un-Fieris your guy

Unfortunately not, this was a long time ago. But I’m sure if you ask them they’d be happy to explain.

In terms of politics, which is mostly what I discuss on here, I once read a Cowbee post that actually made something click for me that I hadn’t understood, basically, that a socialist system should seek to nationalize industries primarily once they’ve become sufficiently developed that incentives for growth are no longer necessary or useful. Previously, my framework had been more along the lines of state-run for necessitities and private for luxuries, without consideration of the level of development, but Cowbee’s explanation clicked for me and connected the concept of enshittification to the question which transformed the way I looked at things.

Um. Other than that, for all the discussions I’ve been in, not a lot else comes to mind. I find it really difficult to have high level discussions with people I don’t already broadly agree with, because people just aren’t interested. Whenever I attempt to pose a real question, or pick people’s brains in a meaningful way, it just gets ignored. People just really like screaming at each other over the same like three topics forever, everything gets reduced to team sports, and those categorized as being on the other team get completely dismissed. Like honestly, that weird cult of “Soulism” that we have on here is at least more thought provoking and mentally stimulating that the 10,000th shouting match of “tankie!” “lib!” “tankie!” “lib!” “Genocide denier!” “Genocide enabler!” blah blah blah, it all gets so boring.

Sometimes I really miss being in school and writing essays, where I could know that someone was going to read it, think about it, and provide feedback. Trying to talk about anything high-level on here is shouting into the void. But everywhere else I know of on the internet is even worse! The only spaces where people actually engage with the sort of questions I’m interested in are spaces where everyone broadly agrees with my perspective already, which also gets boring.

Sometimes, I just need something interesting and challenging to mull over while working an understimulating job, and it’s hard to find that.

I meant “off the beaten path” relative to places like Tokyo or Kyoto. Fukuoka is still a good sized city, but my experience is that most Westerners haven’t heard of it. Japan is a homogeneous country in general, so outside of big tourist destinations, you’re unlikely to just bump into another foreigner on the street, and occasionally like a little kid would stare at me in awe (I did also stand out because of my height, and found it amusing). Like I said, beautiful city, and definitely recommend it.

Do you know if the shop is still around?? I might be going for work next month, and I’d love to get some good shawarma.

Well, I got curious and did some googling. I’m pretty sure the place I went to was called Pasha and unfortunately it closed down. However, there’s actually a place that looks pretty similar (I thought maybe it was the same one at first) called Kafe Toruko that you might check out.

Oh, I have A Story.

I studied abroad for a year in Fukuoka, Japan (beautiful city, off the beaten path for foreigners), and the options where I was were pretty limited in terms of foreign restaurants. However, at some point, us international students discovered this little Turkish shawarma place hidden away somewhere, and it was absolutely delicious, very filling (in a way Japanese food generally isn’t), affordable, and unlike any of the other options. The word spread quickly through the I-house, and many of us became regulars (although it seemed mostly ignored by the locals). We were there so often we got to know the owner, who spoke English, he was ethnically Turkish, but had actually come from Germany and decided to move to Japan and open a restaurant. Over several months while we were there, we watched the place get noticably nicer, more decor, the guy started importing Turkish rugs to sell out front, etc.

Unfortunately, as our second semester came to a close, we went there one last time to say goodbye to the owner and his delicious shawarma. He said like, “Damn, you’re leaving? I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I’m pretty sure we were almost single-handedly keeping his business going, and it would take several months for the next exchange students to arrive and no guarantee they’d find the place or fall in love with it like we did. We didn’t really have a way of leaving a message for that next group, to say, “Hey, check out this shawarma place,” and I never did find out if the business survived us leaving.

Funny enough, this was how I learned what shawarma was, just before the first Avengers movie came out (dating myself here).

Oof, that’s rough.

For temporary relief, you can find stuff on YouTube that plays sounds at different high pitched frequencies. You’ll still be hearing the sound but having it come from an external source can provide relief (at least for some people). Noise machine apps have options for different “colors” of noises, so you can experiment and try to find something that works. Also, I can’t explain it at all but for some reason this music does something for me.

Don’t assume that it’ll get worse or that it’ll always be as bad as it is now. If it’s still there when you’re 40, let 40 year old you deal with it. If it sticks around, you’ll learn to live with it. My experience was that it’s worst when you first get it because you’re not used to it, you don’t have any tools for coping with it, and you can’t accept it.

Take it day by day. If you can deal with it for just one day, then you can apply that to every day. So all you have to worry about is today.

