Oh I agree, we would do well to be more aware of the history in/of the colonies. Anyway, macbeth said that he notices people 'always come to the defence of white colonisers' which isn't surprising if these are the only western historical people really under scrutiny right now.uziq wrote:
why is that some particular problem? most western european countries have not reckoned with their imperial past./Larssen wrote:
Mao is still a national hero in China and has his face plastered everywhere. Most russians will compassionately tell you how Stalin was the right man for the job and the excesses a necessary sacrifice. Ataturk, well, modern Turkey kinda rejects his western preference. But I was specifically talking about reappraisals in the west wrt western history, today almost exclusively centred on colonial figures. Who are of course white.uziq wrote:
the above really isn't true, considering in america it's invoked all the time over the civil war/slavery era, and still happens today over legacies of figures like ataturk in turkey, for instance. or how about the reckoning with the past endured by russians over stalin? germany and its post-war past? china and mao? cambodia/vietnam today? it's not like historiography is silent on reappraising the morals of antecedents outside of the european-colonial context.
what does seem to be present in many european contexts, which doesn't still obtain in germany w/r/t ww2, for instance, is that we've kept up monuments and statues to these people, where in other countries they were silently taken down or thrown away in uprisings years ago. it's really not some 'oh, the poor white european is being exclusively picked on' situation.
yes, stalin might be back in favour now in russia, but they had decades of self-questioning, the 'secret' of the soviets was out, glasnost/perestroika, etc. they went through that process. many western countries never have. the schoolchildren are still not told the 'truth' of empire and the national past is still some rosy story of adventure and glory.
many other nations had industrial ages before ours. india's cloth and textiles industry was far in advance on england's. we effectively DE-industrialized india, stripmined its wealth, and gave favour back to our own burgeoning textiles mills and newly industrialized homeland.Dilbert_X wrote:
It would be interesting to know if that were really true.Larssen wrote:
how the wealth, riches and comfort in the west are ultimately the result of those expeditions and conquests.
I bet the industrial age eclipsed that by many orders of magnitude.
you act like the industrial revolution was some benign force, like research and development or something. it was absolutely political, absolutely involved in empire and militarism, and in global power struggles.
Ehm, the british empire ruling a third of earth's landmass was pretty great for the finances in london.Dilbert_X wrote:
It would be interesting to know if that were really true.Larssen wrote:
how the wealth, riches and comfort in the west are ultimately the result of those expeditions and conquests.
I bet the industrial age eclipsed that by many orders of magnitude.
actual scientists with PhDs recognize the limits of their PhDs. i don't think i've ever met an academic physicist in my work who would have the arrogance and political insipidity of dilbert. genuinely intelligent people seem to have no problem recognizing the limits of their ability. and, yes, for many scientists those limits extent no further than their own fucking nano-niche within a highly specialized sub-sub-field of a branch of physics. an optics expert wouldn't dare hazard an opinion on nanomaterials, let alone proclaim themselves a political genius.unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Sounds like bunk to me.Dilbert_X wrote:
I'd say someone with a good grounding in Maths and Statistics and reasonable knowledge of science would be in a much better position to get a grip on most things than someone who can precis poetry, read latin or tell you what Attila the Hun got up to.
If a cellular biology PhD started bragging about how he could run the country by virtue of science, I'd be a little skeptical. A number of scientists aren't very confident spouting off about something outside their expertise without at least the "I'm no expert, outside my field, correct me if I'm wrong, etc." disclaimer, if they comment at all.
I would be extremely skeptical of an 'algebra' teacher running for city council on the grounds that his subject made him more qualified than his 'local history' colleague.
even promoting things like more numeracy and more reliance on modelling/rationalization isn't really good enough. those systems are only as good as their designers. there are over-arching, meta- or implicit judgments in all these things. every 'system' has certain assumptions hard-baked into its very code. it's not like an enlightened race of math-men in white coats, sat in sterile labrooms, could guide and develop society towards the better interests of all. there's a huge political process of even deciding what 'the good' and 'the desirable' even are, and of developing institutions and systems to that end. there is no 'benevolent' AI-type solution, 'because math'.
all this is way over dilbert's head.
dilbert is illiterate. try explaining to him how industrialization in, for e.g., northern europe affected the existing economies of the italian city states. how that led to decades of want, privation, economic collapse, famine, war, etc. all of the gains made by 'industrialization', aided and abetted by armies, wars, 'trade companies', aggressive or protectionist policy, etc. had very real effects on the power balance of europe and the world.Larssen wrote:
Ehm, the british empire ruling a third of earth's landmass was pretty great for the finances in london.Dilbert_X wrote:
It would be interesting to know if that were really true.Larssen wrote:
how the wealth, riches and comfort in the west are ultimately the result of those expeditions and conquests.
