mircea_popescu: in the end, there's two major functions of leadership in human society. one is http://btcbase.org/log/2018-12-12#1880251 (generally called "economy") and the other is, synchronization, as in, selection of schelling points. this is usualyl called culture, but it's a large thing, including tropes and all sorta manner of thing.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 22:35 diana_coman: not to mention how many were full of mould to the point that you'd get children with asthma and what not
mircea_popescu: even though economy had ~died, the 70s east cultural clock still synchronized a lot closer to reality than the 70s west cultural clock.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902029 << sure. and also, that you went to universitatea politehnica bucuresti, instead of mit. i believe ushinski is way the fuck better than dr seuss, in terms of primary school textbooks, also. and so following.
mircea_popescu: people recur, is the thing.
asciilifeform in the midst of ffalogical labyrynth but cannot resist to peek & eat thrd
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:14 asciilifeform: e.g. ro, lost its sovereignty , and arguably the bill for ~that~ aint even remotely paid yet, nao it hosts nato rockets and became legit target for ru defensive systems
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902019 << eh, this was always the case. romania didn't particularly ~want~ to participate in ye various wars. but always this circumstantial "Can't really not to".
mircea_popescu: he is ~absolutely correct~, too. the actual fuel, for communism's efficiency and persuasion, was precisely the reservoir he identifies : ". Și cîți aliați devotați n'ar găsii în captivii de cari pomenim mai sus, sătui de a-și călca mereu pe cuget și pe inimă, de a-și jertfi zilnic, pe altarul minciunii și inichității, convingerile lor adînci, dragostea de adevăr și de patrie !." is === http://trilema.com/20
diana_coman: changing one set of lies for another set of lies; better lies! granted, everything is just a better lie until finding an even better one.
mircea_popescu: but yes, the history of the "free world" closely approximates the history of a bunch of morons. because guess what -- they ARE a bunch of morons.
diana_coman: http://trilema.com/2012/o-bucatica-de-istorie-sau-1907-din-primavara-pina-in-toamna-de-ion-luca-caragiale/#selection-283.267-283.654 -> to which communism was the answer; oh boy.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:06 asciilifeform: so you try an' make a 'new'. and pray that it worx, before 'a bunch of foreigners land on your shores, buy up some local chiefs, chop down your forests, rip the minerals out of your soil, enslave a few generations, and eventually go home, leaving their bastards in charge'
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902010 << fucking precisely. watching #trilema from a distance, with imbecile "skepticism" is not a free option. should it fail, there goes computing, and generally speaking this is the one chance this century.
mircea_popescu: the fucking morons ~opted~ for evil, and then went about as if their pretending "they didn't opt" makes it BE THE CASE they did not so opt.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 17:02 mircea_popescu: consider the traditional antisemitism -- a cluster of lumphocytes around a very real problem, yes, but SUBJECTIVE PROBLEM OF THE JEWS. not irritating "the organism" as such in any sense, beyond the very obvious an' deeply human "you folk can't be this fucking stupid!" thing
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902009 << this is VERY much related to the http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901903 discussion. it's not like #trilema was fulla linus, djb, everyone else, and i out of my sheer insane evil meanness negrated them an' forced them out.
mircea_popescu: eg, s.nsa is more of a factory, in objective terms, than tractorul brasov ever was or could have been. it's what it is, these days "factory" is complex item.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902001 << the problematic things here are miniaturization and technologization. there's relatively little need or use for the sort of "factory" as displayed in 1950s italian films. and besides, india can have those.
mircea_popescu: yes they "were brought by the tanks", but they stayed because they were actually effectual, and actually persuasive.
mircea_popescu: the commies answers to fundamental questions, as insufficient, incorrect, inept, useless or w/e else you might find them, seated in the hallowed confines of the republic, nevertheless blew the fuck out of the water the available alternatives.
mircea_popescu: that communism was untenable by the time 80s rolled around is a historical fact ; but kingdom romania was actually ~more~ bankrupt, as an intellectual endeavour, than communism ever got.
mircea_popescu: y "prior". the whole thing was a bunch of inept by-hand farmers (CENTURIES after the french peasant had domestique-industrialize already! CEEENTURIES!!!!) and a 14% class literally dreaming on top of them, while "hating" the boss that "makes them" do the makework that existed ENTIRELY as a pretext to pay them, in the very "internal paint" hope they might achieve something sometime somehow (all unspecified).
