Oceans Yet to Burn

funereal-disease:

lizardtitties:

earlgraytay:

elucubrare:

elucubrare:

if you were a villain, what kind of villain would you be?

I’m definitely “I’m taking over the world because under my control it would be perfect”

I’m the “mostly in it for the fashion and the Depraved Bisexuality” kind. 

I’m absolutely the “been pushed too far by you assholes” kind

I’m the “taking logic to a horrifyingly inhuman extent” kind

Joke’s on you. I’m already a villain and I’ve tricked you all into following my blog.

As soon as North America is under my control, I’ll rebuild the NAU and show the Chinese and the Russians the true meaning of the words “continent-spanning superstate”.

collapsedsquid:

collapsedsquid:

argumate:

xhxhxhx:

I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.

It’s about 158 to 161 million.

Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started. 

We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?

Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.

Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people

Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).

The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.

Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.

That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.

xhxhxhx:  right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses

Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?

Or, just gonna put this out here,

The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.

We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?  

collapsedsquid:

disexplications:

“I just wanted to print out a copy of my resume. Now I have these soldiers in my house and they won’t leave”

In 3-d printing future, the government will hijack your printer and use it to print drone soldiers.

No lie, I was planning to use a version of that as a plot element once upon a time.

mitigatedchaos:

collapsedsquid:

I think “Reality Winner“ might be an even better name than “Shadow Moon.“  That is a mythological name that truly captures the meaning of the current era.

My name used to be Raven Moon Night Wolf but I had it changed to Magato Rana to fit the current fashion.

Wait, that’s a real name? In this era? How unexpected. I suppose I need to revise my estimates around contemporary names in the US.

ranma-official:

gunsandfireandshit:

afloweroutofstone:

What do you think the odds are of least one congressman in the next few years coming out and saying they think the Earth is flat and that NASA’s been lying to us? Realistically, 10, 12%?

Like, the head of an MRA reddit got outed as an elected rep, you’re acting like these people don’t already control NASA funding

Redpill, not MRA

Remember when an article was published saying that “MRAs” were in a frothing rage over Mad Max: Fury Road, but actually it was RoK, a site that explicitly thinks MRAs are all losers?

At this point, I’m very close to thinking the misinformation is deliberate.

discoursedrome:

collapsedsquid:

isaacsapphire:

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?

There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.

Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.

There was literally a Battle Royal at a local public high school a couple years back. A 14 year old was arrested a couple days ago with a loaded gun. All gang related, of course.

When physical safety can’t be assured in the school, if you call it racism and classism that people want to pull their kids out, aren't​you just assuming that certain races and classes are inherently violent and criminal?

I’m saying that parents view certain races as inherently violent and criminal.  They are the ones who will be choosing where their kids go.

And this is not theoretical.  This is what actually happens.

The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.

Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.

On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.

The upper class people aren’t *allowed* to make the schools less bad. When some kid comes in with the intention of starting a knife fight, knife in hand, he needs to be either punished hard, or kicked out of the school. Ideally bad behavior should be punished proportionately long before then. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a classroom if no one has the ability to remove a child or punish them for being disruptive and the kid knows it.

Many on the Left think it’s just about being discriminatory, but do people really think my parents would give a damn about the number of black kids if they were all college-bound? No, this is almost entirely about selecting the kids whose parents will punish them for causing trouble (which is what actually gives detention any teeth) and kids who actually have something to lose.

It’s been deemed unethical to allow the schools to punish the children, so that just leaves exclusion.

To prevent stratification, just don’t make the vouchers additive - you either pay only the voucher or you pay the whole thing yourself. That will allow routing around the political damage.

All this complaining about racism and classism, but who is really being hurt most by the status quo? It certainly isn’t upper middle class suburbia.

ranma-official:

blackblocberniebros:

Hey quick question, why is the music app on the iPhone so fucking worthless? Cant repeat songs anymore, cant listen to all a bands albums back to back. Wtf, it’s unusable.

No competition.

Don’t be so harsh Ranma-san. They’re just trying to ~simplify~ the listening experience. Listening to one song over and over repeatedly, hah, who would do such a thing? Sounds like a total dork!

* hides in the bushes with an Android phone, listening to one song over and over again, as Apple iCopters buzz overhead, searching for the last users to escape the Walled Garden of Babylon, *

the-grey-tribe:

mitigatedchaos:

Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.

Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.

I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the dumbest least well-adjusted guy in my class.

Scattered thoughts on education:

If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.

If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.

Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).

There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).

Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.

Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.

I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.

Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.

Back to vouchers:

I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.

Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.

If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.

I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).

Actually, I already laid out a plan for a total revamp, something I’d instantiate a few prototypes of were I actually the technocratic dicta- er, I mean Central Director. Perhaps you could comment on it.

I’ve been slowly writing a more detailed version.

the-grey-tribe:

mitigatedchaos:

the-grey-tribe:

mitigatedchaos:

collapsedsquid:

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding. 

But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system. 

(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)

“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.

Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.

So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.

Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.

I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers.
The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths.
I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.

Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?

Who wants to go to a comprehensive school that pays lip service to the idea that intelligentsia and working class go there together, but actually there are no working class jobs and you’re fucked if you don’t get a university degree?
Why even bother with all this inclusion? Why have comprehensive schools at all in this environment?

Does America have comprehensive schools in that sense? From what I’ve seen, talking about how the school includes blue collar elements is the lip service, and those programs are being cut.

But then, I come from a background where my formative high school years were in a school district that educated professionals moved to to raise their kids in a good school district.

the-grey-tribe:

mitigatedchaos:

collapsedsquid:

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding. 

But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system. 

(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)

“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.

Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.

So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.

Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.

I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers.
The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths.
I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.

Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?

Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.

Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.

collapsedsquid:

mitigatedchaos:

Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?

There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.

Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.

Ah yes, there are no actual problems, just bigotry…

Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?

There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.

collapsedsquid:

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding. 

But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system. 

(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)

“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.

Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.

So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.

Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

Proposition: Al Qaeda wanted to get the West to stop fking with the Middle East.  (”Terrorism is geopolitical, [not ideological].”)

Reality: No 9/11 likely means no Iraq War.

Three possibilities:

1. They were too stupid to realize invasion would be the response.

2. They were too drunk on ideology to realize invasion would be the response.

3. The proposition is false.  That wasn’t their actual goal.

Didn’t Osama specifically think that dragging the Americans into an endless war in Afghanistan would ruin them the same as it did the Russians?

Wasn’t his other goal to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and they pulled out in 2003?

But that’s different than getting the US to just GTFO.

I think the motivation is in significant part ideological, not just geopolitical, because a campaign to just get the US to leave would look more like what was done by the IRA, and would likely have been far more successful.

One would look to cause large amounts of expense without large amounts of casualties, creating the political drive to Do Something, but without the political drive for an invasion.

I won’t go into them, but if one is willing to die, there are all sorts of ways to be extremely expensive to the elites that won’t create enough ire among the regular people to politically support a war effort.

mutant-aesthetic:

rainy-days-are-over:

Bring back water cooled machine guns.

…were those a thing?

I think those were a WW1 thing but I’m not a gun person.