hard as Hollywood or "Big Tech" (really don't like using that term, makes me sound like a conspiritard lol) are pushing for it. And they need us, or rather our money, but we don't need them. It's not like it used to be, when people in the US and Europe would only consume media from US and Europe, and we have more direct ways to support the stuff we want to see, like crowdfunding. And media platforms come and go much faster thanks to the Internet. Things are still going to get worse before they get better, but I doubt it's going to take a generational change to get us out of these woods.

I do feel bad for all those people between who right now are in their 18s to mid20s that are being taught to either feel guilty for just being the white, or that are being patronized and sheltered because thei're non-white. There's gonna be a lot more of unhappy, poorly adjusted people because of all this b.s. on all groups. It's really despicable.

[Ragabul]

No, You Are Not Imagining It. Prices For A Lot Of Things Did Jump In April

This is probably not going to get to a point of more than "nuisance" but it is nice to have confirmed that every economist who sounded like they knew what the hell they were talking about a few months ago does in fact know what they are talking about. And that shoveling money is not the correct answer to everything.

[Vol]

Well, my big effort-post got fat-fingered away by a refresh. I'll try to be concise then.

I hope so too but I've gotten really pessimistic. They seem to have pretty much all the universities, most prestigious news organizations, the publishing houses, tech companies, & Hollywood. So basically all the people whose job it is to come up with ideas and culture and disseminate it.

At this point, my best hope for it to die is for it to become as stifling as the 1950s and for some up and coming group of teenagers to go hippy on it.

Was at a bar, saw posters of the great bands of the 60s-80s, wondered if their counter-culture could have a modern equivalent. But that would be advocating against degeneracy, essentialism, and "equality," and no one wants to take up that message, much less would get published/a large audience. I suspect that when the inevitable rebellion against stodgy old Millennials comes, it'll be new avenues and formats, to get around the authoritarian thought controls.

Problem is that belligerent critical analysis has real power. Case in point, Tolkein orcs, and derivations, as negroes. Reality of intent means nothing, the political capital of the loudest idiot wins the day. Read an account of a now 21 year old woman earlier. At 16, she had a double mastectomy because online weirdos convinced her, and doctors by proxy, that the psychological trauma of becoming a woman was actually gender dysphoria. Now she loathes her scars and bemoans never being able to nurse future children. To try and make a work of art as a polemic against that kind of evil would result in either public censure or obfuscating the message so heavily as to be lost. Such as a cyberpunk/body-horror story, the focus could _not_ be on the authority pushing the mutilation on the people, unless its in no way possibly linked to real world equivalent, or grievous consequences.

If nothing else, the pessimism has an optimistic win-condition. We lose all those great institutions, and much else in the process, but their philosophy is suicidal. Eventually it ends, and we can never lose as much as we did in the old days, when knowledge was so concentrated in tiny geographical areas. Have hope!

It's heading there. Like I said, I don't think we've seen the worst of it. At the same time, people are pushing as hard against this whole reverse puratinism nonesense as hard as Hollywood or "Big Tech" (really don't like using that term, makes me sound like a conspiritard lol) are pushing for it. And they need us, or rather our money, but we don't need them. It's not like it used to be, when people in the US and Europe would only consume media from US and Europe, and we have more direct ways to support the stuff we want to see, like crowdfunding. And media platforms come and go much faster thanks to the Internet. Things are still going to get worse before they get better, but I doubt it's going to take a generational change to get us out of these woods.

I do feel bad for all those people between who right now are in their 18s to mid20s that are being taught to either feel guilty for just being the white, or that are being patronized and sheltered because thei're non-white. There's gonna be a lot more of unhappy, poorly adjusted people because of all this b.s. on all groups. It's really despicable.

I think it'll get a lot worse, mainly as the means of thought-control are rapidly growing in the hands of authoritarians. We'll hit brimstone before bedrock.

There is a summation of a paper going around, from MIT I think, about a study of "corona vaccine skeptics" online. They found that those people were tremendously more informed about what science actually is, how it works, and how results are interpreted and dispersed, than normal laymen. This was portrayed as a bad thing, because those people had looked into the studies and data, tried to replicate experiments insofar as they could, and went through all these intellectually rigorous means of analysis (as laymen), and came to different conclusions than what is being publicly espoused.

Obviously, when we have these highly effective vaccines, highly incompetent government, and highly contagious viruses, the most practical response is to not talk about the data or complicated ethical considerations, but to push for everyone to get vaccinated. That they've done a poor job of selling the shot is their incompetence (The Krispy Kreme promotion still pisses me off). Given how incredibly unlikely serious side effects are, a trustworthy messaging apparatus should have far higher vaccination numbers. That's their failure. Whether or not a healthy younger person should get one is a different concern, one that our governing powers should not demand or force. With the caveat that the specific disease isn't exceptionally deadly, if this was super-ebola, welding people into their homes becomes a reasonable theory.

But the concept that academic rigor from layman is bad, while blind faith in what spokesmen for entrenched powers say is good, is reprehensible in a liberal society. Much less one that has a strong track record of experts and officials being completely wrong, if not malicious. So that's the lens I'm looking into the future through. Potemkin villages out the ass, bury the data with the nerds, The Greater Good.

[Ragabul]

I think it'll get a lot worse, mainly as the means of thought-control are rapidly growing in the hands of authoritarians. We'll hit brimstone before bedrock.

There is a summation of a paper going around, from MIT I think, about a study of "corona vaccine skeptics" online. They found that those people were tremendously more informed about what science actually is, how it works, and how results are interpreted and dispersed, than normal laymen. This was portrayed as a bad thing, because those people had looked into the studies and data, tried to replicate experiments insofar as they could, and went through all these intellectually rigorous means of analysis (as laymen), and came to different conclusions than what is being publicly espoused.

Obviously, when we have these highly effective vaccines, highly incompetent government, and highly contagious viruses, the most practical response is to not talk about the data or complicated ethical considerations, but to push for everyone to get vaccinated. That they've done a poor job of selling the shot is their incompetence (The Krispy Kreme promotion still pisses me off). Given how incredibly unlikely serious side effects are, a trustworthy messaging apparatus should have far higher vaccination numbers. That's their failure. Whether or not a healthy younger person should get one is a different concern, one that our governing powers should not demand or force. With the caveat that the specific disease isn't exceptionally deadly, if this was super-ebola, welding people into their homes becomes a reasonable theory.

But the concept that academic rigor from layman is bad, while blind faith in what spokesmen for entrenched powers say is good, is reprehensible in a liberal society. Much less one that has a strong track record of experts and officials being completely wrong, if not malicious. So that's the lens I'm looking into the future through. Potemkin villages out the ass, bury the data with the nerds, The Greater Good.

I know I just dump nonstop posts from blogs (and specifically Astral Codex 10) but that place is legit.

On this very topic: WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise

Namely, official technocrats cannot be purely about delivering "the truth." They must balance telling the truth and keeping their job, which means they must optimize for both accuracy and politics. If they are brilliant, this means that they end up only "okay" at accuracy because they have to adjust for politics. If they were only decent at accuracy to begin with, they becomes terrible when they optimize for politics. Hence, random people writing blogs or junior professors at rural universities nobody has ever heard of will sometimes (oftentimes) come up with more consistent and meaningful answers than the official experts.

The internet has created spaces where people can find alternate experts or pool their resources and develop metis. And this is not just "alternate facts" in the Donald Trump sense. It means really smart people with actual expertise can go find other really smart people who also have real expertise and apply their own problem solving to issues. This is *exactly* what happened to game journalism. Intelligent YouTube or Twitch guy #76549 has more and better things to say about games so people go to him.

The techoncrats have been in pronounced panic that they no longer have a monopoly on expertise for a while now. Of course, the tech companies are increasingly siding with "official" technocrats and treating deviance in general as egregious, no matter if that deviance was just some bloggers who were yelling we should close the border back in like Jan-Feb 2020 and wear masks while the New York Times was focusing on fighting imaginary anti-Chines racism and virus stigma. It might as well be people claiming vaccines have microchips in them or whatever.

Relevant extract for people who don't want to read the whole thing blog post I linked:

"Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.

At least this is the impression I get from this rather hostile biography. He's a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.

I don't want to judge him. Everyone has to make their own compromise between morally-pure-but-useless and tainted-but-useful, and I think Fauci comes out better than many. This isn't about judgment.

This is about, well - in 2015, if you and a few of your weird friends beat the experts, it was new and exciting. You would prance around, singing "We beat the experts! We beat the experts!" In 2021 it's just depressing. Are the experts okay? Do they need help? Blink once for yes, twice for no...