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:56 diana_coman: to my mind that's precisely the thing: it's not (or not only) that "screaming meat" but the fact that at the end of it, it's only a replacement with what is in fact an inferior, not a superior thing
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901994 << this is deeply untrue, though. romania made its own military equipment, which it did not have in the 30s. there's such a thing as truck factory or tractor factory or etc. period romania had ENTIRELY nothing at all, revisit http://trilema.com/2012/o-bucatica-de-istorie-sau-1907-din-primavara-pina-in-toamna-de-ion-luca-caragiale/ as an excellent summary of the situation in the countr
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:55 BingoBoingo: Don't forget the unbutchered labor activists in the Southern Cone who will consider shuttering a Ford factory "a win for the people"
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901993 << right, http://trilema.com/2012/the-imbecilitarians/#selection-191.0-209.295 geniuses at work.
diana_coman: not to mention when you get what you neither want nor need :P
mircea_popescu: the universal problem, in the end : there's a difference between what you want and what you need.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman sure, why not. for the same money could just blame god tho.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901981 << misery in the short term and complete oblivion in the long term. there's not gonna be anymore "trade in women" as they expect it to work, for one thing.
diana_coman: there is plenty of others to blame and then the top-name is at least easy to remember so there, win.
mircea_popescu: i dunno, in the "public space", whatever.
mircea_popescu: i ran into a lotta these, you know, idle workers who couldn't work because basescu didn't let them.
diana_coman: the argument where?
mircea_popescu: exact nonsense spewing out of the same quarters during say basescu terms.
diana_coman: i.e. look, not as bad as it can be; sure, there is always worse.
mircea_popescu: the argument as i perceived it generally revolves around this "omg, he's the devil!!!"
diana_coman: sure but scoring based on the bottom is dubious
mircea_popescu: you still gotta score the set somehiw.
diana_coman: if it is to grant him that there are currently many worse than him - readily granted.
diana_coman: this eerily reminds me of "but why are you so upset with yourself??? others got even worse marks than you!!!"
mircea_popescu: it's unclear how much can be expected of one guy, or what exactly set of interactions to judge him by. nevertheless, setting top level policy broadly correctly is probably both there and sufficient. in this sense, ceausescu is better than say the english tard, what's her name, or the german tard, what's her name.
mircea_popescu: in any case, to briefly revisit : ceausescu's designs with his oil gains, while ultimately crowned by failure, were nevertheless A LOT smarter than period venezuela's commitments. and certainly way the fuck better than qatar building another mall today.
diana_coman: aha, ibraileanu in fact mentions both as similar in this sense though Caragiale even more instransigent on the matter, supposedly because simply living closer to the problem as it were, as it started in Muntenia
diana_coman: quite; there was a bit of an anger moment when I realised that in school they never even *mentioned* those writings of Caragiale, let alone study them
mircea_popescu: these are just words niggers say.
mircea_popescu: "liberals" in the sense clinton's "democratic"
mircea_popescu: yeah. and yes, his words for the opposition would have been "partidul collectivist". what c a rosetti & co were pushing is entirely indistinct from today's pantsuitism, in all its particulars.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:40 diana_coman: with the added bonus that Ibraileanu in 1909 cites from the same piece of Caragiale (Politica si cultura) with the comment that Caragiale was the most acerbic critic of... "liberalism" (the quotations marks are Ibraileanu's) that is further explained as "partidul <<ros>>" aka the red party.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901970 << the good bit there is where he asks for some hair paint be invented to order. saw that ?
mircea_popescu: i don't think this was avoidable. like that schmuck whose name's forgotten who wanted to be famous so bad, set athens on fire.
diana_coman: but plesu, liiceanu, dinescu, mungiu etc are equally products of communism and I'd much rather have preferred not hearing of them ever
mircea_popescu: very different sports. there's a reason communisms produce ballerinas.
mircea_popescu: and it is VERY different to take credit from the industrial products that are 12yo gymnasts, than to sit about and go "o look, this excellent tennis player got #1".
mircea_popescu: meanwhile ceausescu's communism DID produce the only olympic gold romania got till those times.
diana_coman: re stupid my understanding of the usual charge is that he was non-intelligent, not non-smart; clever and shrewd perhaps; then again, this is my "translation" - I don't really know either way, not as if I knew the guy
mircea_popescu: on the contrary -- to them, its most excellent quality is they've something to blame for ~their own~, wholly subjective and entirely cosubstantial nothingness.
mircea_popescu: the problem with communism, however, is not that it kept plesu, liiceanu, dinescu, mungiu etc from producing great crystals of pure thought to make the fame of romania throughout the ages.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 22:40 mircea_popescu: but there's two lines of pedestrian ceausescu-hate that carry no water. one is, "he is responsible for drought". dood is not a 12yo girl dancing naked in the street, has no peculiar relationship to rain. the other is that he was particularly stupid. was not -- way the fuck smarter than period writers, or generally "intellectuals". less aware of the ample thesaurus of borrowed knowledge they used to drop in conversation as a s
diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902171 -> fwiw it's hate of communism of which ceausescu is the great product and crowning - admittedly local- glory.
