This is why people critique the nuclear family—the degenerate village around the children that just consists of the parents, maybe grandparents at holidays. It’s a recipe for overworked adults.
I've got a Mexican American friend that lives multi-generationally and loves it. He's a few years out of high school with a good job in management and a nice car, money in the bank. His older brother gets help parenting from Tio and the grandparents, and generally everyone gets along well. He's almost kept up with me in savings for property and I'm married (our pay is pretty similar, but I have dual income). American culture optimizes for wastefulness and puts too much of an emphasis on independence, especially when arrangements like this exist that actually can lead to greater individual freedom in the long run.
I read an interview once with an American woman who moved to Italy with her Italian husband. They lived in the same apartment building as her in-laws and in the morning her son would walk down to Nonna's for breakfast.
I love the idea of family living within walking distance but in their own domiciles, like townhomes or apartments or condos in the same building. This is another great argument for mixed zoning. A 55+ condo building in the same neighborhood with single family homes for large families and smaller townhomes/apartments for families that are just getting started.
Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism.
Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.
This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it.
This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious treatment about real things and across more than a handful of people, play a very secondary role. Because it can only ever be speculative narrative that does not enter into any real argumentation. Seeing Like a State does it well. It discusses state projects and their outcomes. What people did given their positions and limitations (the limitations of what they could see). Any narrative about how The State Seer Mind works is just speculative narrative; the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.
But this infantile treatment of Communism is treated as okay/normal, even celebrated. On that subject you can start with the supposed ideology and work backwards from that.
One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.
That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.
The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.
If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.
> The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime
I’ll listen to the regime sufferers on the topic of breadlines. I don’t put any more weight to their opinions alone on topics like how the communist mind is drawn to the determinism of computers. Tsk tsk.
> and explained what he meant.
After I made my own comment.
> You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?
Huh? That you think that it is an own to point out that the “State Planning Committee” (according to Wikipedia) was a state-seer is not obvious to me.
Yes of course the book Seeing Like a State discusses, among other places, seeing-like-a-state in Communist states. What kind of a rejoinder is that?
The reason why I brought up the book is because it is a non-infantile treatment on “seeing like a state”/totalitarian thinking seems to work (precisely by not making it the focal point). Yes, of course it is relevant to Soviet state planning.
> Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.
Like you did with user vidarh you seem to be ascribing an ulterior motive where you have no evidence or reason to. Be careful about that.
It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.
...or as the post-'68 West-German joke goes: "When two leftists meet, 3 splinter groups are formed", doesn't quite roll off the tounge like the German version "Treffen sich zwei Linke: bilden sich 3 Splittergruppen."
Indeed. It is quite fascinating how that is simultaneously a wide-spread view of the left, while at the same time the left is regularly accused of being all collectivist. Some left wing ideologies are decidedly collectivist. Some are going equally far in the other direction...
No one but you and the poster above you is discussing "the left" as a single group.
"Communism" is being discussed, and implicitly Soviet communism, which ruled a gigantic portion of both Europe and northern Asia for several decades, producing a very definable system of rewards and disincentives, both legal and otherwise.
All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.
If you believe "real communism" can not be achieved by marxism-leninism, then that would be a conclusion. I intentionally did not make any claim like that, because that is wildly subjective and contentious. You're entirely free to think these regimes are "real communism" - I have no interest in that argument.
What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and that there is a vast number of communist ideologies outside of ML. You're free to consider those equally bad if you please. I've not made any argument about that either.
It is a fascinating picture of exactly what keybored argued that the immediate reaction of people is to drag out strawmen like this.
Nothing springs to mind that gives a good overview without going to primary sources. It's been literal decades since I spent time reading up on a wide range of these ideologies.
The main split is between "right-communists" and "left-communists" (hence Lenins "Left Wing Communism: An infantile disorder"; the Bolsheviks were considered "right"), where the "left" are those who rejected ML/Leninism on the basis of "democratic" centralism and the idea of a vanguard party.
Most of the anti-ML ideologies like council communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian Marxism are in that category.
Perhaps texts by Joseph Dejacques, Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman would give a reasonable introduction to those.
