I dont judge people who make the decision to work for authoritarians, even for their propaganda arms. I do regret that @ponny1 occupied a spot in our Stanford summer school, denying someone else from Zimbabwe, Belarus, or Russia more dedicated to democracy, HR and the rule law.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 13, 2019
Bad Investment
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was written by Anatoly Karlin for Russian Reaction on March 14, 2019 .15 Comments
Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.
Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.
Apart from writing books, reviews, travel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.
You either write a proper article or don’t post this single-tweet-spam-bul**it .
Steve has plenty of these – seems to be doing fine, my one comment commenter.
I’m confused as well. Some minimal explanation of context would be appreciated.
Who’s ponny1? What’s so special about the Stanford summer school?
What did I tell you about spam?
Steve wants to spam that’s fine. His 55+ year old audience seems to enjoy that shit, allows them to use their phones and seem hip.
The rest of us need CONTENT. You know. BEEF AND POTATOES. Don’t give me these Chiclets.
Might as well just go back to snorting meth…
I don’t have VPN (hence, no Twitter) available right now, so I too would also like an explanation for who ‘ponny1’ is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Baronova
She was a collaborator (took side of foreign enemy of her country) and now she has taken the money of her homeland by taking a job at RT’s media charity. So now Americans who lauded her her as a dissident in books and articles and summer schools are almost as annoyed at her as if she had taken a job at Fox News.
I figure “HR” must mean “human rights”, but, if so, it is really quite bizarre that it is abbreviated so, and (if I have guessed correctly) by an American. Normally, in American parlance, it would mean “human resources”. Undoubtedly, the odd language says something about the bizarre environment this guy comes from.
Zimbabwe is, of course, the result of black democracy. Mugabe and many other socialist dictators went to college. As far as I know, no attempt has been made to quantify the costs of this.
It might just be a lack of space. He also says “rule law” and “dont”. Although if that is the case he could have just made it into a two-part comment.
The glorious revolution relatively recently was hailed as a great victory, now that it merely turned out to be bureaucratic reshuffling they are quiet.
But really, even a woke reading of the region’s political history post-independence could have predicted this. Plus ça change…
Is it the failed ambassador McFaul or some other asshat McFaul?
His excellency the ambassador himself.
I’m guessing the Stanford summer school, whatever they were teaching, wasn’t a neutral affair designed to facilitate the thinking processes of the leaders of tomorrow without necessarily imbuing them with the personal viewpoints of the lecturers and instead teaching them the art of argument and of viewing conflict situations from the vantage of the ‘other’.
Hmm….
Not very ‘liberal arts’ of them.
more importantly, the steveosphere has a number of local memes:
Invade the world/Invite the world
X rotting in the fields (X – fruit, software etc)
Law of female journalism
Who, whom
the already mentioned Most important graph
Regression to the mean
etc,
and he doesn’t write about anything else, so even when he’s being extra laconic you know what the takeaway message was.
That’s what memes do, they establish common ground. It’s the difference between pointing at something (some tool) to a person who works with you vs someone from another department.
Steve’s format (bursts of terse, acerbic poasts) is suited to what he does, which is basically poking fun at the traitorous, agenda-driven media (the technical term I think is Critical discourse analysis)
Maria Baronova
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1101440629719138305
I agree with you that Twitter seems to have a pretty toxic influence on modern day politics, but in a abstract sense, I think it is fascinating, for its potential to be a deep psychological tool about language and politics. Too bad it did not exist in a vacuum or in a sandbox, where it could studied while being decoupled from real world influence.
There is an idea that the way languages branch apart into new dialects and new languages is actually a genetically-based adaptive mechanism for the defense of the group against outsiders. Twitter is really the exact opposite of this, being text-based and favoring short tweets, which predispose to the use of abbreviations. Plus, there is a real preponderance of English connecting distant places. In this sense, I guess it is like another civilizational immune mechanism being circumvented.