mircea_popescu: incidentally alf, ludwig 2 of bavaria is a fine example re this wot. one day decided to ditch his cabinet -- the cabinet decided it'd better ditch him first!!!
mircea_popescu: somehow they never fucking heard of anything, it's like talking to bouvard & pecuchet.
mircea_popescu: (i also fail to hear these "cultured" fucktards explain how ~exactly the same~ was said of what now makes the glory of austria, that insane dood's palaces)
diana_coman: I always rather considered casa poporului among his achievements - at least there is something everyone knows re Bucharest, what do you want now
diana_coman never heard this "how ugly it is" re casa poporului, possibly because she never listened to mungiu-pippidi and the like
mircea_popescu: notwithstanding ceausescu watched tv for his own interest, at least, which is a step above the nigglet.
diana_coman: and fwiw it has everything inside made-in-romania so there, pride
mircea_popescu: the typical "oh, casa poporului is so ugly" item goes right in #2 above : it's a code, exactly like any other code. it's function is to permit the sort of moron who is affraid of the world to recognize who's likely to huddle with him.
mircea_popescu: ort of handshake, but imo this is defensible disinterest. you wouldn't say a kid "learns nothing in school" because he doesn't come home with the list of what grunge bands to listen to for maximum cooldom.
mircea_popescu: but there's two lines of pedestrian ceausescu-hate that carry no water. one is, "he is responsible for drought". dood is not a 12yo girl dancing naked in the street, has no peculiar relationship to rain. the other is that he was particularly stupid. was not -- way the fuck smarter than period writers, or generally "intellectuals". less aware of the ample thesaurus of borrowed knowledge they used to drop in conversation as a s
mircea_popescu: possibly. there's very many variables to control in comparisons.
diana_coman: moscow is also waaaay bigger so presumably the shitholness factor is a few degrees of magnitude higher, easily
mircea_popescu: i'm not saying this is the dood's doing to any degree -- there's a very clear gradient, once the crisis hit, it propagated west to east.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:15 asciilifeform: diana_coman: 'didn't get to the part where it gets better' << this is the distinct impression i get . and i suspect on acct of the shoemaker being soft.
diana_coman: that thing with hit the russians worse is oddly in opposition to http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902023
mircea_popescu: but yes, ceausescu's imperialist plans were obviously going to fail by the time mid 70s turned around, and were well and thoroughly doomed in 1980.
mircea_popescu: there's no argument as to degradation. the objection is that the whole soviet world was undergoing the same process, and it hit the russians worse.
diana_coman: not to mention how many were full of mould to the point that you'd get children with asthma and what not
diana_coman: from the 60s to the 80s it goes from can build house on worker's salary to get to live in the party's shit
diana_coman: at any rate, it's not just a palace in dubious style; look at this point of ref: in 1960, new workers in Ploiesti got to buy a strip of land and build their own house; and they did, not one or two but whole streets; some of those were even fixed-size parcel, others (more expensive) not; in the 80s, workers got assigned (when? well, when enough children) some concrete-hruschebas-sorta-kinda-finished on the rule of n-1 rooms (not dorms, room
mircea_popescu: the local twerps tho knew better, wouldn't touch the stuff. so it got sold in south-east asia instead.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:12 diana_coman: ftr funnily enough precisely fish was very much missing from ro diet to such extent that yes, there were slogans "nici o masa fara peste"
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901961 << this actually worked into the whole imperialism angle above. ceausescu had both drydocks of large capacity and steel production. decided to make ocean trawlers to compete in the (at the time) ongoing race to the bottom -- throughout 70s world oceans were systematically and industrially depopulated, a classical disaster of commons situation.
mircea_popescu: ie, the carlton fell in 1940.
mircea_popescu: willy-nilly these are the points of comparison as to the extant real estate inventory.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman there were two major earthquakes in romania : nov 1940, and march 1977.
mircea_popescu: yes dood made a palace in a dubious style, that all the tircovnici obositi kept "superiorily" criticizing. but tell you what -- none of them were born in a better palace. they have all the footing to talk that any other african does.
mircea_popescu: and the houses! the data's even published on trilema, compare the rfucking living surfaces 1930 to 1960, ie during the two earthquakes.
diana_coman: that is true; I kept thinking of the inept useless huge buildings , not the hydro and roads
mircea_popescu: or a hruscheba, or w/e the fuck they call it. makes entirely no difference, for the vast majority of the population of romania at the time had never lived in paved dwellings.