I can't tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right. I realize this kind of thing is vulnerable to selection bias, but it's been the same couple of bloggers throughout, people who I already trusted and already suspected might be better than the experts in a lot of ways. Zvi Mowshowitz is the first name to come to mind, though there are many others.

There are all sorts of places you could go with this. Maybe expertise is a sham, and a smart guy thinking for five minutes can outdo a decade of working on a PhD. Maybe Joe Biden is an idiot for not appointing Zvi the Secretary of Health. Maybe the whole system is a plot to keep good people down, and we need to burn it down and start over again. Or maybe I'm dumb and biased, and actually the experts are doing much better than Zvi but I'm selectively misinterpreting evidence until I think they aren't.

Probably all of these have a grain of truth in them. But I find myself settling on a different explanation, which is something like this:

When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he's optimizing for - being right - and he does it well.

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they're leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.

The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she's out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford's epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they'll review it further.

I realize it doesn't sound like it, but I'm trying to excuse the CDC here. I'm not just saying they're corrupt. I'm saying they have to deal with the inevitable amount of corruption which it takes to be part of a democratic government, and they're handling it as well as they can under the circumstances.

Expertise isn't a sham. The Director of the CDC could generate opinions as accurate as (or more accurate than) Zvi's, if she wanted to. Maybe she's even doing that internally, when she decides what precautions she and her family should take. Or maybe she isn't; I know a lot of people who have turned into the mask they put on to succeed, just because it's easier that way. The Director may carefully avoid being the kind of person who can generate opinions more accurate than the ones she has to officially endorse; this is probably the best option for her mental health.

Joe Biden can't appoint Zvi as CDC Director, at least not usefully. If Biden appointed Zvi as Director one of three things would happen. One, Zvi would learn to play politics as adroitly as the current Director, and lose his advantage over her. Two, Zvi would offend enough people that they would pressure Biden to fire him. Or three, Zvi would offend people, Biden would offend people by not firing Zvi, and eventually Biden would fall beneath some necessary threshold of support and not be able to be an effective President. I'm not saying that just appointing Zvi would inevitably get Biden impeached. I'm saying Biden has a certain amount of slack, given how many people he needs to keep happy in order to govern effectively, and appointing Zvi as CDC Director would use up so much of that slack that he couldn't do other equally useful things later without becoming ineffective and likely to lose reelection."

[Ragabul]

Another interesting and relevant example of this: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Pupulace

TLDR: There was a terrible earthquake in Anchorage in the 1960s. The city elites became extremely nervous that being truthful would spread panic and so worked at trying to consolidate power and squirrel away information. Meanwhile, the citizens of Anchorage just went out and got shit done on their own with like random welders and bulldozer operators and so on digging people ad hoc out of the rubble.

This is a well-known phenomenon:

"Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors."

The Cajun Navy is another great example. Basically they are just a bunch of random dudes from South Louisiana who show up post bad hurricanes and rescue people with their personal boats.

[Vol]

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news ... ng-shocked

Interesting article from a moderate-left Jewish perspective on what's happening to the American left.

No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly—and then to explain it to others.

What I found most interesting was the summary dismissal of Trump/Trumpism, and by extension virtually the entire organized right, out of hand as _actually_ being the caricature the people she's decrying think it is. Paints a bleak picture. She can see the horrible thing being born, whatever name it will have, and she knows what it will entail, especially for Jews, but remains firmly on the rapidly eroding ground. Though it seems like people generally think this'll all just stop at some nebulous point. The lunatics will have done enough, someone, somewhere will put a foot down, and we can go back to being rational adults with largely moderate beliefs arguing over slightly different platforms.

Edit: This sounds familiar. Raga might've posted this before, as the article is quite old...

[Alienmorph]

I'd just call them "Alt-left", because I enjoy the simmetry. Although as a left-leaning liberal myself, I'll gladly take any more befetting name that separates me further from those clowns.

[Ragabul]

I've posted stuff from Tablet before but not that article specifically I don't think. I'd actually call them more center right though Weiss herself is center left, but that's all probably based on where you sit on the spectrum yourself. To me they look center right. To somebody more right than me they look center left. For somebody in antifa they probably look reactionary.

Bari Weiss also has a substack but she is kind of a broken record. She resigned/was run off from the New York Times over her vocal disgust at various woke internal warfare. If you need somebody who sounds off against woke stuff each and every day, she is good for that. At this point, I get tired of that. Not because it's not important but because there is just no new information in it. There is only so much a peasant like me can do about it and being in a constant state of impotent indignation over it is not really helping me or anybody.

Still it is nice that there are now several old-fashioned ACLU type liberals who lob criticisms at it consistently. Others are Glen Greenwald, John McWhorter, Yascha Mounk, Conor Friedersdorf, & Matthew Yglesias. Mostly, you will note, old liberal Jews. They can smell the Antisemitism and they don't like it.

It makes sense. Jewish success in the United States has been very tied to the meritocracy. You see a similar thing happening specifically with Nigerian immigrants and some subsets of Asian immigrants. They just haven't been here as long and there aren't as many of them so they are less obvious and less vocal.

* Edit

A note on the substack links. It asks for you email but if you click "Just let me read it first" it will take you to that writer's page without needing to sign up. They all have some mix of subscriber and free posts.

[Ragabul]

Another "I keep thinking of stuff but I don't want to keep stealth editing my post forever" posts.

One of the more interesting things about all this is how subfactions that were mortal enemies about 10-15 years ago have realigned themselves into being allies with people they hated before over Trumpism and wokism.

There is now some nontrivial overlap between "old ACLU liberal" and various center right positions.

The two most dramatic realignments I know of is that many neoconservatives have made performative shows of disavowing everything to do with Trumpism and aligning themselves with the Biden type democrats and more or less tolerating woke stuff.

The other is various New Atheist "Science!" type formally angry atheists who have bizarrely started tolerating and even aligning themselves with religious conservatives.

Razib Khan is one of the more interesting examples of this latter one. He gave this interview to a very devout, vocal socially conservative blogger and he spends a huge amount of time on Twitter quoting various aphorisms and scriptures from a grab bag of religions (Hindusim, Islam, and Christianity mostly) about resisting the great evil [that is the woke stuff].

[Ragabul]

One more and then I'm done with thread spam for a while.

And this topic is more about books but since it involves complaining about Marxism, this seems like a safer place.

So I'm almost done with that book on Africa I mentioned in the book thread. The guy is so obviously a closet socialist or some other variety of Marxist adjacent abstruse something or other (and I looked it up to be sure - he is) that I had an increasingly hard time taking his major arguments seriously. The actual historical detail of the book is great. It's the interpretation of what that content means that was lacking. However, since I know very little about Africa and the only area of slavery historiography I'm quite familiar with is about the American South, I don't really have any kind of actual basis to dismiss it other than generalized arguments against socialism and pointing out some low-hanging fruit places where the book is very obviously flawed.

This has prompted me to go off down a rabbit hole looking for other books on slavery *outside* the specific Atlantic trade context to learn more about the institution as such and also to find some other books on West Africa. My goal was "something(s) that is not 50+ years old and is not written by a closet socialist and/or not written using some Marxist or Critical Theory or antiracist type framework that shoves everything through some kind of oppressed/oppressor Master idea." This is borderline impossible to find. It makes me wonder if only people who have this kind of moral predisposition are drawn to studying slavery in the first place or if there is some weird gatekeeping where it's impossible to write a dissertation on anything but this or else it will rejected.

The best I've been able to find so far are that some classicists that mostly study other stuff have written a few books about Roman and Greek slavery but they seem to do so mostly as a novelty in the same way they might write about something like "household shrines in ancient Rome" or "ancient Roman culinary traditions" or something. It's flavor, not a deep dive into it at the institutional level. I've also found a few written on Islam and slavery which are either weirdly apologist or else in the same "flavor" category as the Roman stuff.

So far I've opted for two of the least silly "flavor" books I can find, one on Rome & Greece and one on Islam, and two beefy ones that are unfortunately written by a Marxist and a critical theory dude.

[Sinekein]

So far I've opted for two of the least silly "flavor" books I can find, one on Rome & Greece and one on Islam, and two beefy ones that are unfortunately written by a Marxist and a critical theory dude.

...maybe you will have more moderate authors tackling slavery the day the right finally cuts itself from its Confederate/pro-slavery roots, instead of bending over backwards to avoid admitting that they supported slavery. The day the GOP finally agrees that you can be American, proud to be American and of your roots, while rejecting anything that has to do with the Confederate flag.

