I should anchor my predictions on the current wave of China protests; I don’t think they are going to “go anywhere”, for a few reasons; one being that so far I have seen minimal desire to really fight hard lines drawn by security forces or anything like that. The protestors aren’t being violently confronted in the main, and they will do things like push through barriers or the like but there is no sense that the state is the ‘enemy’ going on. We wont see Hong Kong style police fights outside of a few flare ups.
Secondly, Zero Covid was/is broadly popular in China. Its hard to grasp that on the outside, but Covid was built up in the imagination as a nightmare disease, citizen buy-in was actually quite large. As individual cities got locked down their charity drained, but most cities in China have not been locked down like that. These protests are about Zero Covid, but there is going to be a substantial portion of the country who opposes these protestors, proud of the Zero Covid achievement. Enough to make things like police defections a non-starter.
Still the CCP has clearly being wavering on Zero Covid, not fully but increasingly unwilling to eat the costs of the policy. Once the protests fade I expect them to be used to internally justify, very quietly, continued easing. I am personally someone who is less negative on the decision-making apparatus of the Chinese state, so this part is the most against-the-grain, but its where the smart money is imo.
yes I agree, also worth noting that many of these are small student protests, and while student protests are obviously very sensitive (!) they are happen all the time, even if every minor campus complaint is invariably hailed as the potential next Tiananmen on CNN.
(and similarly the industrial protests at Foxconn in Zhengzhou are hardly unprecedented).
still, it’s clear that all the state media on covid right now is pushing the line that restrictions are easing (even when they aren’t) and normal life is coming back (even when it isn’t) and not dwelling on the fact that case numbers are higher than they’ve ever been since this whole thing started.
Agreed, student protests are honestly one of those ‘legacy’ flashpoints; they can be effective still but I think their ability to launch revolutions is something of the past, the social role of the university vis a vis the state has changed from its 19th century heyday. And yeah lol ‘easing’ will occur; but what ‘easing’ means is up for debate - but I think it will be increasingly real as China does slowly internalize how badly the last few years have gone for them.
1,000,000 Americans are dead because of COVID, and 15,000 Chinese are. Why shouldn’t they be proud of their achievements? This is a bafflingly slanted way of saying the zero COVID protests are unlikely to do much because zero COVID policies have broad appeal in China, and that they have broad appeal in China because they have proven effective at saving lives.
I am curious if you were aware of the Urumqi fire when you wrote this? (You can also take this question as metonymy for “aware of all the deaths from not-covid caused by China’s lockdowns, but mostly to be taken literally. Not exactly a proud moment for China)
you know those little critical thinking questions that they had at the end of short stories in literature textbooks? we should start putting those in posts. i miss them,,,,,,
questions:
- what call to action is the author arguing for?
- why does this work lack capitalization? what might this tell you about the author? what might this tell you about the context this work is meant to be read in?
- is the addition of the questions self referential? does that make this post humorous? how so? how would the post be different without the addition of the questions?
*pins you against a wall* you thought you could just come crawling back to us huh?
[image ID: a monochrome digital drawing of humanized versions of Tumblr and Twitter. Tumblr is an emo girl wearing dark clothing with a side shave hairstyle. She has a kandi bracelet that reads “nov 5”. Twitter is a shorter girl with floppy hair styled after the twitter logo, wearing a large barette of her logo in her hair. Tumblr is leaned over twitter and is holding her chin while pinning her against the wall. End ID.]
(I’m the one crawling back.)
Nuclear early warning systems
I thought I was paranoid about the risk of accidental nuclear war but yesterday I started thinking about nuclear early warning systems and I don’t think I knew what paranoia truly feels like until now.
You see, nuclear early warning systems do not detect nuclear weapons. They detect rockets. This makes possible events like the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident, where Russia briefly mistook a rocket with a scientific payload for a nuclear weapon, because while the launch was announced in advance, someone failed to tell the radar technicians.
I’ve known about the Norwegian rocket incident for awhile, but I never thought much about what it meant, because it didn’t fit into the rubric I had in my head for nuclear close calls. The incident didn’t involve a blockade, a border skirmish, a military exercise, or an equipment malfunction. Tensions between the US and Russia were low, and the equipment worked perfectly. The equipment was just incapable of telling what kind of payload the rocket had.
