you know, I feel like we don't actually do that so much these days. It's simply too likely that the receiving party is going to take you at face value or make up their own deeper meaning.
Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).
> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.)
You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker, because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are missing, too.
And by “you can’t”, I mean “you absolutely can, but you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and take care to use the available tools to substitute for the missing signalling channels”.
It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.
In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.
It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.
By their own words they were going to commit terrorism. That, logically, makes them terrorists. They were found, on film, to be making and experimenting with illegal explosives, and they were found to own even more materials. If you have trustworthy evidence that this is all fabrication—evidence that doesn’t exist in your mind—then I’d be more than happy to see it.
And if you’re saying all of this because you agree with them and their actions, at least have the courage to state you support terrorism directly.
> Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek.
I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke, until true believers started showing up and thinking we believed too. Not a joke anymore...
> I distinctly remember both the invention of q-anon and the idea of Trump as a presidential candidate happening on 4chan as a we're-all-in-on-it joke
4chan was created in 2003. Trump's first bid for the Presidency was an attempt at the Reform Party nomination dropped early in the primary season—in 2000, the one cycle when that party had access to federal matching funds but wasn't effectively a vehicle for H. Ross Perot. Another Trump bid was a recurring topic of discussion in serious, if speculative, contexts ever since (and, for that matter, the idea of a Trump presidential run had been even before the first bid, back to the 1980s, as I recall.) It certainly is not an idea that first emerged as a 4chan joke.
You're right, there's absolutely no sarcasm ever seen on the internet or anywhere else. These days if you say something sarcastic they throw you in jail!
It's funny how the French are portrayed as cowards in American popular culture, when in reality the French would've gotten the guillotines out already while the Americans... cower.
It used to be I guess a slur, "surrender monkeys," because France surrendered during WWII and there was a Nazi-collaborator government established filled with French politicians.
It's unfair given the reality and importance of the French resistance, but, that's where it comes from.
That one was the brits if I'm not mistaken - Jeremy Clarkson specifically (who I have a lot of affection for - Top Gear was a significant part of my childhood, but he does make an art out of being offensively wrong).
I served. While in basic training, the drill sergeants taught us why we salute differently than other countries (probably apocryphal) - because we've "never lost a war". I'm cheeky now and I was then, so I asked about vietnam.
"Police Action" came the terse reply. "We don't talk about that one."
Course by then I'd already signed on the dotted, so...
We’ve never lost a war but we’ve definitely failed to accomplish our objectives a few times along the way. We built the greatest hammer the world has ever seen then asked it to saw lumber and wondered why it failed.
That’s not true at all. We just don’t talk much about the ones we won.
Last year I went to Grenada, which we invaded in the 80s. They love us for it and have statues of Reagan on the island. Without us, they probably would have suffered the same fate as Cuba.
Where would South Korea be without our intervention? Etc.
Well, goes back to your definitions of “won” and “war”. Both are fairly blurry.
We definitely accomplished our objective in Grenada, which we invaded. I’d call it winning a war. There were boots on the ground who did what we sent them to do.
Korea was definitely a war and the ostensible purpose was to repel North Korea, which we and our allies did. If that’s not winning a war, what is it?
is it normal for these places to have 0 liabilities? That alone seems like it ought to raise a flag - if you're not spending the money...
Edit: Clicked through some of the other entries in there and yeah, usually liabilities are relatively close to incomes. How the system didn't catch this is beyond me.
We're not totally unempowered here, as folks who know how to tech. We can build open source alternatives that are as easy to use and install as the <epithet>-ware we are trying to combat.
Part of the problem has been that there's a mountain to climb vis a vis that extra ten miles to take something that 'works for me' and turn it into 'gramps can install this and it doesn't trigger his alopecia'.
Rather, that was the problem. If you're looking for a use case for LLMs, look no further. We do actually have the capacity to build user-friendly stuff at a fraction of the time cost that we used to.
We can make the world a better place if we actually give a shit. Make things out in the open, for free, that benefit people who aren't in tech. Chip away at the monopolies by offering a competitive service because it's the right thing to do and history will vindicate you instead of trying to squeeze a buck out of each and every thing.
I'm not saying "don't do a thing for money". You need to do that. We all need to do that. But instead of your next binge watch or fiftieth foray into Zandronum on brutal difficulty, maybe badger your llm to do all the UX/UI tweaks you could never be assed to do for that app you made that one time, so real people can use it. I'm dead certain that there are folks reading this now who have VPN or privacy solutions they've cooked up that don't steal all your data and aren't going to cost you an arm and a leg. At the very least, someone reading this has a network plugin that can sniff for exfiltrated data to known compromised networks (including data brokers) - it's probably just finicky to install, highly technical, and delicate outside of your machine. Tell claude to package that shit so larry luddite can install it and reap the benefits without learning what a bash is or how to emacs.
