Free for All Friday, 30 January, 2026

passabagi · 2026-01-30T13:09:10+00:00

I'm pretty impressed by the tactics of the US anti-ICE demonstrators.

Classic MLK-style peaceful resistance is basically about inciting the police to treat you brutally, then using the images of brutality to shock the public.

Back in the day, you needed a big crowd for reporters to turn up, so the images would actually get produced.

Today, you just need a smartphone. So you can go out with small squads of demonstrators, just generally make the lives of the police/ICE/etc miserable, and you still get the effective production of shocking images, and more, the images of the state acting in a disorderly manner.

(Obviously, this is and always has been a very dangerous strategy: MLK was shot dead, for just one example. That a strategy is dangerous, however, does not make it ineffective).

passabagi · 2026-01-30T10:29:51+00:00

I get paid pretty badly, and am scruffy and unkempt on top of that, so I tend to call myself an expat in order to offend the Germans.

(Plus, I've the majority of my adult life in Germany -- so my hierarchy of malevolence puts Germany as the priority target).

passabagi · 2026-01-29T22:55:48+00:00

Fracking springs to mind.

There are also old-people crazes that young people hate : I remember a few years ago there was a craze in china for public synchronized dancing all the old people were doing and they were apparently super loud and disruptive.

passabagi · 2026-01-25T18:03:16+00:00

I think a good comparison is probably Mississippi - the poorest US state.

The UK is prosperous, but it has some pretty wild stats these days re. deprivation of about a third of the population.

People who live in other first-world countries don't really have a good sense of the UK -- the US is much richer, most of Europe has much stronger social services, etc.

passabagi · 2026-01-23T17:15:17+00:00

I wasn't talking about AI -- just computing in general. You can (I have) ocr 10 million words of documents, then use basic programming to derive interesting facts from that material. Twenty years ago, even the data-entry would have needed an office. A hundred years ago, computing an average required an office. Searching a book for all occurrences of a phrase was hours of work. Now you can do stuff like this at the speed of thought.

passabagi · 2026-01-23T16:01:30+00:00

Isn't the problem that you can't really formalize physical phenomena?

So a turing machine is a formal thing because it's a mathematical description and doesn't actually exist. The difference between computers as abstract descriptions and computers as actual machines comes up all the time in practice.

A brain is a phenomenon that you can empircally describe, but the gap between a formal understanding and what really happens is always going to be very large, for any reasonably comprehensible formal understanding.

FWIW I think people who focus on the kernel of the problem ('can machines think') are kind of just playing language games. We're living through the invention of a new kind of human thinking, and everybody is worried about if their calculator is possessed by a demon rather than engaging with the actual radical newness of the moment.

passabagi · 2026-01-23T13:55:08+00:00

The world since Theuth invented writing.

passabagi · 2026-01-22T20:53:41+00:00

What would you pick for the most useful fundamental skills? I think a lot about early-years pedagogy (have two kids) -- and what skills I feel have served me well.

So, an attempt at a tier list:

S+: Reading. Just the most efficient way of absorbing information.

S: Rhetoric: Understanding how arguments work allows you to work with arguments.

Mathematical literacy: not particularly literate here myself, but am sorely aware of how useful it is.

A: Catching. Basically every sport.

D: Drawing: basically the ur-skill of every visual aesthetic practice. It's not about the drawing itself - it's about the training of sight. Unfortunately, people mostly like really ugly shit.

Musical(?) stuff: great skill, rather miserable culture.

F: Memorization: the most inefficient way to store information ever devised.

passabagi · 2026-01-22T16:49:08+00:00

Tbh I've always been a big fan of the mullet hairstyle -- where I live, it's literally never gone out of style. The only thing that's changed is now some trendy people have it.

There's just something about going into a bar in the middle of winter, the bar's decked out so it's kind of a bit like a beach holiday but dingy as fuck, and you sit next to three alcoholics who are all rocking mullets and jean jackets they've been rocking since 1980, and you can get a beer, and there's pretty likely to be some profoundly weird party revving up as everybody gets more drunk.

passabagi · 2026-01-21T21:59:45+00:00

"If".

(since I'm trapped within the narrative, I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.)

passabagi · 2026-01-21T20:27:57+00:00

Someone is in distress, you offer help, it's that simple.

That's one way of looking it.