It's a variation of the same tired argument that's proffered up when communist praxis is criticised: That communist regimes they don't represent real communism unlike the all the other hippy versions.
And yet you're the one here bringing that up, not me.
It is irrelevant if it is "real communism" or not - it remains an objective fact that all of these regimes have derived their ideology from one very specific branch. In fact, all of them make a big fuzz over exactly that, and all of them had a history of brutally persecuting supporters of other communist ideologies.
You don't need to support any of them to recognise this. I did not make an argument about the desirability of any of them at all, very intentionally.
I just want to point out how absurd this is. A Bulgarian says communist mind. People from the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other planned economies immediately understand what he means. But we have an American and a Brit complaining about how the good name of communism is being sullied.
I know I know, Standpoint Epistemology is being desecrated. I wouldn’t put much weight in Three Off The Streets of Hamburg when it comes to how liberal democratic state planning works either.
I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it.
the voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).
Direct Democracy is bad because even if people were capable of doing the hard work to actually decide on coherent trade-offs, for which there is precious little evidence, they do not have time which means we should hire a few people to do that hard work, and that's what an Indirect Democracy is.
I think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason):
* not everyone can be an expert on everything;
* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;
* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;
* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;
* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;
* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;
* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;
* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;
* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).
If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.
I've always wondered if a hybrid system could work. You'd need a lot of voting infrastructure, and you need online voting, which means you need a reliable and quick method of online identification. Scandinavian countries fill those prerequisites, perhaps other places do too.
The idea is basically that you give a politician a mandate to use your vote. Whatever your chosen politician votes for will count as their and your vote. If you happen to disagree with your chosen politician on a given question, you can manually vote in that question. Your chosen representatives vote in that question will then be worth one vote less, since you've effectively used it yourself.
In the end we get the best of both worlds: voters don't have to vote in every single issue, but they can should they choose to. When they don't vote themselves, a politician they've chosen gets to use their vote, in a representative-like manner.
That's pretty much Switzerland. Indirect democracy for most things, but if enough people disagree with what the government does or they feel strongly about something the government isn't doing they can call a referendum.
I don't know. Direct democracy seems to work well in Switzerland and badly in California. So direct democracy is clearly not bad per se. We know it can work.
Long before Brexit, I was bemoaning the bad effects of direct democracy in California for constitutional amendments that pass with a simple majority. A good amount of the dysfunction in California is from these sorts of propositions that can not be overruled or modified by the legislature. And the public debate about them is largely divorced from their actual content, quite frequently. You still encounter people that think that Prop 13 is a about letting grandmas stay in their homes in retirement by sheltering them from any increase in property taxes, but it is a much much larger handout to commercial real estate and investment properties than it is to grandmas, for example!
Even a slightly higher threshold than majority vote would be good for direct democracy. And constitutional amendments should either have a higher bar, or should automatically expire after X years unless there's a second vote to verify that the change should actually stay in effect.
I tend to vote no on all ballot propositions automatically due to the bad effects of permanent changes being far too easy with too little substantive information provide to voters.
I don’t know if just one instance means direct democracy is bad. For example, in the US referendums have been used a lot for issues that are popular for voters, but politicians won’t touch.
(Weed legalization in many states, Abortion protection in Missouri I believe)
You could also argue Brexit. Ultimately, most of the UK was okay with shooting themselves in the foot to feel more independent like the good olds days. Maybe was wrong long-term, but if it’s what the people wanted, then maybe it’s good. Politicians never would have done it despite the people wanting it.
I'm anti-Brexit (not that it matters, not British) but also pro-referendum in general. One modification I'd like to see is higher thresholds for more significant actions, especially ones that are difficult to reverse like this was. I don't think something as huge as Brexit should be decided on the basis of 50%+1. There should be a bias towards the status quo, and this should require maybe 60% or 2/3rds to overcome.
I'm afraid that could lead to political instability. Maybe not, but I imagine if 59% of people vote "X" but 60% were needed, people could revolt or at least drastic and unpredictable changes in voting in the next elections could happen - "how can this political regime ignore the voice of the majority?!".