You don't even have to be woke to point that out. In most European countries, when you start waving the flag of old racist ideologies - nazi in Germany, fascist in Italy, Vichy in France - then no one doubts that you are far-right, and most flag bearers are actually proud to admit it. But in the US, you get Confederate flags in random GOP events, one of the two major parties, and one that for most of its history was not far-right at all.

As long as that happens, I doubt moderates and centrists will bother with the analysis of slavery, because I am pretty sure any sensible point they would make would flag them as leftists by roughly half the political spectrum.

The French right has managed to cut itself from its pro-French-Algeria roots in less than 50 years, I really don't get how after more than a century, the American right can't do the same with the Confederacy.

[Ragabul]

There's a *ton* written on American slavery from every viewpoint and every angle you can come up with and it's been getting analyzed in non ideological ways ever since the Dunning School got kicked to the curb 50+ years ago. Seriously, the amount of stuff produced on slavery in the US could probably fill several oil tankers. The issue I'm having is finding stuff on slavery that isn't 95% about the American South and also isn't written by one of these leftist frameworks I'm talking about or that isn't the "novelty" angle.

There's a decent amount of stuff on Brazil and the Sugar Islands too.

But, say, you want to read about the Indian Ocean slave trade without digging through a bunch of academic journals? Or you want to read about Steppe nomads slaving or Viking slaving? Or the mutual slaving between Europeans and the Barbary pirates?

Good luck with that.

This is actually something I do know about the current state of scholarship which is that there is some effort to decentralize the focus on the US because so much focus has been here and the Atlantic trade and its consequences was *huge* for basically everything west of Egypt and East of Hawaii.

*Edit* There are also some ginormous encyclopedias that are mostly meant for professional historians. My basic point is that if you want to learn about slavery *in general* in a non ideological way that's even remotely accessible to a normal person, your choices are remarkably scanty.

The French right has managed to cut itself from its pro-French-Algeria roots in less than 50 years, I really don't get how after more than a century, the American right can't do the same with the Confederacy.

And as to this, it's because it's a different kind of conflict. The American Civil War was not the rebellion of some colonized entity with its own history and identity that existed and was taken over and then gained its independence again. France was a thing unto itself before during and after its colonization of Algeria. France had to come to terms with a loss of its previous stature and the understanding that it committed a wrong but France was and is still France with 1000 other cultural things you could focus on without tying up all French identity in the keeping of Algeria.

The American South is merely a part of the United States, distinctive from it in some ways (most notably from having a very different historical experience), but never being its own entity. It has no historical period to look to *before* the United States. And every aspect of its distinctiveness is bound up in slavery. You cannot "decolonize" the South by moving on from slavery in the way that France can move on from Algeria. Everything about it that makes it distinctive: the dialect, the music, the food, the customs, the place names, all of its prominent historical figures before 1865 are inextricably bound up in slavery. You cannot just pull a Germany and build Memorials to the Holocaust and disavow Nazism while still extoling Goethe or whatever. It's all polluted. And yet the cultural content is real. It exists and it is different.

Your options in the face of this are four:

1. Rabid denialism and patriotic clinging to the Lost Cause that denies all this.
2. Hiding and shame and quietly allowing the generic American culture and civic religion to swallow you up and hide what you are.
3. Ritual flagellation and shame.
4. Quiet acceptance of the reality of it while trying to salvage what you can.

Most people obviously opt for 1 and 2. I am talking about the prospects for Southerners obviously. People adopting the symbols outside the South really are just being nakedly racist with no other consideration or content.

*One more stealth edit. C. Van Woodward was a prominent historian of the American South and he points out something that is largely true. One of the continuing sources of Southern identity or historical experience is that we are the Americans that lose while Americans at large are supposed to be the people who always win. Everybody else's story is upwards, ascendant, and progressive. (Yes, I know this isn't actually literally true. I'm talking about stories that people tell themselves about what being American means). The South is the internal evil that the United States has to go on defeating in order to present itself as defeating slavery, defeating racism, etc. This produces strong incentives to romanticize Southern "resistance" and to make it mean something.

[Vol]

I'd just call them "Alt-left", because I enjoy the simmetry. Although as a left-leaning liberal myself, I'll gladly take any more befetting name that separates me further from those clowns.

As a yoot, becoming politically aware, my perception of the wings was "liberals and conservatives." Liberals were whiny, kind of gay, but well meaning and seeking to change things for the better. Conservatives were dumb, kind of mean, but well meaning and seeking to preserve things for the better. The early seasons of South Park really represented that line of thought well. I don't know if that was primarily childish ignorance of what was really going on in the 90s, probably in no small part. I really miss thinking hippies, rednecks, and corrupt politicians were the worst of American politics.

Mostly, you will note, old liberal Jews. They can smell the Antisemitism and they don't like it.

It makes sense. Jewish success in the United States has been very tied to the meritocracy. You see a similar thing happening specifically with Nigerian immigrants and some subsets of Asian immigrants. They just haven't been here as long and there aren't as many of them so they are less obvious and less vocal.

The Jewish Question (hur) in America is odd. The far left is both intellectually dependent on Jews, historically and currently, but loathes Israel as a colonialist ethnostate (Just imagine if they were a theocracy again). But the closer you get to the center, the more Jews are just another minority group, and don't worry about power, wealth, and history, they're part of the cause against patriarchal racist huwhiteness. Then in the center, nobody cares. Then the moderate right fucking loves Israel, for reasons I'm not totally clear on (Neoconservative legacy, reactionary, self-defense against being called Nazis, prophecy???), but not necessarily our domestic Jews. And then the far right wants to finish the job. It's one of those times Horseshoe Theory works out.

And I'd say "tolerance" far more than meritocracy. They'd succeed in any society that tolerates them, regardless of relative merit compared against the dominant groups, because their culture contains the tools of universal success _and_ in-group loyalty.

One of the more interesting things about all this is how subfactions that were mortal enemies about 10-15 years ago have realigned themselves into being allies with people they hated before over Trumpism and wokism.

Having all those subfactions was a luxury of stability. What kind of weapons the Founders intended us to privately own loses a lot of importance when "Fuck the Founders and fuck natural rights" is a growing idea, for example.

This has prompted me to go off down a rabbit hole looking for other books on slavery *outside* the specific Atlantic trade context to learn more about the institution as such and also to find some other books on West Africa. My goal was "something(s) that is not 50+ years old and is not written by a closet socialist and/or not written using some Marxist or Critical Theory or antiracist type framework that shoves everything through some kind of oppressed/oppressor Master idea." This is borderline impossible to find. It makes me wonder if only people who have this kind of moral predisposition are drawn to studying slavery in the first place or if there is some weird gatekeeping where it's impossible to write a dissertation on anything but this or else it will rejected.

I mean. What sort of works are you _expecting_ to find? Castes, generational servitude, that's how human civilization's always worked.

The only people who would be both able to write about slavery in works that would be preserved, and would believe that forced servitude is notably evil, would be theologians. You can find their works easily. Albeit probably not specifically on slavery until the colonial chattel. Outside of them, you have the Marxist aberrations, and maybe some ancient philosophers who tossed the idea around in really abstract terms.

Most modern people, with the knowledge that slavery is bad drilled into our heads our entire lives, wouldn't have an issue with a bondservant if it was phrased delicately enough.

"Oh, this guy's like my personal assistant, and I let him live with my family, and he does whatever job I need done, and he signed a 10 year contract with me to pay off his gambling debt. It's cool."
"So can he refuse to do something or leave?"
"No, that's part of the contract. I can't, like, kill him or anything. I can beat him tho."
"That sounds like slavery."
"Nah, I _can't_ kill him. Think of it like this, imagine getting your entire student loan debt wiped away by being some rich guy's butler for a couple years."
"Where do I sign up!"

Seems that the only other people who'd passionately care about slavery would be slaves, and nobody cared what they thought.

The French right has managed to cut itself from its pro-French-Algeria roots in less than 50 years, I really don't get how after more than a century, the American right can't do the same with the Confederacy.

Realpolitik: What would they gain from it?

[Ragabul]

It seems like people are misunderstanding what I'm saying about slavery research. I'm talking about modern historiography. Professional historians writing about slavery in the last 50ish years. The opinions of people in antiquity don't really have anything to do with what historians do or don't study or with how they frame those studies.

There is the issue of availability of written sources. Obviously something with more written sources will be studied more than something that doesn't have that. And *especially* if those written sources are accessible. So as one example, Holocaust research in the West got a giant glut of new information when the Soviet Union fell because it opened up a bunch of previously sealed Soviet archives that had information they took from various camps.