I agree and with how much money people in this field can make I’m surprised their aren’t more retired hackers banding together to build something like this. Personally I still have a mortgage to pay off but eventually I would like to be involved in something like this.
What product(s) do you think present the best opportunity for reinventing today with a genuine, user-centric approach?
Personally I feel it's everything from the ground up - silicon IC's through to device platforms and cloud services. But we need a plan to chip away at the problem one bite at a time.
Probably a phone OS would be the most impactful. If it had the ability to really cut back on tracking and data sharing by default.
But if you’re talking about building hardware… that feels like something the NSA would be happy to be involved with whether you want them to be or not. I’d vote for an 80/20 solution that gets people protected from some of the most rampant data mining going on by corporations vs. state actors.
The other issue to keep in mind is that the tech ecosystem absolutely will suffocate anything like this by disabling access to their apps / website with this OS. So at the end of the day I really don’t know if there’s a solution to any of this.
This might be a little broad for most, but I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired. Who cares? We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
I'm saying this as someone who enlisted in the defense of said nations once. Most of the structures that make up a country these days are for the birds - let a guy hike for chrissake. I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense. We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history, and I don't see it petering out anytime soon. Plenty of people care, for all sorts of reasons, many of which I would say, are good!
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,
Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.
Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.
Not really. Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation, and neighboring tribes understanding which area was whose. Even nomadic tribes would be nomadic within a certain area, and jealously protect the area they would go to at the start of every spring, for example.
Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.
I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".
If you're talking about "the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away", the book has been widely criticized for that assertion, as Graeber is extremely ideologically motivated.
If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.
Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.
There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:
Been awhile since I've listened to the book (all cards on the table), so I can't be specific. Nor am I an expert in anyway. My takeaway is that the pre-historical Americas had many diverse ways of organizing people that doesn't quite match up to the implied-risk-game of territory that I was responding too.
In starting to read through some of the criticism's of the book just now, I was reminded of the seasonal hunting parties where many smaller groups would band together for better kills. That's what I mean with "tribal fluidity".
And by freedom of movement, the impression that I had coming away from the listen was that there were many ways in which someone could find themselves in a role where the could migrate through several communities and still live. looking at things again presently, I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_tradition, which I think illustrates what I was trying to convey. "Border sovereignty" doesn't make much sense to me as a concept in that world... i think things were much more fluid. There weren't border checkpoints throughout prehistory.
I honestly have no idea what on earth the "fluidity" of groups banding together on hunting expeditions has to do with the notion of tribes occupying recognized geographic areas that they don't allow strangers to invade? I don't see any connection at all between the two.
There are definitely a lot of diverse ways of organizing people within a tribe.
And you're absolutely right that tribes could join forces to accomplish objectives. And the Hopewell tradition is mainly about trade and cultural dissemination -- of course trade involves traveling with goods to other tribes.
But none of that changes my point. Even if tribes allied for a purposes, they still had their distinct geographic areas. If if people traveled to other tribes to exchange goods, they were just visitors traveling through.
"Border sovereignty" was absolutely real, just as it is in primates. There weren't literal manned border "checkpoints", but you can be sure that as soon as a tribe got wind of a stranger approaching, they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary. The idea that the norm was that some stranger could just waltz in with their family and they'd be welcomed to stay and share the land is not supported by evidence.
(Even though that's definitely the anarchist ideology that Graeber was trying to push in his book, because that's exactly where he gets criticized for ignoring most of the evidence and cherry-picking examples.)
I don't think we will agree here. The statement that "The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history" is not something I can get down with unless its better supported. The territory you are describing is not all the same thing as national territory to my mind, and your arguments are not convincing.
> they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary.
Was there never the case that they investigated, saw that the strangers were floating down a river on the border of "their territory" and simply let them pass through unmolested? That doesn't happen today, and my intuition is that was simply so much space in the americas before recorded history that it happened often then.
I didn't say that the nationalism and border sovereignty that exist in 2025 are exactly what prehistoric humans practiced. That would obviously be absurd.
What I said was:
> Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation
In other words, we have the same instincts operating whether it's with a group of 300 people or 300,000,000. People occupy a geographic area and call it theirs and control who can live there. Many primates do the same.
And is your case of someone traveling down a river trying to contradict me? My example was of that being allowed if they weren't threatening. And the modern equivalent would be something like like a transit visa or connecting international airports.
I really don't know what you're arguing. We're not talking about people traveling anyways, the subject is whether tribes would just let random people come in and share their land. They didn't. They had a concept of group sovereignty, the same idea as national sovereignty, and of land they occupied.
