Well, that is certainly interesting; I'm not sure England was able to project that kind of power that far inland for a lot of that time. (The Holy Roman Empire, for example, was fairly close to Russia compared to England, and both sides of that deal had a vested interest in keeping England from interfering with their trade, or that they were able to keep Europe fighting other European countries.) I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the continuity also: it seems like a stretch to draw a connection between England hundreds of years back and people setting foreign policy in the US nowadays, Clinton and Nuland. I can see trying to contain Russian expansion (as trade with Europe is a bigger deal to the US than trade with Russia), but there's a lot of weird provocation that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Kissinger's strategy was to contain Russia without starting a war, and then to maintain the Sino-Soviet split (even after there was no more Soviet). China's a bigger threat than Russia at present: Russia doesn't like the water, but China's started building aircraft carriers. A long way from Kissinger's strategy, these people right now seem more interested in antagonizing Russia, even to the extent they're willing to lose ground in the trade war with China in order to cause trouble for Russia.
Yes, I thought about that too. Perhaps Friedman meant how Britain dealt with immediate competitors for naval dominance.
> The Holy Roman Empire, for example, was fairly close to Russia compared to England, and both sides of that deal had a vested interest in keeping England from interfering with their trade,
…That’s not how empires think. One part of feeling like you rule an empire is indulgence in the thought that your country is self-sufficient (even if it’s not possible in reality). And if you would lack something you would look into the memo: 1) get angry; 2) expand. Charles V was an European. He’s grown up in the centre of Europe. Which means, in the clay pot with snakes. And that probably was what made him think of Ivan IV as no less dangerous ruler than himself or his immediate neighbours. And this was the mistake, because the mindset of Russian tzars was different. They were not surrounded with “quite similar and evil neighbours”, they were mentally on the stage when civilisation is fighting off outlanders. Mongols, Swedes, Livonians were all aliens. And “the like” were the principalities of feudal Rus, which eventually ended up with two contestants: Novgorod and Moscow, and Moscow thus absorbed everything that was “alike” to the Russian world. There was retained some similarity to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but since 1200s the difference have got stronger, and after they sided with other western powers against Russia, there was less and less similarity with each century. Ivan IV seemed to be sincerely respecting Charles V and sought an alliance, because (among other reasons) “enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and the Ottomans posed a serious danger to both. But alas. Perhaps, Charles V followed Gracian’s advice and thought that one should better have people dependent on you rather than liking you.
> I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the continuity also: it seems like a stretch to draw a connection between England hundreds of years back and people setting foreign policy in the US nowadays, Clinton and Nuland.
What Friedman said, what he was pointing to, is that “the best way to defeat an enemy fleet is to not let it be built”. This sounds pretty much like common sense. Like “divide et impera” or the Gracian’s expression mentioned just above. If one western empire gets atop several others, or remains alone, would it seem improbable to inherit common ideas? If you were a large country and you had an entire fleet of warships able to control the oceans, what would you do with it? Certainly not selling it to India for scrap metal.
> I can see trying to contain Russian expansion (as trade with Europe is a bigger deal to the US than trade with Russia), but there's a lot of weird provocation that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Hm? Like what, for example?
> China's a bigger threat than Russia at present: Russia doesn't like the water, but China's started building aircraft carriers. A long way from Kissinger's strategy, these people right now seem more interested in antagonizing Russia
Ah, that’s what seems strange? Hmm, I have some ideas, pick any or all: - Russia is a pie (a large amount of resources), which, if divided and absorbed, may become the trump card in the forthcoming confrontation with China. 140 million people with nukes and city-sized arms factories. Also 1/6 of land with gas, oil, vast areas with common and rare minerals. - the West is sick of making business with Russia, because since the fall of Russian empire, the western investors got pwned twice: during the time when Soviets nationalised the factories and later when Putin got rid of Western owners, and presented free money-producing factories to his oligarchs. - centuries-old anti-propaganda that was portraying Russia as bad, wrong, savage, inferior, incapable, demonic and barely human – sans the short times when they were allied with Russia. Even if people understand, that what’s said about someone whom they did never see, it leaves an imprint in their attitude – in the absence of things that serve as a counterweight. - they’re just tired of playing pretend since the Cold war long ended, and somehow, Russia is still not subdued and raped by Procter & Gamble capital. - they actually think that Russia is easy to break (and then be theirs) that it’s almost defeated, and all they need to do is but make the last few pushes a little stronger. Press the attack.
> Perhaps Friedman meant how Britain dealt with immediate competitors for naval dominance.
Might be.
> …That’s not how empires think.
I do not believe this to be the case. Trade is trade.
For example, the primary source of conflict between Rome and Persia as well as China and Persia was that Persia killed direct trade between the two empires by sitting in the middle and preventing any merchants from passing through. They were happy to buy Chinese goods and sell them to Rome and vice versa, but they prevented any actual communication or direct trade, because this form of rent-seeking was lucrative for the Persian empire. That is three empires behaving differently in one example.
> If one western empire gets atop several others, or remains alone, would it seem improbable to inherit common ideas?
Certainly not even unusual to learn from history, but "This idea existed" is different from "This idea is why these people are doing this".
> Hm? Like what, for example?
Well, in addition to the stuff I listed, there's that "Reset Button" thing from years back, and the response here was that Russian is a difficult language and nobody at the State Department speaks it.
> later when Putin got rid of Western owners,
This makes perfect sense. This is plausibly personal (someone loses their business ties in Russia), whereas some historical injustice is abstract.
