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.
No no, that's the trap of their narrative. "The Democrats are always just bending over backwards trying to promote minority candidates even when the deck is stacked against them, because they're just such true believers in progressive ideals."
The reality is, by playing up the "progressiveness" of a candidate's inherent characteristics, they can be quietly used as a vehicle for conservative policies that make their donors happy. This is a strategy that's very played out around the world, even Pakistan once had their own version of Margaret Thatcher, and Japan just go theirs recently.
From the perspective that progressive politics are completely off the table, picking a minority candidate was a tactically reasonable choice. A candidate's race and gender are about the only "concessions" they could give to the left, while courting their donors.
But the problem with that is that second-wave feminism, the kind that tends to see Thatcherites as a win, never caught on in the US like it did in the UK, and third-wave, which is more popular these days, accounts for that failure and focuses more on systemic issues and policy than individual leaders.
But any strategy that might work to get progressives to bend the knee to neoliberalism will be tried again and again, and if it fails they'll just chalk it up to sexism or whatever other bullshit.
Women won senate races in three of the swing states she lost and a Hispanic man won a fourth. It's hard to imagine an explanation more out of line with actual evidence.
I'm not, actually. I just want the US to refocus on confronting the domestic roots of fascism rather than trying to control the world, while fascism is so deeply rooted.
I guess I should know better than to expect a liberal to answer any serious question under any circumstances.
What does that even mean? He's already president with secret service protection, so it's not as if he'd be particularly easy to kill now (and has had it since well before being elected) and it's not as though there's some special "become impossible to kill button" he's waiting for the midterms to press.
Do you mean, it'll be too late for killing him to stop the things that are in motion? Because that's always been the case. Killing some senile octogenarian was never going to make a difference.
Real life isn't a movie. You're not cutting the red wire with 1 second left on the clock counting down to fascism.
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.
Hell yeah, bean burgers are fantastic. But I'm glad to have the impossible option too, and there are times where I get a craving for it. I think with them being more widespread, it's easier to get tired of them. Plus there's something... creatively satisfying about a vegan meal that does it's own thing and shows off what it can do rather than just substituting.
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.
If every state that opposes Western hegemony gets labelled as "authoritarian" in practice, then I fail to see the distinction.
It's only in a purely hypothetical fantasy that you can imagine a state that opposes Western hegemony that you wouldn't call authoritarian. As soon as that state actually came into being, you'd fall for propaganda about it, and it would have to engage with real world challenges with countering foreign subversion that y'all don't like to think about.
At best, the only anti-imperialist projects that "anti-authortarians" seem to support are the ones that fail, or last for about a week, because then they can be imagined as being perfect.
Even from that perspective, don't you see how having "illegitimate" socialist countries makes it easier for "legitimate" attempts to survive?
The US can't effectively sanction countries if those countries have the option of just taking their business to China. A multipolar world allows smaller countries a greater degree of freedom to experiment with different systems because they have options of who to turn to for trade and security, while in a unipolar world the US could just impose whatever conditions they want because they're the only option.
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.