I bet the industrial age eclipsed that by many orders of magnitude.
our gains absolutely came at the cost of other nations and people.
i think dilbert imagines the industrial revolution in the same way that people talk about advances in, for e.g., agriculture that enabled the entire world to feed itself more easily. like how borlaug created a 'green revolution' or something. as if industrialization was a bunch of benign improvements in nitrogen processes, freely shared with the world's hungry.
it's called extractive/accumulative capitalism for a reason.
Last edited by uziq (2020-07-19 04:10:35)
We already went through an overrationalised maths-based phase in politics/policy. It was the cold war dilbert. Injecting math in policy of any kind was hot stuff in the 60s-80s. Look at game theory in international relations, or how the americans tried to run the vietnam war. You're stuck in the past
Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-19 04:02:09)
yes but if only this time we can give it to smarter scientists and better mathematicians. if we just try this central-planning, supercomputer thing one more time but with more processing power and more big data. this time we will really get it right.
it's not that the starting assumptions for many of these processes might be flawed; it's not that we cannot take into account irrationality, or unpredictability, or any other number of stochastic processes; it's not that math and statistics give us no intrinsic guidance on decision making; NO, we just need MORE math, MORE computing, this time around. we didn't MATH HARD ENOUGH!!!
it's not that the starting assumptions for many of these processes might be flawed; it's not that we cannot take into account irrationality, or unpredictability, or any other number of stochastic processes; it's not that math and statistics give us no intrinsic guidance on decision making; NO, we just need MORE math, MORE computing, this time around. we didn't MATH HARD ENOUGH!!!
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3717
I mentioned to superior mind about this before but potatoes, tomatoes and other agricultural products that are now a mainstay of many European cuisines have their origins in the Americas. Europe would not have been able to maintain their high populations without these new agriculture products. Late in the Industrial Revolution oil from the United States further propelled European industrialization.
So colonization did have a dramatic effect on European development. That doesn't mean you have to reject modern plumbing or something because racism.
So colonization did have a dramatic effect on European development. That doesn't mean you have to reject modern plumbing or something because racism.
I propose we start an experimental world government using crowdsourced computing. Folding@home recently pushed exascale. All that potential is wasted on things like disease research. It's time to leverage it for compassionate and nuanced governance. My RTX card is ready.
HAL 2020
HAL 2020
https://twitter.com/WethePeople303/stat … 5176846336
just a reminder that this is still going on, on a large scale, with no burning of buildings, rioting, looting, murderous antifa. inconvenient for dilbert, i know.
just a reminder that this is still going on, on a large scale, with no burning of buildings, rioting, looting, murderous antifa. inconvenient for dilbert, i know.
There's a little bit of mischief to that site. Tossed up a blue-box, white-text registration request or whatever. For a nanosecond, I thought I'd bluescreened. I'll at least acknowledge the prank, intended or not, as perhaps effective or attention-grabbing.
- Superior Mind
- (not macbeth)
- +1,755|6690
I have a friend who is really afraid BLM will mean a communist overthrow of the government and the organized killing of white people. I say it would never happen. Communism couldn’t take hold in such a decedent society, could it?
your friend is a dipshit.
Exactly, you need ideas, vision, judgement - things studying the past absolutely don't teach you.uziq wrote:
but maths and statistics don't tell you anything about how to govern a country. they tell you how to manage one, certainly, how to model and maintain one. they're great at running structures efficiently, maybe, and at making small-scale decisions based on data. but at a certain point politics becomes about more than mere 'maintenance' and ticking-over of a state machine. you need ideas, vision, judgment; and you need to react to new events, new global developments, for which there is no established data and statistics. how would a mathematician know how to deal with relations in the middle-east? how to tackle an emergent terrorist threat? how to enact diplomacy on the world stage and maintain relations with several other superpowers? this isn't stuff you put into an excel spreadsheet.
Synthesising, developing, predicting, looking forward not backward, those are the skills needed and thats what is lacking from arts training.
Given their actual resources some of them did remarkably well, plus they had the constraints of communism which is a separate issue.you do know that several countries have tried your mathematicians and engineers lark, right? the soviet union was meant to be ran by an enlightened cadre of technicians. several communistic societies have tried to rationalize and quantify every single bean in the land and to run it through a central computer. it didn't work very well.