mircea_popescu: that log thing about "what sovok is -- it's when they take the poor country girl and give her a house for free", that fucking happened. whole generations of what else'd have [been] turned into http://trilema.com/fata-satului got forcibly taught how to be textile mill workers , and got forcibily placed in 1k sqft of new construction to call a house.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman yes, useful and durable. romania got a hidro power structure, for instance. the reason it even has power today.
diana_coman: ahead; not sure on the right road though
mircea_popescu: guy was ahead of his time, it's not specifically his fault that the spawn-and-divideresources cuntal strategy fails.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901959 << note how this is EXACTLY what the usgistani is converging to, from both the "airbnb" end and the "communal dwelling for lifetime students" end.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:11 diana_coman: and that's valid for the 1000 bakeries too; I suppose one can argue that it's still an achievement to have bakeries with no bread than to have no bakeries and stale bread but I don't buy it; and note that in the 80's the latest brightest idea (in the same vein, all hail!) was to further do this sort of great "improvement", to wit the communal "neighbourhood kitchen" to get rid of such waste as having individual kitchens in every hruscheba
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901958 << it's a matter of infrastructure that's discussed. in any fair comparison, nicu's building/whitewashing butade is actually closer to truth than any aferations of the "european stability and development funds" wank. infrastructurally, romania grew in the 60s and 70s. this was not matched hence (or ever afore, even accounting for surface and population, the carol boom is almost a degr
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:08 diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901855 -> his "move" was - as most - very much in the vein of "this is the shop where we don't have fish"
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901954 << not originally. originally, it was in the vein of hungarians driving over to shop in romania.
mircea_popescu: soviets needed a slightly larger ukraine like i need slightly longer nose hairs. they ~did~ however need a friendly romania more than they needed hats.
mircea_popescu: but the galling idiocy of these schmucks actually making territorial demands ? it wasn't gonna be forgotten.
mircea_popescu: easy fix, at peace conference post ww1, instead of "here's what we want" could've been, "oh, romania, sacred mother of our people, plox forgive us"
asciilifeform: the real q is waithefuq should lenin have fought britain's war for it . imho really oughta have ~switched sides~
mircea_popescu: because there's this group of people who talk for you so you don't end up more hated than you need to be.
mircea_popescu: which is why people even have diplomats in the first place, and why the whole "oh, washiongton correspondents dinner" wank ever even had any root in reality :
asciilifeform: sorta how entente saw the whole ru withdrawal , neh
mircea_popescu: but nevertheless, diplomatically they were fucking inept. there's one thing to fail on an obligation, there's another to be offensive about it.
mircea_popescu: im not saying that staying behind and honoring war committments was POSSIBLE for the russians. i suspect -- was not possible.
asciilifeform: the old empire was irrecoverably sad as early as 1907.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:06 asciilifeform: so you try an' make a 'new'. and pray that it worx, before 'a bunch of foreigners land on your shores, buy up some local chiefs, chop down your forests, rip the minerals out of your soil, enslave a few generations, and eventually go home, leaving their bastards in charge'
asciilifeform: dunno that partial differentiation worx in this context. for all i know, if not revolution + stalingrad, then instead http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902010 .
mircea_popescu: it's the sort of historical truth people dun wanna hear, but the causation's plain an' obvious.
mircea_popescu: the incredible mismanagement of world affairs by revolutionary govt cost the russians stalingrad, quite plainly.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes, but the russians also didn't ally with swiss against mongol horde only to withdraw midway
diana_coman: asciilifeform, at the grassroots thing, quote great-grandmother who lived through both wars: ffs ,the german soldiers were at least clean! the russians got us full of fleas!
a111: Logged on 2018-06-19 15:59 mircea_popescu: the universal oppinion of romanian officer corps, which, in romania, a country very german, were more than a third of the whole shebang, was that russians are literally worse than dogs.
asciilifeform: i dunthink the swiss thought 'ohnoez, human'
asciilifeform: so herr hitler shows up and says 'let's you an' i drang nach osten together, howabout'. wai ro elite answrd 'sure' and not 'fuckoff' (like e.g. swiss)
mircea_popescu: wehrmacht had tanks, and the finns had impassible terrain.
mircea_popescu: understand the situation : ro army held its 1/4 of stalingradf front with infantry and the occasional tachanka.
asciilifeform: if so great -- then wai fungus ate
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform romania had this brief surge in the late 1800s / early 1900s. her pov is factual, ro army had better officers than ~most anyone, for instance, and it was proven in both the extrication of the tsar from his inept turkis venture and in ww1.
diana_coman: makes anything; I mean: talking to the pigs ?