But for one, we have *tons* more written sources from all over the world than people believe. The book I was digging on has *huge* numbers of sources. They are just in various colonial archives all over Africa and Latin America. And you don't have to take ancient writers at their word to get information out of what they wrote. That's half of what being a historian of antiquity and/or oral cultures is about. Gleaning what you can from exceedingly biased and imprecise ancient written sources and comparing it with archeology and oral traditions and other written sources. And now ancient DNA and genealogy DNA research is being used as well.

None of that means you *must* interpret what you find in any particular ideological framework. Lots of historians do because frameworks can provide useful ways for organizing and thinking about something. It's not a problem to think of ancient Rome or the American South in terms of "how capitalist production ruins everything." Write that. Knock yourself out.

If that's the *only* interpretation being brought to bear, it's a problem.

Writing history is not just about listing a bunch of things that happened. It's about making arguments what why things happened and what it means that they happened that way. If only one framework is used you run into huge problems.

Just like in the 19th century everybody framing history as "here's 17000000 ways in which black people are inferior to white people and deserved what they got" was a huge problem.

So to answer the question "what sorts of works are you expecting to find?" The answer is "a variety with different interpretations" like you would find in literally any other major area of historical research.

*Edit*

If you mean what specifically am I looking to challenge in the book I just read? That the Atlantic trade was uniquely a product of modern capitalism and thus significantly differs from past examples of slavery. That using slaves as a form of currency was new. That African societies were somehow less "hierarchical" than European ones until the arrival of slavery. That racialized and/or ethnicized slavery was entirely new.

I can refute this stuff at a high or broad level with what I already know. I want to be able to refute with meat and detail.

[Alienmorph]

I'd just call them "Alt-left", because I enjoy the simmetry. Although as a left-leaning liberal myself, I'll gladly take any more befetting name that separates me further from those clowns.

As a yoot, becoming politically aware, my perception of the wings was "liberals and conservatives." Liberals were whiny, kind of gay, but well meaning and seeking to change things for the better. Conservatives were dumb, kind of mean, but well meaning and seeking to preserve things for the better. The early seasons of South Park really represented that line of thought well. I don't know if that was primarily childish ignorance of what was really going on in the 90s, probably in no small part. I really miss thinking hippies, rednecks, and corrupt politicians were the worst of American politics.

I have been raised in a family mostly made of left-leaning folks and was always taught to live and let live, and of the importance of equal rights and opportunities, but also equal accountability, for everyone. And when I grew old enough to articulate that in terms of politics I've pretty much kept it that way, it just seemed to made the most sense. I was aware of the whiny fart-smelling "californian liberals" types, or of the man-hating "super-feminists", but always thought they were just making asses of themselves and that just like your average bible-thumping redneck, they would ultimately accomplish nothing, and better thought-out opinions would eventually prevail.

Then the last half-decade happened.

I still think of myself as a liberal/libertarian, and I'm definately never EVER voting right-wing. But fuuuck me, the damage woke culture and cancel culture has done and how much it's gonna slow down our path towards an actual inclusive and cosmopolitan society is... mind-boggling. In part, it's why I tend to stick to talk about the reapercussions it's having on pop culture and other secondary things, because looking at the phenomenon as a whole is infinetely more depressing and infuriating at the same time.

[Ragabul]

I've had a conservative temperament my whole life. I just didn't know it. I tended to be a default liberal once I was like 16+ and started voting and kinda sorta following the news. I did it mostly because "it's what smart people think." I was also consistently annoyed with liberal arguments for inarticulate reasons particularly arguments that fell into the broad categories "You owe people with less than you things simply because you have more than them" and "people who do X stupid thing should not be held accountable for it/should be allowed to keep doing it because Y stupid circumstance made them do it."

Then I switched my reading from mostly fiction to mostly nonfiction starting about 10 years ago, reading a lot of history, political philosophy, economics, and various scientific things that analyze human behavior and I started fleshing my thoughts out. Some of this was prompted by instinctive anger at the 2008 financial crisis and me wanting to understand it more. I got a profound distaste for and suspicion of neoliberalism and laissez-faire economics in that phase.

Somewhere around 5 years ago I finally admitted to myself that I was not just a malcontent liberal with some progressive suspicions of neoliberalism. Wokeness probably helped snap me out of it. Whatever I was was obviously right of center even though I'm an equally terrible fit for standard American right. That had me dig deeper into a lot of right wing philosophical stuff to clarify my own positions. (I'm whatever the hell Roger Sruton was. Pick your word for it).

I still end up voting mostly in ways that supports the Enlightenment liberal order because nothing else can realistically be implemented without grinding somebody under a bunch of bootheels. And the stuff on my bookshelves is equally likely to see me end up in Dachau or a gulag if it comes to that.

I am philosophically a postliberal though. If I had some option to go off and peacefully join some colony world or weird experimental island country or something with a very different way of doing things, I probably would.

[Sinekein]

There's a *ton* written on American slavery from every viewpoint and every angle you can come up with and it's been getting analyzed in non ideological ways ever since the Dunning School got kicked to the curb 50+ years ago. Seriously, the amount of stuff produced on slavery in the US could probably fill several oil tankers. The issue I'm having is finding stuff on slavery that isn't 95% about the American South and also isn't written by one of these leftist frameworks I'm talking about or that isn't the "novelty" angle.

There's a decent amount of stuff on Brazil and the Sugar Islands too.

But, say, you want to read about the Indian Ocean slave trade without digging through a bunch of academic journals? Or you want to read about Steppe nomads slaving or Viking slaving? Or the mutual slaving between Europeans and the Barbary pirates?

Good luck with that.

This is actually something I do know about the current state of scholarship which is that there is some effort to decentralize the focus on the US because so much focus has been here and the Atlantic trade and its consequences was *huge* for basically everything west of Egypt and East of Hawaii.

But Viking or Roman or Greek slavery was fundamentally different from the US one from several reasons, one of the main ones being how much further they are from our modern times.

Antiquity and the Middle-Ages were pretty much alien for us modern viewers. Even the Romans which are pretty much being shown as the ancestor civilization of most Western European cultures, whether they speak English, French or Spanish, were absurdly different in their mindset from our XXth-XXIst century brains.

But the triangular trade that led to slaves being sent to the US and the Caribbean happened after the Renaissance, the first significant step towards the modern era, where technology made a gigantic leap forward, and it kind of was the beginning of globalization as we know it. It's not something you can brush off with "different times, different habits". It's also true for the Indian Ocean trade, but I think this one is well-documented, it's just that most documents are probably written in Malay or (probably) Indonesian.

So I do not think there is much of a point comparing Middle-Age or Antiquity slavery traditions to the ones that sent Africans to America (all of America, I think way more ended up in Brazil than in the US). Because that last one you can pretty much read with modern goggles. Just like you can make "modern" analyses of the Napoleonic Wars, but it is way, way harder to do so with the Hundred Years war, for example, whose objectives and strategies had next to nothing to do with modern causes for warfare. Napoleon though - imperialism, access to trade and resources, ideological differences, you name it.

US Slavery was part of the industrialization of human trafficking. It is why it is so unique and hard to compare to a Barbary corsair raiding to capture a couple dozen coastal villagers he can sell for some gold on a market.

[Sinekein]

The French right has managed to cut itself from its pro-French-Algeria roots in less than 50 years, I really don't get how after more than a century, the American right can't do the same with the Confederacy.

Realpolitik: What would they gain from it?

In the far-right Front National in France, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Jean-Marie was (or is, since sadly he somehow is still alive) a nasty piece of work. Former paratrooper that was used to torturing enemies, obviously racist, very obviously antisemite, denying the holocaust, etc.

Marine is staying clear from all that. She actually kicked her father from the party herself. Now you won't find an elected official from the FN doing nazi salutes for fun, or drawing Swastikas, or having the kind of vile speeches saying that Jews deserved the Shoah, or that it was a pure creation. They automatically get ejected. And even if they shifted towards anti-muslim policies, they always avoid outright using racist insults against Arabs.

And they've gained 10-15 points in polls since then, because now, people who are "against the system" but cannot stand outright, avowed racism can vote for them. You can sincerely vote for them without being racist of supremacist yourself. That wasn't possible before.

I am pretty sure the Confederacy is also something of a repellent for part of the right wing or the center that could be aligned with GOP policies except for the whole "praising the slavers" bit.

