i don’t like it when bad things happen to bad people, although i agree that it is necessary sometimes for reasons of accountability and deterrence.
i don’t like it when bad things happen to people.
@perfect_brains the work of states is to conjure nationalisms consistent with stability and internal peace (which often means pluralism). nationalism untethered to a state that incorporates as full citizens all of the residents of the territory it controls is indeed a pestilence, in my view. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/10/13/national-self-determination-is-a-vicious-idea/index.html
@realcaseyrollins that is the horror.
"It is the bleakest of historical ironies that a people hounded from country to country, and eventually into camps, by the pestilence of nationalism should seize on nationalism as our saviour, our birth right, our vengeance." #SamAdlerBell https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/jews-resist-inhumanity-israel
@phillmv as a 2016 Bernie-ite it has been a bit jarring having been pilloried by people especially at his publication as excusing racism and denying science for preferring Bernie's materialist politics to Hillary's material apologism and identity-baiting only to watch so many of those "serious liberals" now join a coalition complaining about that politics once they realized it was meant seriously enough to affect them.
@realcaseyrollins just because there is no points on which to compromise doesn't mean the form of competition needs to be war. humans have lots of irreconcilable claims and aspirations. we argue, we go to court, sometimes police intervene sometimes we set up some kind of challenge or competition to decide the issue (like who gets to live in a nice house and who doesn't). we don't pull knives, we find other paths, 'cuz knives are bad for everyone. even moreso war.
the chips are corpses.
it's a hard situation. i am not on either side. in fact i have warm feelings for neither.
but war is bad. you can't just opt out but you should always be striving for circumstances under which it can stop without entirely subordinating the interests of one belligerent to another.
that people so feted tweet so glib.
@stevendbrewer yes. i think that's fair. he wanted to be transformational in the sense of "not red not blue but the united states", but he perceived that and undertook it as an elite project, where it was doomed to fail, because mostly elites divide over interest and recruit political passions to buttress their capacity to serve those interests. when the game is tug-of-war, you can't just heal the wound.
@jumbanho 🙂 i'm doing a lot of that now. i used to write more polemically more often, now i try to be very cautious and fair and nobody reads my stuff either!
@failedLyndonLaRouchite that might be how he rationalized it to himself. that doesn't mitigate its effect.
@stevendbrewer i guess i disagree, unless "transformative figure" is interpreted only on symbolic dimensions. on material dimensions, his administration had a great deal of discretion, and they chose to preserve stability at the top of our social hierarchies at the explicit expense of those beneath. that strikes me as the opposite of striving and failing to be transformative. 1/
@stevendbrewer Obama did run a scandal-free administration, though he's not lived a modest, Jimmy-Carter-esque postpresidency either. corruption needs definition. /fin
@jumbanho yeah. i should talk more about ObamaCare / Affordable Care Act and also about foreign policy. but this was just a quick response to Yglesias, those would each be long discussions. ACA is I think quite mixed, net good relative to status quo ante, also very flawed, also politically corrosive at the time, even as it has now become politically untouchable. on foreign policy i think the verdict would be less mixed and pretty bad.
@jumbanho (re the superlative, obviously a bit hyperbolic, i don't want to be in the business of comparing Obama to Pol Pot and claiming Obama more destructive. there's an implicit "of what?" i wanted to push back hard on the Yglesian erasure of what Obama's choices did to the consensus surrounding the legitimacy of the United States' core institutions. That's where "most destructive" is arguable, though again, i think it prima facie hyperbolic and not really a "thesis" to defend.)
@SmudgeTheInsultCat @pixelpusher220 it's like a gun buyback, keeps it off the streets.
[new draft post] Obama was the most destructive political figure of my lifetime https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/30/obama-was-the-most-destructive-political-figure-of-my-lifetime/index.html
@admitsWrongIfProven yes. i hate that. i'm a huge fan of including imports in the samples (even that renders it a bit pseudocode-ish, if as in Java the imports have to be up top). i love scala-cli, because your sample can be a self contained script, imports and dependency versions included. https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/
@admitsWrongIfProven I find that everything I have ever done I have forgotten, and I have to look it up all over again. If I have done it, though, I can look it up in my own work, which is better teaching material (for me) than random stuff on the internet.
@sqrtminusone it's very good at wish fulfillment! it knows exactly what a function should do, and even has a pretty reasonable idea of where someone might put it. in LLM-world, just imagine what you want and it is real. it's like a car commercial or something.
@admitsWrongIfProven yeah, that's what i did initially, was surprised to see the ~ left alone. it's a bit annoying, it's a cli, when a user types --dump-dir ~/whatever the shell fixes it by --dump-dir=~/whatever and the tilde stays. oh well. i did it manually, substituting the system property (but rather than using string manipulation, calling homeDir.resolve(...) on a path that truncates the given path through the tilde plus file separator)
@admitsWrongIfProven I checked through Java 21.
Path.resolve is different. myPath.resolve( otherPath ) places otherPath beneath myPath. So if myPath is '/home/swaldman' and otherPath is 'foo/bar', myPath.resolve( othetPath ) is '/home/swaldman/foo/bar'