Zompist Bboard Again

I don't think we mean the same thing by empire. Yes. I mean empires. You mean countries you don't like. only as a contingent matter. what I mean by imperialism is when a country [lets call it the empire] employs both military, diplomatic and economic power for its corporations to expand globally to...

It's also complete nonsense for Torco to complain about "Empire", given that he's cheering on Trump's efforts to make things easier for the Russian empire in Europe and for the Chinese empire in Asia. (Yes, Torco, I know that neither Russia nor China have ever done bad things to Chile, bu...

like... is USAID an aid organization or a front for the CIA? ¿por qué no los dos? ¡ciertamente los dos!

Yeah, I like that reading a lot more. and incompetence is a perfectly reasonable hypotheses, considering the actors. we've had the convo about the costs of the collapse of the empire before, and I think i've made my position clear: it's that it's not like it won't have any bad consequences, of cour...

He and Musk don't understand soft power, so they're throwing away all the things that make the US actually beneficial or a good example or an essential source of outside information: disaster assistance, mine clearing, epidemic readiness, seed banks, foreign aid, broadcasting. They think being nice...

thank you, though on the other hand I feel as if it has a problem: western classical is extraordinarily non-improvisational, to the point where classical musicians that want to improvise end up publishing their improvisational albums under such rubrics as "jazz violin" or stuff. this wasn'...

so like, if they're dismantling the apparatus of empire, it's not cause they're following their principles: it's cause they want to dismantle the apparatus of empire. That's not even the terminology in which the fascists themselves think. And they're explicitly making noises about annexing other co...

fair enough, i agree it's not a slam dunk but then again, why dismantle the apparatus of empire? Because of ideology. It's a mix of neoliberalism, libertarianism, fascism and Christian fundamentalism. Especially relevant are the first two parts that say "Big Government is Bad". That is of...

our tradition comes from medieval european music I'd say Western music originates even earlier, with Greek theories of tuning. The Bengali songs I listen to most of the time don't actually use the Western scale. I meeeeean.... i know us westerners love saying that their traditions go back to greece...

fair enough, i agree it's not a slam dunk but then again, why dismantle the apparatus of empire?

another candidate to distinguish just anyone having a race from the olympics is the fact that the latter is an industry , right ? like, people can live off of it, it's a job rather than, or as well as if you're lucky, as a source of fun. this could be a good case for the no-popular-culture-in-premod...

wait... was that movie with viggo mortensen based on a real practice, then ? neat

That's what I mean. When it comes to the past, we generally hear about the culture, popular or otherwise, or people who leave writing behind, so it's like with exoplanet detections: there's more non-hot-jupiters than our available data would suggest. Authorship would somewhat dilute in oral cultures...

isn't mythology just... pop culture but with inferior IT ? i don't think there's a very strong divide between mythology and popular culture. sure, sure, we mean different things by them, but are they really that different? i've always been kind of oblivious about pop culture, both western in general...

Why should we take seriously the theoretical ramblings of people whose declared method is "praxeology"? remember that their method is open anti-empiricist and anti-scientific: they just decide a priori that people are perfectly rational utility maximizers and then build their entire edific...

Neurons are interesting, because it’s been proven that a two-layer artificial neural network is enough to simulate any other non-linear function whatsoever. This is a qualitative difference from logic gates, which require considerably more complexity to do universal computation. The other big diffe...

That's projecting both more reason and more humility on Trump than he has. The sociologist in question might be falsely assuming that everyone shares their ability to do serious sociological analysis. granted that's a fault in the analysis of many people in social sciences. That honestly makes sens...

Mohism always struck me as noticeably progressive -insofar as such categories can be used for ideologies that sprung in a feudaloid preindustrial society that's not western, which is admittedly not that far. Universal love and concern for all people without regard to family and social status, critiq...

I think you're conworlding here. Trump is doing nothing to extend US power; quite the reverse. very much so, yeah. As a rising power, what's in China's interest is maintaining the status quo. Hopefully Xi realizes that and doesn't actually try to grab Taiwan. In any case it seems like the magic has...

Preserving the "unipolar moment" has been the goal of every US administration since then. It's the same for Trump, only the means have changed. I'm honestly not sure. there's a certain chilean sociologist that defends the notion that trump is, rather, adapting to the end of that unipolar ...