But I’ll tell you, shit sucks. There’s an herbal supplement in the US that’s marketed as helping with tinnitus. It doesn’t work, and I knew it wouldn’t work, I saw the word “homeopathic” on the label and I knew exactly what it meant. I bought it anyway. My dad suffers from it too, and I saw the same one in his medicine cabinet.

I think my case is relatively minor, too, but I can remember being that desperate for a moment of relief. But for me it’s faded into the background and I usually don’t notice it. Tbh I’ve come to find it almost handy, in that it’s a way of my body providing feedback to tell me when I’m stressing myself out. Kinda like that thing with old folks where they can tell a storm coming because it makes their joints ache. The sensation itself is just a sensation, it’s annoying and unpleasant, but my experience is that what makes it really bad is when you have other thoughts attached to that. And the good news is that it’s possible to change the thoughts you associate with the sound even if you can’t change the sensation. It just takes time and mindfulness.

That’s a good point. The real problem is that the land and resources they stole through brazen force still remain in the hands of Western megacorps in a system of neocolonialism, and whenever any of the exploited countries try to tax or regulate that (much less reclaim their resources altogether), they get sanctioned into oblivion, if not overthrown outright.

Put it this way: I don’t think PJ is a fed, but I think the fact that he’s the feds aren’t paying him is wage theft.

The kind of atmosphere a planet can have in the long term depends on having enough gravity to keep gas particles from floating off into space. Mars’ gravity is smaller than Earth’s, which means that even if it had oxygen, that oxygen would be lost over time. Mars likely once had a dense atmosphere heavy in carbon dioxide, it wasn’t lost in one specific event, but gradually losing it over a long period of time.

Meanwhile your quote highlights the fact that Orwell thought that being honest about the Soviet Union and its critiques in political discussions is a mark of intellectual honesty, which isn’t really pro-fascist, since you can critique the United States and still be anti-communist after all.

In that case, you reject the reasoning in the initial quote.

When the Soviets were fighting the Nazis, criticizing the Soviets was either pro-fascist or it was not pro-fascist. If it’s pro-fascist, then Orwell was a hypocrite for doing so. If it isn’t pro-fascist, then the reasoning in OP’s quote is wrong.

Somehow this “our side or their side” broke down for him when considering the Soviets fighting on the same side as the Allies.

If a crazy guy attacks you on the street, would you just stand there and let him kill you because of all those societal consequences that are working against him?

No, because I’m not a pacifist. But what I’m saying is that this “with us or against us” argument is reductive and wrong. The question of whether pacifism is correct is a separate question from whether the “with us or against us” reasoning is valid.

If someone asks you to fight back to save yourself and your neighbors…no…they aren’t the ones doing you harm.

I think you and I have very different understandings of what the term “forcibly conscript” involves. It’s not “asking.”

Not only that, but there are an enormous amount of assumptions that you’re making here. Not every conflict is between fascists and non-fascists, as I said, WWII is an exception and you can’t make a rule from that exception.

Provided that neither side is exterminationist in nature, the conflict may just be a question of which oppressor rules over you, and in that case, you are not fighting, “to save yourself or your neighbors” but to preserve the power of one oppressor over another.

WWI provides a very clear example of this, and historically, the pacifists had the second best take on that conflict, better that virtually anyone else in the West. Likewise in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Every one of those conflicts was framed as being “defensive” and “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll be fighting them over here,” again, pacifists were much more correct than anyone who participated in those conflicts.

Technically, when it comes to violence, it is that simple. There is the side attacking you…and you.

No, it isn’t. Even in the purest, simplest scenario of like, crazy guy on the street comes after me for no reason, it still isn’t that simple, because it’s not a zero sum game of his interests vs my own. For him to assault me goes against his own interests, it’s likely that he’ll face legal or social consequences for doing so. At the same time, those legal/social forces are not necessarily “my side,” they might act to protect my wellbeing (or at least punish someone after the fact), but I don’t control them, and they may act against my wishes. For example, I might prefer that my assailant get rehabilitated rather than incarcerated.

This isn’t even an abstract thing for me. I have a relative who used to be very mentally unstable, suffering from paranoid delusions, caused or made worse by the meth he was on, and the war he had fought in. He was a danger to myself and my family, and to everyone in the area. For him to get clean and find treatment that worked for him was in everyone’s interest.

This is in the most extreme example of assailant and victim, and no one else. If you try to scale things up to a nation and pretend that there are only two sides, it’s utterly ridiculous.

“My” side might forcibly conscript me to be sent into some pointless meat grinder, killing people who are in the exact same boat but who happened to be born in a different country. Are they not aggressing against me by doing that? Perhaps the real “sides” are the working people of both countries against the rulers sending us to die.