If you want to insist that modern national sovereignty and borders drawn on maps are completely and utterly unrelated to tribal sovereignty and tribal borders -- if you don't see the obvious similarity, the same human group instinct and human territorial instinct -- then I really don't know what to tell you.
No, really. You could make a city be defended but there was no great way to make a nation state before gunpowder without natural barriers in place.
Further, trade goods are found over large distances, which doesn't work over large distances and many alleged single-tribe-lands unless the good is extremely valuable and defensible from theft.
Your claim that great powers style organization is specifically refuted.
Who said anything about nation-states or "great powers organization"? You're changing the subject entirely.
The original comment was about nationalism and borders, not nation-states and great powers.
I explained that the same concepts are found at the tribal level and even in primates. To occupy and defend your territory, and territory is defined by borders, even if they're just a river or the edge of a forest. And gunpowder has nothing to do with anything.
And I don't have the slightest idea what you're trying to say with trade goods.
So no, nothing I said is refuted. It would be helpful if you stuck to the subject at hand, however, without going off track entirely to modern nation-states. Nations are not the same thing as nation-states.
It's not just a human thing; people who study wolves find they maintain surprisingly strict borders between different packs, and this behavior continues though a lot of other mammals and even some smaller animals like certain birds and insects.
That's partially true; the bit about borders and human history (so long as you sequester 'history' to 'recorded history') - but nationalism is actually newer than you'd think, and there were human societies for thousands of years before there were borders. More recent if you go by the current definition of border (formalized, surveyed borders are also relatively modern).
Is nationalism going to peter out? No, of course not. Do some people care for reasons that are important to them? Sure, I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. I am just another jerk with an opinion like the rest of us.
But if you were to ask me, it's take it or leave it. I'd be more than happy to see free movement in the world. Just another set of rules I'm not using.
Yes, hard borders are far more recent than people think. As late as the First World War you could travel the world without so much as a passport.
But: back then only a handful of very rich people had the means to do that, and taxation and social protection were much lower than today. Those things are related. They (IMO of course!) are what make borders a pragmatic necessity.
The most obvious one is that the modern welfare state relies for its legitimacy on social cohesion, i.e. a certain base of shared values and identity. You will not get people to consent to heavy taxation and redistribution if they feel that their society is full of foreigners. This observation is perhaps more relevant to Europe than the USA.
And that's before mentioning the economics of funding a welfare state with a relatively static/shrinking tax base and growing, imported, welfare recipient class - the latter being practically unbounded in the case of illegal immigration.
The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.
By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’
We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.
> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!
> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.
We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?
> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
> Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
Fundamentally, everything in your post down to this ending boils down to whether or not you think that immigrants coming into the country is a good thing or not. People will try to split hairs over "doing it the right way," when until the 1900s doing it the right way was basically just having enough financial stability to make it here - many states had nothing beyond 'means testing' that would easily be passed if you could afford to make it to America rather than stowing away, and many states had less than that. For most of American history, immigrating properly was literally just showing up.
For the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants, the only difference between them and the legal immigrant is the amount of paperwork on file. And many of us arguing that that paperwork matters are beneficiaries of a time where that paperwork wasn't necessary.
It's very explicitly a case of "Fuck you, got mine."
You know, ideological differences aside, there are some brass-tacks reasons that this particular brand of rhetoric does you no good, and actually hurts you.
Bought groceries lately? Kind of expensive, no? A significant portion of that is due to the central valley labor shortage. Which is a direct result of ICE enforcement. Same goes for price increases in restaurants across the country. Those increases in prices at the grocery store also translate to inflationary pressure across the board. People have to spend more to eat, so they demand bigger salaries, so their companies raise prices. Not rocket science.
Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here? Are you directly benefitting from this or is it just a balm for some vague jingoist need to feel superior? I'm genuinely curious. The common arguments like 'they're importing rapists' is... well I don't even know where to start with that one it's just preposterous and demonstrably false. Immigrants aren't taking your job, are they? Like what is it?
> Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here?
I want to leave my country to my children and theirs. Whatever America would be after the endless waves of third world immigrants (most of whom are grasping collectivists who value none of the things that have made America worth preserving, and would happily neuter the bill of rights and tax every dollar out of my pocket) it would not be my country. Bored cat ladies and wishcasting liberals are apparently happy to roll the dice with the futures of our children on the line, but I'm not. Let Canada or the UK or whoever carry the experiment to its conclusion, and if it works, then by golly let's jump in with both feet. But a blind gamble? Hard pass.