diana_coman: and I'm not actually sure that pointing out "oh, but he was very correctly pointing out to the pigs that they should do something for their food"
asciilifeform: i cannot resist to bite, an' ask, diana_coman , why the '83 adlais 'not elite', but the tail ends of habsburg absentee landlords somehow 'elite'
diana_coman: I wasn't even for a second considering *those* elites, no; as I said: elites were long dead by that time; the thing was precisely that being between them, well, he was asking the fat pigs to actually do something; big surprise they oinked only louder trembling that the food might stop.
mircea_popescu: ie, it would have been ~better~, and for all of these dorks, to have obeyed ceausescu in '71, and in '83, and whenever else, than to adlai about.
mircea_popescu: witness how the "boierii mintii" to this fucking day have on display neither a) work to compare with trilema or else b) the required prosternation before it.
diana_coman: I suppose it's even ironic that the work he wanted them to do was by all indications closer to their possibilities; after all he wasn't asking for art or culture but simply for the set number of sentences with the set number of correct words and so on.
mircea_popescu: what elite ? the pliiceanu corps ? that fat pig above ? gunoi dinescu ? laisses, as inept as ceausescu might've been politically, the culturniks were inept ^ inept.
mircea_popescu: in his relations to, eg, the "intellectual elite" (in their own mind, and exactly nowhere else) as gathered before him at say neptun, or mangalia, he was entirely correct. and his pointing out that they have yet work to do before their workproduct is as tall as he stands is sound, if unpleasant.
mircea_popescu: diana_coman the point of the discussion, though, is to not end up accidentally banning shitting just because ceausescu was known to shit.
diana_coman: and yes, I can see him easily and predictably as a scapegoat; kids, don't take crown found in the mud just because nobody else wants it
mircea_popescu: the country never recovered.
mircea_popescu: whole thing went bankrupt in the 70s, by 72 it was dead. he decided to blame "the jews", as he understood them, hence "show off those slick ny bankers, pay debt".
mircea_popescu: as incidentally (and incompehendingly, to him) oil was high then (arab embargo) he decided to center this mini-empire on oil production and refining.
mircea_popescu: other than escaping the soviets, he attempted a sort of mini-imperialism, the cutest tchotchke show you could ever imagine, romania as an imperial power of a rag tag group of nowhere countries (including columbia, we discussed the very unhappy lulz of romania when those doods decided to just walk out of "agreements" -- mirroring exactly say spain, over the centuries)
mircea_popescu: he then implemented his own state apparatus. there's nothing peculiar about this -- incoming us president also gets rid of old regime bureaucracy, at least if he has any fucking sense.
mircea_popescu: let's do a quick ro commie likbez : ceausescu took over in '65. he got rid of dej-era leftovers as part and parcel of continuing dej's own policy of escaping the soviets. this the west ineptly (but in typical self-centered manner) misreported as "loosening".
mircea_popescu: this isn't made up, either, various high officials joking about it, "what, ima desert in moscow ?! these schmucks have it worse than we do"
mircea_popescu: the 60s worked signfiicantly better in east berlin than i nwest berlin. the 80s miserably -- but mind that at the time, the russkis were doing ~even worse~.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:08 diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901855 -> his "move" was - as most - very much in the vein of "this is the shop where we don't have fish"
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901954 << you wanna discuss the fellow in the strict terms of 1984-1989 ? he found himself promoted (by lack of actual alternative at the time, ftr, not so much he took step forward as everyone else took steep absence) in '65.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 21:24 asciilifeform: diana_coman: this is where i admit that it is above my paygrade to say just how 'maybe without shoemaker, less worse and shorter' . if there's a way to keep neighbours from turning yer congo into a resource extraction base without marching peasants at gunpoint to city and having'em stand in front of lathes to make kalashes, i do not know it
diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902040 -> ftr the problem is not that he "moved pesants to town" but simply that he did that a. through blatant lies (what communism is) rather than an honest gunpoint if that's what it takes b. failed in the end anyway
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901947 <<< ahahaha fucktards won't even admit. it's because the boys are mean that they're fat and slow ?
asciilifeform: i dun expect 'following' would tell one much, unless it is in the sense of 'followed gauleit^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresident and bugged his comp'
diana_coman: I haven't really followed in ages what democratic this and that is going on in there but I doubt there's anyone to ask anyway
asciilifeform: ... or when it's time to close the torture dungeon for renovation and open new one
asciilifeform: i wonder whether usg even bothers to ask ro 'democratic' apparatus when it feels like moving the 'aegis' batteries from place to place
asciilifeform: moar of a 'without gun, the words go in 1 direction and are words 'drop on knees an' get ready to please' '
asciilifeform: re sovereignty, i cannot resist to add a legendary tidbit : j. hariton , co-designer of sov nukes with kurchatov , in his last yrs of life was reputed to have uttered 'idiot , eltsin, thinks he is getting red carpet reception in washington because he is some kinda man, rather than because they think he has some of my warheads still in working order'
asciilifeform: if the dynastic crown-wearer is enuff of a tard, then yes shoemaker, or cabbie, or defrocked priest, will wear
diana_coman: asciilifeform, sure, at the root of it being wtf was a shoemaker doing with the crown on his head
PeterL: trinque: so I am running the cuntoo build script, it seems to have stopped doing anything, the end of the build log http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/whbcf/?raw=true , not sure what to do next here?