You can’t oversimplify the world in to “our side” and “their side,” and say “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” There are countless different sides and there are factions within those sides that have different motivations and agendas. That’s simply a fact, and to pretend otherwise is just lazy.

Pacifists are generally more correct than most people because they’ve figured out the “no war” part of “no war but class war,” and the vast majority of war is not class war (or is perpetrated by the ruling class). I’m not a pacifist but I have respect for those who are.

To be fair, Orwell’s argument is understandable in the specific context of WWII, but it is not a generalizable principle.

Tbh I think people are trying to hard to dunk on you rather than actually explaining how we see things and why.

Opposing war is generally the correct take, in most cases, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should turn it into a hard rule, because there are exceptions. The American Civil War is an example I think most people would agree with. As violent and bloody as it was, it was still outweighed by the centuries of systemic violence baked into the system.

As Marxists we concern ourselves less with “who started it” (an inherently subjective question) and more with who’s fighting it and why, and what outcomes can be expected. War is the continuation of politics by other means, so to understand a conflict it’s important to look at the political questions at stake, on a case-by-case basis.

Without getting into the specifics of these conflicts, that’s what’s meant by “anti-war-ism,” not just opposing war, but doing so without really bothering to understand the specifics of a given conflict.

I think there’s also an element of online spaces promoting the “extreme” version of every idea. The same way the right is so much more overt and unapologetic about racism, the “centrist” types go to the unapologetic extreme of, “The lesser evil, no matter how evil” with no concern about alienating people who aren’t on board with that. It’s like the one thing they get to have a “this but unironically” or “yes Chad” response to.

Which party do you think is most likely to see the light on them… hmm

PSL, duh.

I feel like there was a time when voting for the “lesser genocide” would have just been presented as a hypothetical to show the logical extreme of lesser evil voting, but somewhere along the line people just started advocating that openly and unironically.

Go: To what extent should you rely on AI reviews vs pro reviews?

AI is really, really good at Go, far better than humans, and it’s pretty undeniable that it’s a valid use case for the technology. It also makes it free and easy to pop a game into it and have the AI tell you which moves were mistakes.

But AI favors a “risky” playstyle, because it can read out crazy detailed variations to be able to tell when a dangerous position is actually fine. Humans trying to emulate that, without the superhuman reading capabilities, sometimes mess up and get worse results than if they used a safer strategy.

AI also can’t explain why one move is better than another. Humans rely on heuristics, patterns, and proverbs to point us in the right direction of finding a move. A professional can show how to find a move through a heuristic, which is more generally applicable. There can also ofc be the factor of wanting to support the community by paying for a teacher or going to a club and finding someone to help review.

The question comes when the human professional says something that contradicts the AI, who do you listen to? I’ve been in a room before where an amateur was getting a game reviewed by a foreign professional (for free, but at a paid event) and after the pro criticized a move, the amateur insisted that the pro was wrong because the AI agreed with the move.

It’s an interesting question, at least to me, whether or not that’s inappropriate. On the one hand, you’ll always have the AI’s input so getting a different perspective is valuable, pros arguably earn a certain degree of their respect from their abilities, and there are the issues I mentioned above with relying too heavily on AI. On the other hand, because AI is so indisputably good, many people see it as a sort of objective standard for evaluating moves, whereas individual players may have different styles of play. If you can see reasons to play a move and the AI backs it up, then if the pro doesn’t like it it could just be a stylistic preference. And of course the type of people who tend to be attracted to a competitive strategy game like this (especially Americans) don’t necessarily have a lot of respect for credentials on paper or social heirarchies, as opposed to whether you can back up your analysis by objective standards.

Then instead of judging China’s foreign policy on its own merit

Hi. I’m willing to discuss China’s foreign policy on its own merit.

China has been at peace for decades. Before that, they had very shitty foreign policy, and their current approach of peacefully trading with everyone while avoiding conflicts is in part a reaction to that. This approach has it’s flaws, like a tendency to avoid getting involved in Israel/Palestine rather than supporting the Palestinians, but overall it’s been fairly effective and positive. It’s also nice that they’ve invested in poor countries and forgiven debts.

What part of their foreign policy is supposed to be “aggressive” exactly?

Certainly. I criticize China for some things. But I also critically support it and refute misinformation about it. That’s what makes people call me a “tankie.” Having a single kind word to say about anything China does tends to be enough to earn that label. The way I see it, to not be a tankie, you have to be completely and uncritically opposed to everything they do.