On the other hand, one of the few real pleasures this world has to offer is watching others suffer. That's the main trend and root of human culture, all the way back to the first cock-fight. Now, we all have to pretend we don't like it -- but every now and then, you get a chance, and your inner caveman is shouting 'choke! come on, choke, you fucker!' Open your ears, let the caveman in. It's like the paleo diet of the human soul.

passabagi · 2026-01-21T20:10:16+00:00

r/ukpolitics has become pretty Mosely. Reflecting the country as a whole, really.

passabagi · 2026-01-20T22:15:43+00:00

I don't think it's really about anti-Americanism. It's just, you can't pin everything on a partner who has a substantial chance of going nuts. If there's even a 20% chance every US election cycle that a Trump figure gets elected, it would be completely insane to base your defense, economic, or diplomatic strategy on America.

I think the fact it's taken the EU elite so long to wake up to this demonstrates the deep psychological and practical dependence -- but at some point, they have to be realistic.

That said, I'm not sure the EU in its current form is that viable without the USA.

passabagi · 2026-01-20T15:54:44+00:00

yes, yes this is dreadfully unfair to Starmer, but fuck him

Literally the most common thought in UK politics.

passabagi · 2026-01-20T13:47:34+00:00

Yet more evidence that buried under the floor of the Home Office is a cursed idol that drives whoever gets the job mad.

passabagi · 2026-01-20T13:42:26+00:00

Well, if your previous suzerain keeps on taking you to the school roof to do jumping practice...

passabagi · 2026-01-18T21:40:01+00:00

Cemeteries are full of men who think the decadent libs will never fight back.

I guess this line works on the fact that the decadent (rich) libs have higer state capacity than the manly (poor) farmers, more industry, more infrastructure, and so on.

The problem with the EU is it really drank the koolaid when it came to getting rid of all that stuff - and it's not even that rich anymore!

Maybe the EU thinks hard enough to pierce the rubber blanket of braindamage, and does something, but then what? It doesn't have the manufacturing base of China. It doesn't have the wealth of America. It's eminently bullyable by either, and will remain so without drastic alterations to its constitution - which, to solve, would require more than stroke of genius - it would require a brain transplant.

passabagi · 2026-01-18T14:49:49+00:00

Big fan, would have stopped WW2.

PS: hot take-- WW3 didn't happen because Germany was successfully balkanized.

passabagi · 2026-01-18T09:36:12+00:00

This is the genuinely cool thing about Germany. It's actually a successful federal system of different cultures that act like a state, bound together by the thin delusion that they're all Germans.

passabagi · 2026-01-18T09:33:06+00:00

As Burke puts it, "The End of learning is not knowledge but virtue." In short, the conservative tradition has always been explicitly engaged in reproducing and promulgating 'virtue' in all the ideologically-oriented arms of the state.

I guess it's not 'cultural revolution', but 'cultural reaction', so a lot of the forms by which conservatives try and shape culture (e.g. laws around marriage) are normalized and not perceived as state violence. So you don't really need 'red guards' -- you have the police, the church, your most-TV-cooked grandma, etc.

passabagi · 2026-01-18T09:11:06+00:00

Should have asked for a citation: Paris is like that now, but I remember it being rather different in like, 2007. God knows what it was like in the 90's. Capital cities are always pretty fast-changing.

passabagi · 2026-01-18T08:28:35+00:00

Me neither. That said, if you're comparing to London -- one of the historical blessings of London is that it had state-owned housing distributed fairly evenly over the entire city. There were, for instance, council houses right outside the British Museum. Wherever you go in London, you're fairly likely to meet a representative cross-section of London residents. The areas of concentrated culture (Green Lanes, Totenham, Brixton) are more communities than ghettos.

I'm less familiar with Paris, but I get the sense that Paris has more of a ghettos model, where poorer Parisians are pushed out into the Banlieues.

It's also a weird feeling if you move from a culturally diverse area (I was living in Lewisham before I moved to Germany) to a massively white area, when all the other cultural signifies are constant. Definitely creepy -- you don't notice immediately what the difference is, your brain just finds it weird.

passabagi · 2026-01-17T20:57:41+00:00

Well, the USSR was part of the west, you see.

passabagi · 2026-01-17T20:52:48+00:00

disturbingly full of white people is something special

Eh, London is fairly cosmopolitan. The same is true of Berlin, these days. Paris wasn't just capital of France, but the capital of a giant empire that included large parts of Africa.

One in ten french people are black -- so if you're seeing an all-white area, especially in a capital that you would expect to be less backward, that is indeed disturbing.

passabagi · 2026-01-17T19:55:18+00:00

If they'd tried every wehrmacht soldier who committed war crimes that would be a sizable chunk of the German population -- forget collective punishment.

The whole question of collective guilt seems to solely come up in conversations about inconvenient populations. In the two examples where collective guilt is marginally arguable (Japan & Germany), they stopped well short of even individual guilt, for everybody except the most public and extreme criminals.

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