Perhaps it would be different if I thought we had good faith partners on the other side, but I don't. Biden tried to bum-rush millions of illegals into the country with the full stated intent to amnesty them, enfranchise them, and use them to control the congress, admit new states (DC/PR), and cement permanent demographic-guaranteed progressive/collectivist majority. The democrats attempted most of these steps during his tenure, but were 1 vote short in the senate.
I was hesitant to even support deportations before the Biden regime jumped the shark. (Remember when they said we needed to pass a new law to "seal" the border--and explicit lie--when the law actually codified mass, unvetted illegal immigration at ~10X historical levels? I doubt it.) Knowing now that the left (the leadership, if not the rank and file) clearly intended to weaponize demographic change for their political benefit, of course I oppose them.
Again, the entire commentary you have here is all more FYGM.
If the Native Americans had this attitude (and Europe didn't just go to war) we wouldn't be here at all. If earlier European-descendant Americans had this attitude, a huge chunk of us wouldn't be here.
People said all of the same things here that you're saying about Irish, Italian, Chinese, and many other immigrant classes over the years. None of your rhetoric is new or unique.
> Again, the entire commentary you have here is all more FYGM.
Typical progressive inversion of reality. If you think it's selfish for Americans to expect the American government to put them first, I'd hate to hear what you have to think about the foreigners who demand the same!
> If the Native Americans had this attitude (and Europe didn't just go to war) we wouldn't be here at all.
The Native Americans did have this attitude, which is why they consistently resisted the colonization of their territory.
> If earlier European-descendant Americans had this attitude, a huge chunk of us wouldn't be here.
Earlier European descendant Americans brought in immigrants to further their own goal of colonizing the North American continent. It wasn't a welfare policy for the benefit of foreigners, it was a policy enacted by Americans for the benefit of Americans. They also drastically cut immigration when it suited them, as with the Immigration Act of 1924.
> People said all of the same things here that you're saying about Irish, Italian, Chinese, and many other immigrant classes over the years. None of your rhetoric is new or unique.
Are you suggesting that earlier European-descendant Americans did, in fact, share my attitude? Pick a lane.
> Typical progressive inversion of reality. If you think it's selfish for Americans to expect the American government to put them first, I'd hate to hear what you have to think about the foreigners who demand the same!
Because I don't think it's actually beneficial for Americans to do what you're suggesting we do. America became what it was through accepting immigrants from all over the world.
> The Native Americans did have this attitude, which is why they consistently resisted the colonization of their territory.
Did you ignore the part of the message that literally covered that? Or is your stance that might makes right? Alright Mr. Redbeard
> Earlier European descendant Americans brought in immigrants to further their own goal of colonizing the North American continent. It wasn't a welfare policy for the benefit of foreigners, it was a policy enacted by Americans for the benefit of Americans. They also drastically cut immigration when it suited them, as with the Immigration Act of 1924.
> Are you suggesting that earlier European-descendant Americans did, in fact, share my attitude? Pick a lane.
Are you suggesting that I believe that Americans are monolithic in thought? I believe it is quite obvious that I am speaking to the overall attitude of the country on the broader level - obviously there are groups that have held a wide variety of views. But for the majority of our history - as you pointed out, only the last 100 years or so have had particularly strict immigration laws - the prevailing view as evidenced by the actual laws of the country was obviously not a country that felt that restricting immigration was the right thing to do for her citizens, despite the fact that many people obviously had the same sentiments then that you do today.
if you look at that chart, there's a price spike between jan-march of '25, precisely when ICE started cracking down in CA.
Biden also famously did not do what you are saying he did. He continued the work on the border wall, much to the chagrin of everyone who sees immigration differently than you do. The idea that immigration was "10x historical levels" is not backed up by the data - see, I found a chart too [0]. True that we now have a greater percent of the population than any time in history [1] - around 16%. If that's "they're taking over the country" then I'd say you're just being dramatic. Since it also looks like we're talking about legal immigrants here, let's take a look at what they provide because you did mention taxes.
So we've already identified that 16% of our population is immigrants, more than ever before, sure. In 2023 we made about $2.2T from individual income taxes [2]. Of that, immigrants paid $651B [3]. So despite being 16% of the population, they paid nearly 30% of our total individual tax revenue. I'd say that's a pretty good deal!
"I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired."
Well, it looks we'll have some kind of global government within a couple of decades. It won't be better than what we have now, in fact it will be even less accountable.
human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.
My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.
That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"
The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.
Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.
Very much this. The research points to hours spent on social media - not 'I saw something adult and now my fragile little mind is le bork'.
If you want kids to be healthier you're gonna have to deal with it on the device level at worst, and the healthcare level at best. Include mental health services and counseling as part of a single-payer preventative care plan if you really, really want to save the kids.
Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).