There are other problems of this type. For example, I’ve read that some people are very worried about Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles, because if they’re ever actually used, how will the United States know the missiles are conventional and not nuclear before they hit? Similarly, there are concerns that if US anti-ballistic missile defenses were actually used in a war against North Korea, Russia might mistake it for a nuclear attack. I don’t know if similar concerns apply to anti-satellite weapons—maybe they’d always be launched on a different trajectory than nuclear ballistic missiles?
I assume there are solutions to this problem, but I'm not sure what they are. Radio transponders only work if everyone trusts everyone not to fake the transponder codes, and might be less effective if a missile is moving much faster than any aircraft. Some people seem to think the solution is “everyone agrees to never do anything that could be mistaken for a nuclear launch”, but the problem is weird enough that getting everyone to stick to the plan could be hard.
Why does anybody pay attention to Emmanuel Macron
This is not an anti-Macron post. I am actually confused about why he is important. Like, nobody pays attention to the President of Germany, it’s all about the Chancellor (basically Prime Minister). And France is similar to Germany in having both a President and a Prime Minister.
You might think the French president must have more power than the German president, but that doesn’t seem to be true? The French president can’t veto legislation. The French president picks the Prime Minister and Cabinet but he basically has to pick someone the legislature likes, because the legislature can fire the entire government at any time via vote of no confidence.
The French President does have some pretty serious “emergency powers”, but only de Gaulle ever used those powers, and nobody expects Macron to ever use them. It’s not like if Macron fails to reach a compromise with the legislature on some issues, he will invoke his emergency powers and rule by decree.
)My best guess is that this is just a matter of tradition? That there’s a tradition (almost certainly thanks to de Gaulle) of paying attention to what the French president thinks, where in Germany the tradition is that all the attention is on the Chancellor. But there might be something I’m missing about the French system of government that makes the president important.
This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.
We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.
(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)
But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.
Maybe I’m not understanding you. Do you think the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities ?
I used to think Trump’s weird friendliness with Putin was purely a matter of Trump’s authoritarianism but now it’s clear he had at least one, probably two ulterior motives.
What do you think those ulterior motives were ?
The now-known-for-certain one is the lucrative real estate deal Trump needed Russian government approval for.
The probable one is that Russia was helping Trump win. Even if Trump didn’t know (and I’m betting he did), members of his campaign team might have pushed him in a more pro-Russia direction because they knew.
This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.
We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.
(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)
But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.
Maybe I’m not understanding you. Do you think the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities ?
I used to think Trump’s weird friendliness with Putin was purely a matter of Trump’s authoritarianism but now it’s clear he had at least one, probably two ulterior motives.
This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.
We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.
(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)
But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.
The (in)attention theory of government (in)competence
I’ve been thinking a lot about what things governments do well vs. what things they do poorly, and the most plausible thing I can come up with is that, in a democracy at least, the competence of government is largely a function of the public’s ability to pay attention to things.
So governments are good at fighting major wars like WWII, because people would have noticed if we’d lost WWII. But dealing with bureaucracy has a consistent tendency to suck, because if budget cuts lead to understaffing lead to long lines at the DMV, this isn’t a front-page scandal. (Unless you find you can argue DMV understaffing is part of a conspiracy to stop black people from getting the photo IDs they need to vote—but most of the time, slight suckage in the bureaucracy is hard to get people to pay attention to, so it’s hard to fix.)
This doesn’t imply that any given government can only be competent at a finite number of things. Governments can fend off a more or less arbitrary number of headline-worthy catastrophes. People don’t have to be paying attention to the thing going well, as long as they would notice if the thing weren’t going well. However, governments may be inherently incapable of stopping things from sucking slightly in ways that are hard to talk about.
This is totally half-assed speculation, and I’d be curious about counter-examples. Especially counter-examples in the direction of “governments doing little things well even though no one would notice if the thing weren’t done well”.
I’ve seen John Hickenlooper getting mocked for declining to answer the question of whether he considers himself a capitalist, saying he didn’t want to talk about labels. I think this response was basically correct, though.
The right has spent decades calling anything to the left of Hayek as socialism. This has both confused a lot of people and caused a bunch of liberals to take a “re-claim the slur approach.”