And the right should be preoccupied by that because Trump, who might have been the elected president with the most fanatical fanbase ever, got clearly defeated in an election by the US equivalent of François Hollande - a guy whose biggest quality is not having gigantic flaws and looking "normal". Imagine if the Dems find themselves another charismatic candidate like Obama.

I still think of myself as a liberal/libertarian, and I'm definately never EVER voting right-wing. But fuuuck me, the damage woke culture and cancel culture has done and how much it's gonna slow down our path towards an actual inclusive and cosmopolitan society is... mind-boggling. In part, it's why I tend to stick to talk about the reapercussions it's having on pop culture and other secondary things, because looking at the phenomenon as a whole is infinetely more depressing and infuriating at the same time.

I am pretty obviously left-wing, that much shouldn't surprise anyone, but I am also against all "revolutionaries", because I cannot think of a good example of a government being toppled by radical left-wingers having lasting positive consequences. There have been however spectacular progresses made by left-wing governments when they legally came to power, and most of what makes my country really nice to live in at the moment comes from various left-wing governments (the same ones that had some conservatives fearing that it meant Russian tanks coming to Paris).

The woke culture is just another example of something that might have been a good idea turning very wrong. But I am pretty certain the threat posed by the woke/cancel culture is small compared to post-truth Trumpism and how much it is going to damage democracies in the future, now that being accurate and truthful has become entirely optional to grab power - before, you at least had to pay actual facts lip-service.

If I had to put myself in a box, that would probably look like social-proscience-pragmatic-ecologist, of the "against laissez-faire capitalism, but not dumb enough to just want to burn it to the ground asap" kind.

Except for social networks, where I am pretty much a fascist and nothing would make me happier than a strongman outlawing them all in their entirety. Those things have only brought misery to the world.

[Ragabul]

I'm gonna leave this until I've read some more for the most part but one thing I can already say is that that Marxist classicist I mentioned (whose book I ordered and will read) did argue that there were genuine "slave societies" in antiquity with similarities to the Southern US and Brazil.

But to establish the singularity of the Atlantic trade you have to establish several things:

The utter uniqueness of the way slaves were commoditized compared to other periods of trade
The per capita scale of it using various demographic and economic metrics
A contemporaneous shift in the way people thought about slavery (this one is already provable, else widespread abolitionism would have happened before. However it's unclear if this shift is what *enabled* the supposed uniqueness of the trade or is what is responsible for ending the legitimacy of slavery for good).
that it was uniquely racialized/ethnicized (also somewhat provable because its the only slavery system I know of that produced a *defense* of slavery in a philosophical sense, but this was part of the shift that also produced abolitionism)

[Alienmorph]

The woke culture is just another example of something that might have been a good idea turning very wrong. But I am pretty certain the threat posed by the woke/cancel culture is small compared to post-truth Trumpism and how much it is going to damage democracies in the future, now that being accurate and truthful has become entirely optional to grab power - before, you at least had to pay actual facts lip-service.

That is part of the "mind-boggling" damage I was talking about. Right now, no matter what isle of the political discourse you look into, most of what you find is outrage, clickbait and radicalization. The only thing everyone politically vocal seem to agree on is that if you want to act in a moderate, more well thought-out fashion you're either a coward or a liar that is "secretly part of the Other Side". Once upon a time being liberal also meant granting people the freedom to disagree with you, so long they weren't spinning for anything reprehensible, or demonstrably false. Now what separates most vocal left-wing and right-wing people is just who they believe deserves all the blame and to be unpersoned. I've literally seen and read of people on the left making the same arguments and using the same b.s. rethoric extreme right-wingers use. Just switch "gays and immigrants" with "male and pale" to get the right wing or left wing version. Most of the times we're either given the choice between "joining the cult", so to speak, or the shut the hell up and let the "grown-ups" do the talking. Compromize and objectivity are pretty much becoming curse words. It's probably going to take years before people stop screaming and hurling shit at each other like a bunch of angry monkeys, and it might help some very nasty extremist groups to take over the US or part of the Europe for a while, before it's all said and done.

If I had to put myself in a box, that would probably look like social-proscience-pragmatic-ecologist, of the "against laissez-faire capitalism, but not dumb enough to just want to burn it to the ground asap" kind.

That sounds like a mouthful, but I think I can agree with pretty much all of it xD

Except for social networks, where I am pretty much a fascist and nothing would make me happier than a strongman outlawing them all in their entirety. Those things have only brought misery to the world.

I mean... social media has its uses. But it needs some g'damn regulations. Since the Internet is no longer neutral anyways, if it ever truly was, might as well hold some morons accountable for what they do when on it.

[Sinekein]

I mean... social media has its uses. But it needs some g'damn regulations. Since the Internet is no longer neutral anyways, if it ever truly was, might as well hold some morons accountable for what they do when on it.

They are useful insofar as they are handy tools to stay in touch with many people you know. To organize events and the like.

But to see so many saying they got their news "from Facebook" is terrifying. These bullshit generators are built upon showing people what they want to see. They are confirmation bias manufacturers.

That is part of the "mind-boggling" damage I was talking about. Right now, no matter what isle of the political discourse you look into, most of what you find is outrage, clickbait and radicalization. The only thing everyone politically vocal seem to agree on is that if you want to act in a moderate, more well thought-out fashion you're either a coward or a liar that is "secretly part of the Other Side". Once upon a time being liberal also meant granting people the freedom to disagree with you, so long they weren't spinning for anything reprehensible, or demonstrably false. Now what separates most vocal left-wing and right-wing people is just who they believe deserves all the blame and to be unpersoned. I've literally seen and read of people on the left making the same arguments and using the same b.s. rethoric extreme right-wingers use. Just switch "gays and immigrants" with "male and pale" to get the right wing or left

I see what your point is, however I think that a significant difference is that the left-wing radicals have so far consistently failed to gain actual, concrete political power, and I really doubt they will ever manage it, mostly because left-wing voters are way less likely to "agree to disagree" and fall in line behind someone than right-wing voters are. Conservative voters might bicked and have points of disagreement, but in the end, they will vote for whoever is closer to their point of view, while some left-wing voters can decide to abstain if candidate X is not deemed "strong enough" on a single point.

They do seem to have more cultural influence at the moment, but...I mean, this was big companies paying lip-service to some vocal Twitter warriors in a way that would grant them woke cookie points without hurting their bottom line. But I doubt Nike having Kaeperninck ads or Marvel going for a black Captain America will go much further than that. We might see some more headlines like this in the future, but they are likely to disappear simply because said companies will have diminishing returns while the outrage will remain the same. Make one of your most popular heroes black? Many people are happy. Make two? Alright, that's cool, you get out of the token area. Make three? Why not. But who cares about the fifth or sixth one, except people who have been against it since the very beginning?

Meanwhile, denial of facts made its way to the White House. A spokesperson for the POTUS used the words "alternative facts", which is just terrifying. People say wokes love their doublespeak - and they do - but "alternative facts" is something even Orwell would have found too on-the-nose.

That sounds like a mouthful, but I think I can agree with pretty much all of it xD

The problem is that trying to be shorter will lead to oversimplifications. There are too many unbelievably stupid ecologists - antivaxxers, survivalists, science deniers. There are many examples of dangerous socialists. There are some crazy pro-science types. If you try to sum yourself up in just one word, people will usually assume the worst possible thing they can.

[Ragabul]

It's consistently interesting how both sides are convinced they are losing.

My tinpot theory of choice is that people on the right care more about cultural power and people on the left care more about political power. The left has cultural power while the right has political power (or at least roadblock political power in the USA at the moment). Each wants what the other has and can't get it so they feel like they are losing.

[Sinekein]

I assume it is not that far from reality, especially if you link the Left-Right scale with the Idealism-Cynicism one.

[Ragabul]

Since this was getting talked about earlier in that conversation about what denominations believe what in regards to personal revelation:

Some parts of the Pentecostal Church are trying to establish standards for prophecy.

This is very Catholic of them.

The article is more interesting because it explains the difference in cessationism vs continualism in revelation.

[Vol]

Since this was getting talked about earlier in that conversation about what denominations believe what in regards to personal revelation:

Some parts of the Pentecostal Church are trying to establish standards for prophecy.

This is very Catholic of them.

The article is more interesting because it explains the difference in cessationism vs continualism in revelation.

Interesting. So the spectacles are _the_ defining feature.

I'm sure the irony isn't lost on Martin Luther, if he's aware of it (I have no idea what Luther thought about applying scholasticism to supernatural events).