asciilifeform: if yer wearing a crown and you really think 'no options' , you get out the wagner and cyanide and be sure to also dose blondie the dog 1st to make sure as fuck the cyanide is strong enuff
a111: Logged on 2017-05-31 16:28 asciilifeform: and if someone wants to mention godel etc -- ethical engineer MAY NOT cite godel, EVER, just as a police detective MAY NOT cite the supernatural and admit a hypothesis of miraculous theft from a safe
asciilifeform: as for the old shoemaker, admittedly i never wore a crown, but afaik folx who wear crowns do not have the option of saying 'we lost options'. sorta like the http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-31#1663960 thing.
a111: Logged on 2015-03-06 03:29 mircea_popescu: if you are one of the people buying belgian rubber concessions on the stock exchanges, you make money. if you're in africa, you make quick with the hands and feet.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: this is where i admit that it is above my paygrade to say just how 'maybe without shoemaker, less worse and shorter' . if there's a way to keep neighbours from turning yer congo into a resource extraction base without marching peasants at gunpoint to city and having'em stand in front of lathes to make kalashes, i do not know it
diana_coman: well, england is particularly good at misery making from what I can tell so I'd even grant them that they probably did the misery part even worse
asciilifeform: going upstack to http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1902021 , oddly enuff per my reading ro ~was~ sovereign during post-stalin sovok. i.e. routinely pissed right in the mouth of e.g. hrusch, and got away scot-free
asciilifeform: the 1 thing that defo dun work for 'better' is 'peasant gets to sit on his horse if he wants'
a111: Logged on 2018-05-14 16:41 asciilifeform: there's a common set of jokes from su, q: 'if only we let germany win, we'd be drinking bavarian! riding in mercedes!' a: '... yes, ride in mercedes. but -- as the leather seat.'
asciilifeform: earlier tried spreading for the germans. conceivably could have 'drinking bavarian' and even not as the leather seat, in an alt-hist
diana_coman: in terms of communism it was possibly the best communism there ever was, I can readily grant that. My problem is with the fact that it was communism though so...
asciilifeform: diana_coman: 'didn't get to the part where it gets better' << this is the distinct impression i get . and i suspect on acct of the shoemaker being soft.
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 16:23 mircea_popescu: diana_coman what, the horses ? the "killed elite" thing would be what, i gh duca ? (and guess what, digging for that reference i also ran into -- apparently there's a piece re the afore mentioned prince)
asciilifeform: if these fire , folx in ro will be lucky to have what grows to feed horse, not even speaking of auto or frozen fish.
asciilifeform: e.g. ro, lost its sovereignty , and arguably the bill for ~that~ aint even remotely paid yet, nao it hosts nato rockets and became legit target for ru defensive systems
diana_coman: you know, the other funny thing is that all the Russians I talked to were rather shocked when I described every day childhood in an industrial town of the 80s in Romania; and usually the final comment is "hmmm, Romania didn't get to the part where it gets better". Perhaps though I can't quite see exactly how does it get better given the fundamental trouble.
asciilifeform: it's a slow grinding process. but either the man with the crown sets it in motion, or shortly 'No-one needs to learn to read and write in order to carry rubies out of a deep mine. '
asciilifeform: stalin didn't either immediately conscript erry horse plower into factory.
diana_coman: look that if we burnt down everything , we wouldn't even be able to chat; sure, make a new whatever but either you find a way to organically grow it with whatever bridges are needed at first out of what is or it's not going to work.
asciilifeform: 'the west'(tm)(r) has 'fish in erry supermarket' , only on acct of the accumulated fat of entire generations mercilessly recycled into fuel . that fuel -- is running out, not long left until returns to historic norm of 'want fish, live by the sea and catch it'
asciilifeform: so you try an' make a 'new'. and pray that it worx, before 'a bunch of foreigners land on your shores, buy up some local chiefs, chop down your forests, rip the minerals out of your soil, enslave a few generations, and eventually go home, leaving their bastards in charge'
diana_coman: from zero because "new man" and "proletariat will make now the middle class and the top class and everything else in between" ; oh, and culture and literature-with-party-line too, since we are at it
asciilifeform: e.g. ru, cn , jp , followed ~same path, 'out of meat'. varied slightly in how the meat was herded out of farm and into factory, yes, but same raw material
asciilifeform: diana_coman: in what sense was the attempt 'out of nothing' ?