And as you said, China is run by a technocrat elite and they've managed to build a modern country almost from scratch in 20 years.
Johnson and Cummings can barely hold together a functioning country they've been handed on a plate.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZimbabweSuperior Mind wrote:
I have a friend who is really afraid BLM will mean a communist overthrow of the government and the organized killing of white people. I say it would never happen. Communism couldn’t take hold in such a decedent society, could it?
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
errr these are precisely the benefits of studying history, dilbert.Exactly, you need ideas, vision, judgement - things studying the past absolutely don't teach you.
here's a scientist, for you.
You have to know the past to understand the present
err, and precisely as i said, the 'technocrats' in all their benevolent wisdom are also guilty of mass human rights abuses, concentration camps, and extremely chauvinistic thinking about their nation and its place in the world. which are all the qualities and warning signs i highlighted above about 'objective' and 'rational' technocrats running things.And as you said, China is run by a technocrat elite and they've managed to build a modern country almost from scratch in 20 years.
you literally just said this a page ago, complaining about my perspective:
now you're advocating for a chinese technocratic state that is autocratic, anti-democratic, and does to hell with human rights? LOL thank god xi jinping has a degree in chemical engineering!That and the world shouldn't be run according to democratic principles and basic human rights, it should be directed according to millenia-old fairy stories and what in-bred cultists want.
so china is big, bad and definitely scary to you 99% of the time; but when you want to make a point about technocracy being benign, benevolent, and great, and how history graduates are the worst: wow! check out this china place! neat!
you are a fucking idiot.
yes because post-colonial zimbabwe and the united states of america are really comparable.Dilbert_X wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZimbabweSuperior Mind wrote:
I have a friend who is really afraid BLM will mean a communist overthrow of the government and the organized killing of white people. I say it would never happen. Communism couldn’t take hold in such a decedent society, could it?
hey! maybe you should read ... SOME FUCKING HISTORY!
I'm always reluctant to say that the past holds lessons for the present or future. People usually interpret that in a too literal sense and start drawing historical parallels. I'm not sure about that and usually refrain from doing so seriously (surface level stuff is fine), but there's certainly something to be learned. History's greatest value to me is in how it helps us understand change, which ultimately is at the heart of almost all historical research. Why did certain events come to pass, or why were things the way they were? Understanding how history unfolded and what can influence societal changes provides a wealth of contextually important knowledge to leaders who want to change the present. It gifts a strong analytical toolbox for understanding what happens around us and maybe even allows us to glean in what ways we could influence events. Or what could happen if we choose to do X, Y or Z. Without knowing the long view of history or historical analysis, people are often ignorant of their own place and meaning within the wider context of their time. Which is why I argue it's an incredibly important field to study for the politically involved, Dilbert, as these people are at the helm of long term changes and usually leave legacies with long-lasting effects.
Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-21 07:12:45)
the fact he says you need people who can make 'good judgments', but then dismisses any past-oriented learning, i.e. the very definition of wisdom, raises the question 'just what do good judgments consist of?' they're not off-the-cuff intuitions. good judgments are precisely formed by prior knowledge, precedent, example; wisdom, in short. the idea of a 'canny' technocrat who can 'make great judgments' sounds like a fucking The Apprentice candidate. oh, a dynamic leader who can make great decisions on the fly!!!
I also don't see how prior experience in technical fields will truly aid political decision making. Beyond the value in a diversified range of backgrounds among leadership and perhaps some tangentially important subject specific knowledge, there's not much an astrophysics degree will do for you if you're a member of parliament or cabinet..
Are we like supposed to apply orbital state vectors to social policy lol?
Are we like supposed to apply orbital state vectors to social policy lol?
Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-21 07:34:01)
it's because engineers are super good at making good judgments, you see, their jobs are super important, they have to decide things all the time, otherwise BRIDGES WILL FALL DOWN! they use CAD, and computer modelling, and put numbers into pre-existing formulae to ensure their designs observe FIXED LAWS OF PHYSICS! it's very rigid and precise!
just like, er, human society. or something.
it's funny how many terrible leaders have been chemists or chemical engineers, by the by. maybe all that time inhaling solvents affects their limbic system and empathy? a thesis to be sure ...
just like, er, human society. or something.
it's funny how many terrible leaders have been chemists or chemical engineers, by the by. maybe all that time inhaling solvents affects their limbic system and empathy? a thesis to be sure ...
Last edited by uziq (2020-07-21 07:35:49)
How is this still going on. Or is Dilbert deliberately taking a fall just to fill the void left by hollis and jay.