This of course brings the risk that none of them are actually prophesizing. And also the possibility that someone is. So it's a good idea all around. I'm not sure what I'd do if someone was able to, beyond all reasonable doubt, predict a specific, detailed future event, in the backdrop of a Pentecostal service. I'm equally unsure what I'd do if I observed a Catholic priest successful perform an exorcism, or if I personally met some spiritual being that told me to do something. Suppose I'd start with trying to figure out if I'd finally lost my mind, and if not, work from there. I've never held to materialism per se, because it piles internally consistent concepts on top of each other and cannot definitively prove them, so I've always told myself I need some undefined amount of proof to ever believe in a specific contrary example. Like a dog chasing a car, haven't put much thought into what I'd actually do if presented with it.

I'd think, if the premise of the faith is true, that total cessationism would be odd, and also that man's fallen nature makes any particular claim of revelation extremely dubious.

[Ragabul]

Support for Black Lives Matter Surged Last Year. Did It Last?

This is a great entry in the genre of "whenever people respond to the images and headlines our elites curate for some agenda, it's grassroots and natural, but whenever people respond to whatever our opposition's elites are curating for some agenda it's nothing but wolves in sheep's clothing leading the people astray."

Note how their chart fastidiously labels everything during the increase in approval for BLM as neutral events that just occurred independent of framing by elites or media but that the instant BLM approval starts sinking it's because "Trump threatened to call out the national guard." There is 0 mention of riots as a thing that could have led people to any particular conclusions on their own.

There's a million other things I could go to town on this article for including its naked desire to create a "POC" identity, its utter silence on the topic of protesting turning destructive anywhere and how or if that's relevant, its coy implication that white people should/could become irrelevant, and so on.

It's just such a pristine example of the "The Narrative" as it exists on the left. (Yes, I'm aware the right has one too. Go read the Federalist if you want one. They have multiple to choose from each day).

[Ragabul]

Lab leak theory of Covid-19 is apparently officially kosher to believe now. You are no longer whackadoo if you think it's plausible.

Yet another example of the gap between what experts are actually saying and thinking and what the media is saying experts are saying and thinking and how that feeds on itself in a vicious loop. The expert ---> technocrat ---> media information pipeline obviously has some major issues. I sort of felt this way anyway but Covid has been a spectacular case study in it.

[Vol]

When trying to see if artists I enjoy have updated, or feisty ultra-conservative women (Who tend to be Asian for some reason) have anything interesting to say, on the public brain drain that is Twitter, I end up seeing a topless, mutilated lesbian being heralded as a harbinger of the world to come. The feeling that came over me was, I imagine, like watching a boat full of children sinking, and you're out of earshot of their screams.

I need a good night's sleep, I think.

@Raga: Of course it was a lab leak. The only question if it was intentional or incompetence. I have distinct memories of talking with a carpenter on the same job I was, last spring, about it, and we both instantly agreed it was most likely from the lab. Its been a weird experience, the last few years, to consistently have the gut reactions of the uniformed be correct (in spirit), immediately, while educated, thoughtful opinions take the long path of retardation to get to the same point. I'm not a fan of this phenomenon, because I'll be talking to someone, who intuitively knows how geopolitics actually works despite no understanding of anything more complicated than "Red China bad", and in the next moment, he'll be telling me how he's totally gonna make it rich by flipping old GBA games he stole from the backroom of a Gamestop 10 years ago.

[Ragabul]

There is no certainty it came from a lab. Weird zoonotic viral progression through various animals and ending up in humans is how most novel human viruses begin. "It came from filthy Chinese wet markets/animal farms" is a completely plausible scenario.

It's just that "weird gain of function experiment + leak" has also always been a plausible scenario.

I'm at like 60% leaning lab leak at the moment, but I will not be surprised if it really was just bat via raccoon dog to human or whatever.

The issue isn't that the media was suppressing a clear truth. It's that they were claiming a clear truth when they didn't have one because they were so worried about possible consequences of possible conspiracy theories that they couldn't bring themselves to say "we don't know." It's that elite panic thing discussed in that article I posted earlier.

[Vol]

Its the PRC. Any plausible explanation they give is to be inherently treated as less likely than any other explanation, if their international "face" stands to be affected. Given they gave us the bat hypothesis, which implies gross negligence in their ability to regulate wet markets, it is more reasonable, from the get-go, to assume the truth is more damaging. Not with certainty, but again, its the PRC. That the last year has only strengthened the case for a lab fuckup is a happy coincidence.

That makes me think about the recent alien footage being shown around. Its hard to take on the face, but I don't see the obvious reason for putting this all out right now, and why "experts" and "elites" are pitching it so blase. It smells off.

[Ragabul]

After reading that book on AI driven military platforms and a few other similar things in recent days, I feel pretty sure that a good percentage of the UFO sightings (at least for the ones the military keeps seeing) are Chinese/Russian/somebody else's weird autonomous drones of various kinds. China and Russia have apparently been heavily investing in stuff like this for about ten years now.

I haven't actually seen if there has been any data on an uptick in civilian sighting of UFOs. And even if there was it's hard to isolate that from questions like "how much is renewed public interest because the military seems to be taking it seriously" and "how much of it is that drones are everywhere now and everybody also has a camera in their pocket at all times?"

I can believe there is more weird shit flying around than there has been at any previous point in history (there objectively is) and that said weird shit is worth investigating.

[Sinekein]

Its been a weird experience, the last few years, to consistently have the gut reactions of the uniformed be correct (in spirit), immediately, while educated, thoughtful opinions take the long path of retardation to get to the same point.

There is a plethora of examples of the uneducated's gut reactions being pretty completely wrong.

It's more the death of nuance that is to blame in that case, once again. There was no real middle ground between "no possible link with the lab" and "Chinese bioweapon".

But everyone is pushing for it actually. No matter what the situation is, you always have "the good", you, and "the bad", the others. It is becoming less and less possible to admit that grey areas sometimes - because the middle ground fallacy is still a thing - exist.

The problem of gut feelings is that for many, they just can't be disproven. Just ask all those whose gut feeling is that DJT really won the 2020 election. No matter how many investigations are conducted to disprove one fraud allegation after another - they will never believe anything other than what their gut tells them to.

[Ragabul]

In some ways you can put that up to bad elites as well. The initial "gut reaction" on Covid was actually pretty decent. People independently did start wearing masks, staying away from crowds, and so on. Signaling over Covid (here anyway) didn't become sorted on a partisan basis until May 2020 or so and a lot of that was because various Trump/Tucker Carlson/whoever started signaling what the "correct" thing to do was. There was stupidity as well such as hording toilet paper but that's so weird and illogical, I'm not sure what anybody in authority could have done to anticipate it and stop it before it started. It's also got a Moloch problem where even if you aren't hoarding per se, it incentivizes you to buy 1 extra package or to buy a new package before you are out for fear of running out. This is rational from an individual perspective but the end result of everyone making individually rational choices is a mass shortage. It's illogical but only at the macro level. This is where elites are supposed to actually step in and be able to do something to stop escalating problems. People's instincts actually are pretty good for making individual decisions a lot of the time, but people have coordination problems. Climate change is another problem like this. Good elites are supposed to help with coordination issues.

I really hate the "the masses are sheeple" argument for the most part but unfortunately they often are. Especially when people are highly polarized and tribalized like they currently are. They care more about signaling what tribe they are in than they do about either listening to their initial pretty decent common sense or trying to figure out what person in charge is least full of shit. The elites are also mostly interested in tribal signaling so it's stupidity all the way down with seemingly fewer and fewer people wanting to focus chiefly on just doing things sensibly and in a way that works.

This is yet another reason why trying to politicize everything (the personal is the political) is a terrible idea. At the end of the day that reservoir of apolitical people who do nothing but watch sitcoms and mind their own business and don't care about politics might be the last bastion of reasonably unpolluted common sense you have left.

[Sinekein]

I really hate the "the masses are sheeple" argument for the most part but unfortunately they often are. Especially when people are highly polarized and tribalized like they currently are. They care more about signaling what tribe they are in than they do about either listening to their initial pretty decent common sense or trying to figure out what person in charge is least full of shit. The elites are also mostly interested in tribal signaling so it's stupidity all the way down with seemingly fewer and fewer people wanting to focus chiefly on just doing things sensibly and in a way that works.

This is yet another reason why trying to politicize everything (the personal is the political) is a terrible idea. At the end of the day that reservoir of apolitical people who do nothing but watch sitcoms and mind their own business and don't care about politics might be the last bastion of reasonably unpolluted common sense you have left.

It is, and indeed the elites are more to blame than the masses for that. It's not the masses that are responsible of this polarization, it's the elites that are profiting from it - from both sides actually, it is impossible to pinpoint a single responsibility here.