diana_coman: asciilifeform, yes; the contention is whether there is any option in fact to create it out of nothing and moreover by someone who never saw it other than from a distance at best
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 20:56 asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: is exactly what i meant as 'same relation as peasant to his horse', 'it is simply there'
diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901996 -> "it is simply there" was absolutely not the same relation I saw peasant-horse, no
BingoBoingo: I'm becoming rather convinced the common man encounters a psychological failure mode if they aren't scratching the dirt to avoid starvation
asciilifeform: the catch is that it aint optional, ro, bulgaria, etc. cancelled their shoemakers, lost industry, and now becomes feed base for foreigners
asciilifeform: diana_coman: to paraphrase mao, the jury's still out on whether industry was in fact good deal vs horse an' plow
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: is exactly what i meant as 'same relation as peasant to his horse', 'it is simply there'
diana_coman: to my mind that's precisely the thing: it's not (or not only) that "screaming meat" but the fact that at the end of it, it's only a replacement with what is in fact an inferior, not a superior thing
BingoBoingo: Don't forget the unbutchered labor activists in the Southern Cone who will consider shuttering a Ford factory "a win for the people"
asciilifeform: with the diff that auto is 100% powered by 'great inca', you cannot plant petrol inside 'field' in a washington flat to feed to it, nor breed a replacement for when dies
asciilifeform: tho observe also, as soon as the butchery is removed , mentality sinks rapidly back into 'peasant', modern-day ameristani has exactly same relation with his auto as peasant -- horse
asciilifeform: it is above asciilifeform's pay grade to say with what algo to industrialize a kingdom without mass engineered penury and a good helping of butchery for the folx who dun get message. afaik this problem has no known historic pill.
diana_coman: asciilifeform, you know, that's the thing that popped at me as soon as I lived for any amount of time in the west: ffs those people do *of their own will and even paying money for* precisely the idiocies that I thought communism was to blame for. So in this sense, Ceausescu "ahead of his time" , marete realizari etc etc; I still think the direction totally wrong so pushing it further doesn't seem like a great achievement to me, that's all.
diana_coman: asciilifeform, I think there what can be said is that it could have certainly be pushed even harder.
diana_coman: you know, apparently I was several times unlucky in that - among other things - my hometown was/is an industrial town; which meant for instance that blackouts were very usual (because many powerful industrial consumers and they got priority) while from what I heard in non-industrial towns this wasn't really the case
asciilifeform: shoemaker, near as i can tell, didn't press the point very hard
asciilifeform: which is why stalin didn't bother to ask'em
asciilifeform: this kinda thing, 'would rather have no fish than rotten frozen', is presumably how ro ended up having to feed its horses to europistan as unlabeled mystery sausage when eurocrats banned horse on public road
diana_coman: asciilifeform, dunno; but take this re fish since you mentioned your experience in Timis; I can still remember when one found a rotten fish among the frozen "fish" with which communism improved one's diet forcibly.
a111: Logged on 2014-11-13 23:14 asciilifeform: (king hunger is actually just an affiliate duke under king thermo)
asciilifeform: problems in the class of 'no fish' are orig. created by http://btcbase.org/log/2014-11-13#920487 , yes
diana_coman: I don't recall; but I'm sure that at/after the revolution in Romania the idea was quite the same
asciilifeform: does anyone recall old thrd where mircea_popescu linked to a youtube clip of some idiot kid smashing up ancient car that his father gave him, 'cuz not mercedes' ?
diana_coman: asciilifeform, that communism cancelled doesn't solve the problems is clear, at least for the very simple reason that the problems were there even before communism, sure, as it can be seen from the pieces above that are quite earlier than that.
diana_coman: with the added bonus that Ibraileanu in 1909 cites from the same piece of Caragiale (Politica si cultura) with the comment that Caragiale was the most acerbic critic of... "liberalism" (the quotations marks are Ibraileanu's) that is further explained as "partidul <<ros>>" aka the red party.
asciilifeform: it sounds retarded, but in ru there was this genuinely large mass of people who thought 'oh hey now we will live like the west(tm)(r)'
asciilifeform: diana_coman: i must add also that i went for a week to timis, and for 5 days went past fish market, each time finding there 0 fish. apparently shooting the shoemaker did not fix..
diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901720 -> maybe; but this sort of "it's enough to make the buildings and name them as to what they are meant to be, because surely then the content will magically appear" doesn't seem much realism to me, quite on the contrary.