In US politics right now, it is not informative to hear whether someone calls themselves a socialist or a capitalist. We don’t have any Jeremy Corbyns anywhere near positions of power. Bernie Sanders and AOC call themselves Democratic Socialists, while Elizabeth Warren acknowledges that she is a capitalist. None of them believe in nationalizing all industry, centralized planning, or the abolition of private property. All of them believe in a strong welfare state, wealth redistribution, and labor protections and workplace and financial regulation.
I would really like to see a prominent Democrat go on TV and say: “’Am I a capitalist or a socialist’ is a stupid question. I believe in both a market economy and a strong welfare state with protections for the little guy against massive corporations. If Republicans are against that, let them say so openly.”
I reblogged this and then realized AOC might believe in centralized planning? She invokes WWII as a model of what the Green New Deal would be like but it is unclear to me whether she actually understands what the wartime economy of WWII entailed.
00incognegro-deactivated2021041
Just sayin
thisiseverydayracism
What’s happened in Flint is a crime against humanity.
invertedporcupine
The water in Flint has been at safe levels of lead for some time, according to the scientist who first drew attention to the problem. (And who is now being made a pariah by people who care more about scoring political points than about what the truth is.)
Holy shit I am seriously annoyed that this is the first time I am hearing about this.
Full Metal Jacket is ostensiably an anti-war movie, yet Marines love the boot camp sequence
Apocalypse Now is an anti-war movie, yet the Helicopter assault scene is a hit with the military
Truffaut was right
Getting sincere support from those who like what you’re criticizing is the only way to be sure that what you’re criticizing, as depicted in your criticism, actually exists outside of your own head.
Content creator: depicts people he doesn’t like, doing things he doesn’t approve of
People he doesn’t like: *love it*
Content creator:
invertedporcupine
Filmmakers - Accurately portray putting normal people in horrible situations such as war leading to horrible behavior.
People who have firsthand knowledge that this portrayal is accurate - “This is excellent.”
Tumblr idiots who are constantly trying to divide the world into the intrinsically good people and intrinsically bad people – “But, but… how can the bad people appreciate being portrayed as bad?”
The issue isn’t generically liking an anti-war movie but thinking “oh totally badass”. For example, the infamous helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now, where the massacre of a Vietnamese village is set to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries.
Though this may be less an issue of “it’s impossible to make an anti-war movie” than “don’t set a massacre to Ride of the fucking Valkyries”. Like I totally see what Francis Ford Coppola was trying to do with that scene but I think some mistakes were made.
Clicking is hard
@cptsdcarlosdevil and I recently got our son a tablet, and today I observed, to my surprise, that he has not fully mastered the skill of clicking on things. Which should not surprise me, given that he’s 13 months and we just got him the thing, but I didn’t realize clicking is a skill that had to be learned.
Specifically, the issue is that as a rule computers define a “click” not as a press, but as a press and release. If you press down on a UI element, drag your mouse pointer/finger off the button, and then release, in most cases the UI element won’t activate (unless it’s specifically of the “click and drag” variety).
Viktor has trouble with this—he will sometimes successfully click the buttons on his app, but other times he’ll be trying to click and wind up sort of dragging his fingers across the screen and nothing will happen. This is super-weird to observe because I have no memory of having to learn to click properly when using a computer—but apparently the skill isn’t completely intuitive.
(To be fair, it might be less intuitive on touch screens than with a mouse.)
Yes, I did in fact make a conscious decision to start using Tumblr again. Because at this point I hate Tumblr less than I hate Facebook, and that’s saying something.
Is there a school of socialist thought that says, “you need democratic control of the means of production but it doesn’t matter if this comes through direct ownership or heavy taxes and regulation”?
Because I think that view might actually be true.
I think it is in fact generally regarded as “fence-sitting between socialism and social democracy” but maybe other people have suggested it before?
This is legitimately good news, even though, yes, she’s lying about her past record.
So about Berkley’s 2020 city council elections
Berkeley just voted to effectively expel hundreds of Berkeley residents living in RVs from the city. Four of the six votes for this measure—including mayor Jesse Arreguin—are up for re-election next year. Who’s going to find challengers for them?