You'd need most of the people to understand why 60 or 66.(6)% of people are needed to decide something and really believe in this threshold. And Y% of the populace is different psychologically than Y% of elected officials (in cases where a supermajority of officials are needed to pass Z in a forum like parliament/house/senate).
> The Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly available vs those reserved for the already wealthy and pre-established.
The Internet was developed by the US state sector and handed off to the private sector in the 90’s. Then it worked as an open space until it didn’t any more. Predictably driven by corporate interests.
> In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that much that is distinctive about America was shaped by the existence of free land to the West where anyone could start over, and that this condition infused America with its characteristic liberty, egalitarianism, rejection of feudalistic hierarchy, self-sufficiency, and ambition.
A more asinine comparison could not have been picked.
The person launching them sure does. This scenario reminds me of the time Russian hackers took over a US pipeline a couple years ago then immediately apologized saying they didn't want to cause a international incident and they would vet their targets better in the future. There are not many people who want that kind of heat. Like the first ayatollah is dead and the second is reportedly in a coma. The Iranian government is willing to pay that price and that's why they won. How many pirate leaders do you think are willing to pay their life so that their third of fourth successors can maybe collect a toll? Or how many are like Venezuela and you can kidnap one guy and the whole house folds.
I think it’s weird that you imply that it is because the American regime failed to change the Iranian regime. They (lead by Israel or not) illegally invaded a country.
It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).
But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.
> I'm a very law-abiding cyclist since witnessing a few horrible accidents, and yet I encounter situations with headphone-wearing pedestrians regularly. Often I'll ring my bell to no avail, until driving right up to them, and they still won't hear me. This is really frustrating; I'm definitely in the market for this.
I’m guessing some law (law-abiding) gives you the right to bother people who are using their own feet instead of wheels because you want to pass them and they should have to actively watch out for you and yield to you? Okay, that part is fine. But I don’t see how it is nice or, I dunno, ethical.
In my experience (in my locale) as a cyclist you either give pedestrians a wide enough berth, dismount so that you can pass them if it is crowded and there is no passage, or use the vehicular road.
I remember violating this one time when I belled someone that I wanted to pass on the sidewalk. But I was a child at the time. Even more self-centered than I am now.
These seeming rules for yielding to cyclists are worse than the laws and norms when cars interact with bicycles, by the way. At least where I am: cars never honk cyclists. They have to wait for them or find a window to pass them safely. They can’t honk them into the ditch or something.
> I’m guessing some law (law-abiding) gives you the right to bother people who are using their own feet instead of wheels because you want to pass them and they should have to actively watch out for you and yield to you? Okay, that part is fine. But I don’t see how it is nice or, I dunno, ethical.
No. There are just people who will walk on a designated bicycle lane because they haven't seen the signage, are ignorant or careless about it, or will just cross it to get somewhere else. All while wearing ANC headphones. This isn't about bothering someone, but warning them. It's really no different from someone jaywalking without seeing you, and honking to make them aware of that. Or are you supposing you'd just break and wait until they're finished crossing the street?
Edit 2: I originally didn’t think of the case when you want to warn pedestrians that you are passing (without asking them to give way) in case they decide to switch direction without looking if there is any incoming entities. That seems legitimate to me. Although giving a wide enough berth might be better than doing it routinely (that could amount to a lot of noise eventually).
Edit: Since people seem to go either way: It is my understanding that in my part of the world (in Scandinavia) cyclists do not have the right of way on sidewalks (which means they can’t bell people away). They also (and I know this one) do not have the right of way while cycling across road crossings. Something that most cyclists, in my experience, violate all the time.
Quite. It drives me up the wall when cyclists not only use the sidewalk close enough to me to practically graze me (pedestrian), but expect me to actively pay attention and yield to them. Use the road, dummy (there are scarce few bicycle lanes).
I use regular headphones (not over-ear and not really noise canc.) on the sidewalk but take them off when I am crossing the street. And I of course am mindful of other pedestrians. But I’m not gonna take them off because some two-wheeler thinks they can ram into me unless I jump out of the way on the sidewalk.
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