@stephenjudkins so intellegence collection is a different thing, but your claim is that foreign influence ops are uniquely dangerous because they could enable that bad, different thing, and it's not plausible otherwise-also-bad domestic ops would provoke that particular bad consequence?
@stephenjudkins (it's worth pointing out that corporate/plutocratic intelligence collection and covert ops beyond influence are real things in the world, including by domestic corps, and domestic influence ops have already largely legalized and normalized that!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite one can always draw the line at lawbreaking, and if foreign "speech" (as the Supreme Court has defined it, to include money for influence) is criminalized, then of course foreign ops are uniquely criminal. But on a principled and practical basis, I see no reason to fear Chinese influence ops more than I fear Bezos' or Musk's. They are all covert attempts to undermine a more decentralized democratic consensus-building in ways I perceive as adverse to my interests.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Sometimes the CIA does illegal stuff. But a lot of what the CIA does is legal in target countries, or would be if it were a domestic actor doing the same. The CIA covertly funded much of European arts and letters during the Cold War, encouraging an optimistic, liberal, anticommunist editorial spin. Why is that worse than if domestic actors had done the same?
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Is the claim that foreign actors evade laws and regulations that domestic actors obey? Did Russia's IRA do anything that it would have been illegal for American astroturfers to do?
why is domestic influence — beyond the act of voting itself, and perhaps very widely direct and decentralized forms of discourse — less problematic than foreign influence?
(to be clear, my intention here is not to exonerate foreign influence ops, but to condemn our tolerance of domestic ones.)
@SteveRoth i think for the most part in the US immigration has been plainly disinflationary, especially when it was illegal. you can imagine circumstances under which it'd be inflationary, but i don't think we've experienced them significantly.
@SteveRoth similarly demographic, but a bit opposed to my view that it's precisely when those youth demanded jobs that the pressure came on, not (as is a perfectly natural hypothesis) when they were part of the dependency ratio.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite sounds chiller than it usually is…
@allafarce let's start a draftsosphere!
[New Post] Drafts (meta) https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9807.html
already "e-mail" customer service is formulaic (ends up copying and pasting from some support article you've already read) and nonresponsive. has it been botified for a while?
i think going forward the presumption will have to be you are interacting with an LLM, though one should be polite and kind as a form of risk management.
i want to see the web come to life again. instead of faves or mentions, when i write i want to see links. i used to see links. i used to link.
@paul i can’t really justify the connection, but do i have to? https://youtu.be/Qf-MaLXgl3A
@MLE_online you may be possessed by your lemonade.
@kimschulz No, I don't. Universities in Nordic countries don't sort and enforce a sharp hierarchy like they do in the US, even though they are themselves hierarchical. As I write, "left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards" but that's tolerable in the service of a society of equal dignity. In the Nordics, universities serve such a society, which is fine.
@kimschulz My claim is not that any university or form of academia must be right-wing, but that what has emerged in the United States in particular is so, almost cartoonishly, both despite and the cause of the ostentatious "progressivism" of the US professoriate.
@poetryforsupper (thank you!)
"And don’t say the revolution will bring them down + restore balance. Seriously, please shut up abt the revolution. Revolution shld be nightmare fuel, not visions of post-scarcity sugar-plums. There won’t be a revolution in the west any time soon, and if there was it wouldn’t restore shit except polio and feudalism. We actually have to work and solve our problems here and now, not hope the world burns down and somehow all that blood and horror comes up roses and utopia." https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-great-replacement-not-that-one
@laprice (thank you! i don't know whether there will or won't be a more final result. i've made a "drafts" blog because i became constipated about just sitting down and writing and hitting publish on things on the main blog, i've not decided, will i "promote" some of them or how to proceed. it has been liberating to not have to pretend to be a temporarily unemployed Atlantic writer, which is what blogging had become and why i was doing so little of it.)
[new draft post] Higher education is shockingly right-wing https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/01/higher-education-is-shockingly-right-wing/index.html