The fact that it is now harder and harder to express basic nuanced opinions can't be blamed on the people.

[Ragabul]

Pretty good breakdown of the coverage of early lab leak theory in the non fringe media

*Edit*

Statement by President Joe Biden on the Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19

"shortly after I became President, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident. I received that report earlier this month, and asked for additional follow-up. As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question. Here is their current position: “while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”

[Vol]

There is a plethora of examples of the uneducated's gut reactions being pretty completely wrong.

Right, and so too the expert consensus. The difference being, we would expect the experts to have the academic discipline to either coach their claims in proper scholastic uncertainty, or, be silent. When they're wrong, its significantly more damaging, and if the frequency of expert error is on par, or worse, than laymen gut reactions, we're in clown world.

The problem of gut feelings is that for many, they just can't be disproven. Just ask all those whose gut feeling is that DJT really won the 2020 election. No matter how many investigations are conducted to disprove one fraud allegation after another - they will never believe anything other than what their gut tells them to.

I know. I've spoken to a number of people, such as my grandmother, who refuse to accept information that does not slot neatly into their world view. Its frustrating at first, but I wonder if their stubborn ignorance isn't a virtue in the right light. Such as if the people generating and delivering information are corrupted.

In some ways you can put that up to bad elites as well. The initial "gut reaction" on Covid was actually pretty decent. People independently did start wearing masks, staying away from crowds, and so on. Signaling over Covid (here anyway) didn't become sorted on a partisan basis until May 2020 or so and a lot of that was because various Trump/Tucker Carlson/whoever started signaling what the "correct" thing to do was.

Same principle with the vaccine. The push to catch all the "hesitant" people is materially honest, but philosophically disingenuous. They do want people to get the shot, absolutely, but their methodology is aimed at self-affirmation of the ideological in-group and catching only some marginal people, i.e., the campaign is not designed as if the intention was to actually maximize inoculations. There is absolutely a real, unspeakable desire for a certain subgroup of people to remain stubborn and vulnerable, and they will not be reached out to in an effective way.

I really hate the "the masses are sheeple" argument for the most part but unfortunately they often are. Especially when people are highly polarized and tribalized like they currently are. They care more about signaling what tribe they are in than they do about either listening to their initial pretty decent common sense or trying to figure out what person in charge is least full of shit. The elites are also mostly interested in tribal signaling so it's stupidity all the way down with seemingly fewer and fewer people wanting to focus chiefly on just doing things sensibly and in a way that works.

Need to consider the constraints of the masses too. The reason the rational decision to make when you observe other people creating a false run on toilet paper is to buy toilet paper is because you do not have alternative options. You are at the mercy of the national supply chain, and even if the toilet paper factory is a mile from your house, you have no more access to its products or personnel than people hundreds of miles away. The isolation of the masses from other rational choices is a greater factor because it funnels us towards the inevitable, dumb outcome.

[Ragabul]

I've gone down another rabbit hole. There's an issue I've sort of suspected as being true for years but never really articulated in some serious way until recently. I think the word "capitalism" is sort of a nonsense word. I use it all the time as more or less a synonym for "markets" which is how I understand 98% of economists to use it, most journalists and politicians, and even most lay people. There is a specifically socialist definition of capitalism which is something like "that system that came after feudalism and mercantilism where the means of production ceased to be mostly land and raw materials and became instead mostly widget factories." This just seems like another word for industrialization. If you want to make an argument that industrialization leads to a unique species of economic and social inequality, okay, great, but then why the word capitalism as something distinctive from industrialization itself?

Outside the industrialization frame, what does this actually mean? In what way can you separate something called "capitalism" from any part of history that came before? Private ownership of the means of production? This has been a thing since recorded history. Ludicrous social and economic inequality? Again, throughout recorded history. People not receiving 100% of the proceeds/benefits of their labor and a portion of that going to somebody else? Again, throughout recorded history. Boom and bust cycles? Check. Workers wages and well-being being at the mercy of supply and demand? Check. Exploitative/extractive trade relationships in which some groups benefit and others become paupers? Check. Literal slavery? Check. Ecological degradation? Check.

I used to just not care too much about this which is why I never really pursued it. I just assumed people either mean "markets" or they meant "industrialization" and you could go from there. There was also a species of usage that meant something like "really terrible Gilded Age children working in factories with no social safety net industrialization" and another that basically just meant "that thing that Americans do as opposed to that thing Sweden does." Call that first laissez-faire capitalism and that second thing neoliberalism if you want. I could usually pick up these meanings from context as well, and it wasn't too worth dwelling on the fact that there were actual words for them.

But I've seen a distressing doubling down on something else (most distressingly among various academics) in the last 10 or so years of a kind of mangled socialist understanding of capitalism. I don't believe most of these people are Marxists because they consistently mostly don't talk about economics but instead talk in moral or borderline metaphysical ways about some kind of great abstruse *evilness* that began circa 1600 and is now polluting the whole world with its horrible oily tentacles and that singularly explains most bad things. They will consistently call this capitalism (sometimes also imperialism interchangeably). This opposed to what? Some weird less horrible thing that preceded it when there supposedly weren't empires and rigid hierarchies based on social status and wealth?

I mean if you want to talk about horrible things that happened circa 1600 (the slave trade, the depeopling of the Americas, whatever) than do that. But what is this unique thing "capitalism" that came into the world supposedly with those things distinctive from everything that proceeded it and possessing singular power to explain most or all bad things that have followed from then? They just take it for granted that this *is.* It is so taken for granted, they don't even bother to try to demonstrate the veracity of it anymore. It is just a kind of understood foundational axiom rather like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

I'll keep using it to mean "markets" but after going out trying to actively find a meaningful, consistent definition for this *thing* I really do think it's smoke and mirrors.

*Edit* Another potential usage that I think could work is if you want to use "capitalism" to refer to a grab-bag series of major changes or events that happened circa 1600 for convenience sake. This usage would be rather something like "the Protestant Reformation" or "the Industrial Revolution" or "the Age of Exploration." These are made up epochs but there are commonalities there that can make taxonomies like this useful. But serious people still understand that they are taxonomies and don't refer to one gestalt thing. But the people I am talking about really don't seem to be using "capitalism" or "imperialism" in this way. They seem to really believe it is a gestalt thing that is so obvious it can be identified with borderline scientific rigor. The particular *things* I would argue make a real departure circa 1600 from what came before are industrialization and true globalization. This increased the scale of trade and production but nothing changed in some qualitative hierarchical sense. Now, the outbreak of political liberalism in the USA and Haiti and France was a qualitative difference in understanding of hierarchy but this is pretty inconvenient if you are trying to prove that something called capitalism started in 1600 and mostly ruined everything.

*Edit* One more edit and then I'll leave off. There is something to the idea that there was some kind of change in kind and not just scale of how investment worked somewhere around 1600. Namely that investment as we understand it in the modern since (and not just being usury or a species of loan) emerged. Loans have been a thing since forever. I don't know of anything like *investment* in the distant past. I'd have to look into it some more.

[NCLanceman]

*Edit* One more edit and then I'll leave off. There is something to the idea that there was some kind of change in kind and not just scale of how investment worked somewhere around 1600. Namely that investment as we understand it in the modern since (and not just being usury or a species of loan) emerged. Loans have been a thing since forever. I don't know of anything like *investment* in the distant past. I'd have to look into it some more.

That last bit has always been my understanding of the term capitalism. Or at least since I became interested enough to appreciate the phrase. Before Adam Smith, the assumption was that economics was a zero-sum game, that when you buy and sell the net value of the exchange was zero. It's a reasonable position, but it isn't and never particularly was true. Smith's ideas reframed economics as an infinite sum game, where it was possible for everyone to make a tidy profit off of a given exchange.

The classical example would be a bank loan: In a zero sum game, Person A borrows Person B's money, then A pays it back. Or not. The sum is zero either way. Smith observed that that's not actually how economic systems work, since other factors often work so that both Person A and B have made more money at the end than they had at the beginning. Person A borrows from Person B, then uses that capital for an enterprise. Having made a successful venture, A repays B, who's been charging interest all this time. Both people have made money and are better off than they were before. Played intelligently, this game can allow everyone to win. The rapid generation of wealth and living standards across the world from Adam Smith's day until now I think bears the man out. My father's favorite example of economic wealth was pointing out that in 1900 the wealthiest woman in the world was the Queen of England. She owned nations and was in the lap of luxury of the greatest empire on Earth. And if she wanted fresh strawberries out of season there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. Today a man on food stamps can manage that. That man is in a meaningful sense more wealthy than the Queen of England was because someone invented the refrigerator, someone manufactured it, banks loaned and were repaid for it, and that gadget spread across the world and spawned new and interesting industries.