diana_coman: ftr funnily enough precisely fish was very much missing from ro diet to such extent that yes, there were slogans "nici o masa fara peste"
diana_coman: and that's valid for the 1000 bakeries too; I suppose one can argue that it's still an achievement to have bakeries with no bread than to have no bakeries and stale bread but I don't buy it; and note that in the 80's the latest brightest idea (in the same vein, all hail!) was to further do this sort of great "improvement", to wit the communal "neighbourhood kitchen" to get rid of such waste as having individual kitchens in every hruscheba
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 16:24 mircea_popescu: diana_coman but ~which people~ ? whole point of industrialization is moving from the traditional to the modern. is the idea that ceausescu is somehow personally responsible for the fact ?
diana_coman: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-13#1901855 -> his "move" was - as most - very much in the vein of "this is the shop where we don't have fish"
a111: Logged on 2019-03-13 16:23 mircea_popescu: any kind of ro elite was long gone by the time ceausescu came in, he gets to hide behind ye olde "greaua mostenire" trope.
feedbot: http://bimbo.club/2019/03/philosophical-transactions-for-the-months-of-july-august-and-september-1716-part-viii/ << Bimbo.Club -- Philosophical Transactions. For the months of July, August and September, 1716. - Part VIII.
BingoBoingo: And in this busy local news day, the new criminal code in action https://www.subrayado.com.uy/compro-objetos-robados-y-la-justicia-lo-condena-hacer-100-tortafritas-y-donarlas-n528679
BingoBoingo: https://archive.is/Tfqyw << "Varias calles de la Ciudad Vieja permanecen cortadas y con desvíos luego de que varios vidrios de edificios de la zona estallaran con los vientos que se registraron en las últimas horas." But what did the wind blow? "En la madrugada de este miércoles un vidrio del décimo piso de la Torre Ejecutiva" Ah, the Presidential office tower got its 10th floor windows blown out. Not by a bomb. This Angloph
asciilifeform: when a wot (whichever wot, physics, austria-hungary, shitoshi's, etc - dun matter) makes the transition to 'institution', the ~actual life~ is definitionally to be found ~outside~ of it
asciilifeform: exactly like the 'actual chemists' nao, are the people who are looking for simpler syntheses of meth and 'ecstasy' out of not-yet-banned hardware shop crapola, and not the monkeys who sit all day doing http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-07#1900867
asciilifeform: sorta like the actual bitcoin maintainers, are here, and not mit.
asciilifeform: the lhc aint an instrument of physics, simply from the fact that the people who control access to it, and the catamites they grant it to, aint physicists ! the actual physicists are drilling little holes in aluminum , in kitchens.
asciilifeform: like napoleon's 'there is a marshall's baton in erry private's rucksack' item.
asciilifeform: those lobsters, mircea_popescu , cost 0, they are already invisibly in erry kitchen.
a111: Logged on 2019-01-04 17:15 asciilifeform: in other olds, apparently i slept through this, but in early 2000s some ru d00d actually built a ~non-grazing~ lens for xray. for pennies, at that.
asciilifeform: argument is that the field went to stuff head up own arse, and took convenient excuse to 'you now NEED the high priest machine, or you aint in physics' to incaize
mircea_popescu: there can genuinely arise the situation where people who aren't necessarily trying to find their way to arby's / olive garden / we are nevertheless sick of polenta and saving to buy a lobster.
mircea_popescu: dunno argument was "low hanging fruit". they wanna see what happens at high energy. the only way to see is to make. approximately situation of "when it comes to cooking, don't have to order out. alf has this method of making polenta, works well!" "and if i want lobster ?" "well then you gotta buy a lobster". getting indignant over how "wanting lobster only serves to drive an impossible wedge between budget and mariscos mercha
asciilifeform: but will add that i'd have easier time believing the 'physics picked the low-hanging fruit and now you NEED synchrophasotron for $trillion to do ANY' yarn , if it weren't a balloon fulla fart that i can on occasion puncture with fingernail without breaking a sweat
asciilifeform: recall story of where asciilifeform ~personally~ described to schwartz how to cut adelberger 100% out of the loop for under what mircea_popescu's bmw costs.
asciilifeform: whether physics-flavoured or wunderwaffen-flavoured or 'end poverty'(tm)(r)-flavoured, they're all quite alike
asciilifeform: the mega-cyclotron is not an instrument of physics, but of f35-style printing press diversion.
a111: Logged on 2016-07-11 17:14 asciilifeform: the whole field now consists of 'gimme' artists.
asciilifeform: and then iirc it broke down and 'moar studies needed' an' 'give us another $trillion of printola' and all was quiet
mircea_popescu: if there's even gonna be a next time. i doubt it.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform amusingly, do you recall all the wank re cern cyclotron, "what if it brings about end of world ?!?!?!"
mircea_popescu: i guess this is a workable forcing of the metaphore.
asciilifeform: there is such a thing as autoimmune reaction.