Problem is some jackass came along and ruined generations worth of economic philosophy with the romantic notions of people who don't like or own factories. Karl Marx gave us the labor theory of value, the idea that with enough untrained and undifferentiated individuals you can get work of equal quality to trained professionals in any given field. Thus, economics is a zero sum game after all and it can be made to work for you if you just get all the workers to act as one! Like other utopian ideals it's charming and seductive and runs into the ground the first time it touches a real human being. Utopian ideals die hard though. The root word for "romantic" is "Rome", after all, so the ideal of a golden age where men are equal and all are appreciated has thus far escaped the taint of the millions dead every time this goal is attempted in earnest.

Anyway, I say all this to address this point:

But I've seen a distressing doubling down on something else (most distressingly among various academics) in the last 10 or so years of a kind of mangled socialist understanding of capitalism. I don't believe most of these people are Marxists because they consistently mostly don't talk about economics but instead talk in moral or borderline metaphysical ways about some kind of great abstruse *evilness* that began circa 1600 and is now polluting the whole world with its horrible oily tentacles and that singularly explains most bad things. They will consistently call this capitalism (sometimes also imperialism interchangeably). This opposed to what? Some weird less horrible thing that preceded it when there supposedly weren't empires and rigid hierarchies based on social status and wealth?

In the seventh grade, I had a teacher that wanted to impress upon us the beauty of the English language. One day she handed out a sheet of Latin prefixes and suffixes to show us how many words were constructed by mixing them together. By the end of the day "necrodendrophiliac" (dead tree fucker) was the hot new insult and was so for the rest of the year.

Marx and his ilk turned capitalism into a dirty word. That's really the beginning and end of this sentiment. I don't think the full implications of damning capitalism are actually considered when people express that opinion any more than the actual mechanics are considered when someone is called a "motherfucker" or a "necrodendrophilic". Capitalism is the dirty thing opposing the clean romantic notion of Marxism, and while they may even realize that Marxism doesn't work, reality need not intrude in the dream logic of an insult.

EDIT: After reading all this, I forgot to define capitalism. Capitalism is the idea and practice of economics as an infinite sum game. Making the assumption that everyone can win if playing intelligently, investment in new ideas and firms allow the propagation of wealth to all interested parties who gain something useful from each exchange.

[Ragabul]

EDIT: After reading all this, I forgot to define capitalism. Capitalism is the idea and practice of economics as an infinite sum game. Making the assumption that everyone can win if playing intelligently, investment in new ideas and firms allow the propagation of wealth to all interested parties who gain something useful from each exchange.

This works as a theoretical model for explaining how markets work which is why I use it as a synonym for "markets." But markets have always been. Abstracted wealth (which is all currency is whether commodity or fiat) has always been. This is what I mean that outside of a model like this, it becomes a nonsense word.

It's like saying evolution. Evolution isn't "the way life changes over time starting with Charles Darwin." It's just a word for what life has *always* done. Capitalism is not "what markets started doing sometime around 1600." It's just what markets do period.

But these people aren't just arguing that this model of the market is wrong. They are arguing that the nature of markets fundamentally changed at some point in the past and this is when this thing called "capitalism" began.

*Edit* And I focus on this later distinction because this is the thing that has recently begun to be treated as a given by people who aren't even Marxists. You can actually be a logically consistent Marxist (or other species of utopianist) along the lines of something like "the current way markets work sucks and revolutionary thing X would be better." But this other thing I'm talking about is ironically a first cousin of reactionaries because it looks backwards to some imaginary time before "capitalism" in which things were supposedly better, more egalitarian, less exploitative, and more authentic. Core Marxism does not romanticize the past. It is relentlessly forward facing and future oriented. "The past sucks and the better world lies in the future." This other thing tends to treat history as being on some kind of horrible alternate timeline that started 500ish years ago that we desperately need to repair.

The most obvious manifestation of this is probably with the silliest parts of modern environmentalism which seems to believe that before 500 years ago or so man lived in some kind of quasi-mystical balance with nature (Um, no) and modern greed is now destroying the planet. And the solution is not engineering and human stewardship, but to go back to some supposed "noble savage" lifestyle of walking everywhere and growing tomatoes for personal use. Specific examples of this would be things like people complaining that hydroponics doesn't count as "organic" because it's not in the spirit of the thing and that that new electric F-150 Ford is producing is bad because it's perpetuating "car culture."

I am *not* progress oriented at all and very much tend to look to the past as the best way to try to figure out how to do things. However, I at least try to base this in a past that actually existed and not one I made up in my head. */Edit

The investment idea has something to it because it is true that certain species of investment (like say joint stock companies) are something that has only come into being in a massive way in the last 500ish years. However, any place that is sufficiently prosperous to create a trader and/or financier class has always come up with tools for investing in trading ventures and businesses. (And if you want to include something like land improvements like irrigation systems as "investment" than there is not even a need for a financier class. A lord can just compel it to be done or communities can autonomously decide they want to do it).

The more I think about it even with investment, the only thing that changed circa 1600 is scale and level of abstraction in investing. You don't need complex abstractions for investments that consist of "I am loaning you ten gold coins to open a fruit stand and in return you will pay me 15 gold coins by X date." You do need higher levels of abstraction for "I am founding a company to go look for stuff in Virginia and some people will put money up front and expect pay outs later while staying in England and also some people will come along and expect supplies and land once we get there and also some guys will not stay in Virginia or England but will trade between America, Brazil, Africa, and Europe for needed supplies and profits."

[NCLanceman]

This works as a theoretical model for explaining how markets work which is why I use it as a synonym for "markets." But markets have always been. Abstracted wealth (which is all currency is whether commodity or fiat) has always been. This is what I mean that outside of a model like this, it becomes a nonsense word.

It's like saying evolution. Evolution isn't "the way life changes over time starting with Charles Darwin." It's just a word for what life has *always* done. Capitalism is not "what markets started doing sometime around 1600." It's just what markets do period.

True! But people didn't always realize it. Diseases have always worked the way they currently do, but it wasn't until Louis Pasteur gave us the Germ Theory of Disease that we could begin to be truly effective at combating them. By that token, I'm arguing that until the 1600's, people didn't quite understand the full scope of what markets do, but when it was studied and codified into a thing people do on purpose instead of by accident, the entire nature of markets changed. Thus, capitalism is a distinct thing from what came before it through the emphasis on what investments in new ventures can do in the long term.

[Ragabul]

I'll leave off after this because it's always gonna be subjective in the long run, but I'd say even so what you are describing is just the creation of the field of political economy and not an entirely new way of making markets work.

It's like "the scientific method" as we understand was formalized around this same time even though "learning by observation through trial and error" had been a thing since forever.

That and "the beginning of capitalism as system" is usually dated to the Dutch Republic in the 1600s specifically and "the beginning of capitalism as theory" is usually dated to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and ilk in the 1700s.

[Vol]

It's Pride Month again. Rainbow drenched goods and services posted publicly will ensure the spirit of Progress passes over the headquarters of its people, and only take the children of those who resist Progress' will.

https://twitter.com/TonyDLeonardi/statu ... 2367065091

"Slippery slope fallacy," my ass.

[Ragabul]

They always choose that particular homage to the god of progress too because that's the one that requires a giant corporation to do absolutely nothing. It doesn't require redistribution. It doesn't require dealing with unions. It doesn't require dealing with work/home balance issues like parental leave or flexible hours. It doesn't require doing anything about those affiliated sweatshops in Asia.

Just keep on keeping on while making some pious sounding noise.

[Alienmorph]

Yeah, it's a bit like the "let's save the Rainforest!" craze of the 90s. It's an easy to brag about cause that doesn't really affect most of the population, so lots of people and corporations highjack it to show thei're on the right side of history and that you should buy their stuff.

Not gay myself, but having plenty of LGBT friends and a gay brother it still really annoys me how exploitative these kinds of celebrations always feel.

[Ragabul]

More in the "UFO" category: A Military Drone With A Mind Of Its Own Was Used In Combat, U.N. Says

[Ragabul]

Douthat on Why the Lab Leak Theory Matters

TLDR: Basically if the virus came from wet markets, the CCP can frame that as coming from old, dying, preindustrial "peasant" China and thus justify their continued presence as a force of modernization and management. If the virus came from their brand new high-tech research facility that is meant to showcase what China through CCP management can do, that's a whole other thing.