> Hitomi Yoshizawa. *insert Yandex joke here*
Ha, I thought that was her but I remember her looking more like someone's lesbian aunt, and I wasn't sure anyone would remember some rotating cast from that far back. (I stopped paying attention to them after Dance*Man stopped doing the music; it turns out that if you take away the fresh beats, it's just a bunch of teenage girls singing vapid songs.) dance_man--i_am_beatmania_you_are_whatmania.mp4
Trade is not everything. It’s just one motive. Others may range from “why ally with someone I can subdue” to “my court astronomer said that the next week is favourable for attacking fortresses”. Charles V listened to vassals (the Livonian Order), who were on the ground doing business. He also had the Pope to listen to, and Popes have been declaring eastern Christianity a heresy since the crusaders “accidentally” ravaged Constantinople in 1204. So, if you’re a proper Catholic king, it’s one thing when your merchants trade with whoever (even heretics), and this is profitable for you. But if you, as a king, make an official union with them, it’s a completely different thing. Charles V believed more to the people from his circles. Letters, which reflect his sympathy towards Russia, are of dubious origin, as far as I remember. So, I believe, he might consider a military union useful – and potentially he could expand that with other kinds of support, but the closest circle (plus Pope) meant more to him.
> That is three empires behaving differently in one example.
Truth, it’s a different situation and different countries. If the question about similarity (why different countries at different times should think alike) is still bothering you, there’s saying “circumstances shape the man”, – or so sounds the materialist postulate. Meaning that what you do depends on what you perceive from your surroundings and determine from previous experience. As long as the circumstances remain similar, they produce similarly thinking people. Whether the elite “goes with the flow” or “thinks out of frame” depends on the will and the entertainment which one finds while being in power. But what a particular person decides, rests on typical human laziness, willing to take risks and inextinguishable desire to bring changes forth. That one was born to be an elite doesn’t yet grant these qualities. So, thinking out of frame is to be expected seldom.
Sure, but if we're talking about trade, and whether it's plausible that England, a very recently Protestant country and very unpopular with the Pope, could project enough force into Eastern Europe, before they had any empire to speak of and the top two navies were Spain and Portugal, then I think it's unlikely England could have prevented trade by fiat.
> Truth, it’s a different situation and different countries.
Well, you say "This isn't how empires work" and I say "Here are three empires that worked that way". British Empire, any empire. Trade is one of the primary drivers, and even if not directed, an empire forms a hub for trade. If nothing else, you have to pay your soldiers somehow.
> I only remember her thanks to some anon posting Morning Musume.
Well, there's not much worth digging up. Normal Japanese manufactured pop, interesting as a novelty if you haven't heard it, but music distribution kind of flattened out since then so there isn't much novelty.
I tend to agree. However, often biology uses hacks until it can get to something better, and humans are notorious for compensatory behaviors.
I mean, I think the spiritual truths are obvious, but religion works around them so we can keep being egomaniacs, whether ego-affirming or ego-denying egomaniacs.
> I mean, I think the spiritual truths are obvious, but religion works around them so we can keep being egomaniacs, whether ego-affirming or ego-denying egomaniacs.
Are you familiar with the concept of "Scientism"? This is to treat reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth and value; apparently Heinlein wrote some screeds against it. It could be seen as "totalitarian rationalism". You can reduce the concept of, say, "love" to "some chemical reactions in the brain", but you can also reduce the concept of "reason" to chemical reactions in the brain.
In general, I'm with you on that: the idea behind reason is that we can use it to delineate things that we are certain of, but a thing can be true independent of our ability to prove its certainty.
Agreed. People use their minds to project knowledge where there is none, which means mystery not certainty. This offends the human ego, to have to accept what we do not know, but it is also the beginning of wisdom.
I tend to see "rationalism" itself as a problem. This says basically that if we can think something, and it is internally consistent or derived from a precedent, it must be true.
Actual wisdom and science come from testing things against reality and where they cannot be tested, designing theoretical models according to Occam and Kantian architectonic reasoning.
Realists and consequentialists are interested in effects in reality. We are less concerned with what might be, might not be, or can be computer modeled by reducing the number of measurable factors.
> This offends the human ego, to have to accept what we do not know, but it is also the beginning of wisdom.
Well, yeah, definitely, but "know but cannot prove" is even worse. We thought math was safe and then Kurt Goedel came and fucked that up and this really frustrated people.
> Realists and consequentialists are interested in effects in reality.
If I am not mistaken, this is not too many steps removed from phenomenology, where you are more concerned with properties (a thing is what it does) than some Platonic ideal about the true essence of the thing.
> To Plato a chair was not the result of the form of a chair, but the result of the forms of gravity and humans.
It's been a couple of decades since I read Socrates's books about Plato and I don't think I understood it very well, but I do remember Plato talking about trees and the perfect, ideal tree that all visible trees are a manifestation of, and then his discussion of "a head taller" not meaning "for reason of a head" but because the essence of size had manifested more perfectly in the tall guy than the short one. I'll have to defer to you on Plato, maybe the concept of the "Platonic ideal" had colored my ability to read Plato.
> Philosophy professors always use chairs for some reason.
They are often sedentary.
> even a hollowed stump.
Fedi has colored my perception on Diogenes. I can practically hear him saying "Look, I'm not jacking off in your bakery, I'm just moving my arm and my dick happens to be there. You're the one that defined the place inside these walls as 'yours' and 'a bakery' and I didn't consent to this."
I might beg off of that dichotomy because I think Platonic forms are comprised of function.
It relates to his larger theory of causality as a proof of metaphysics, which is a bit subtle, although I riff on it in a recent article for the Evil Site.
To Plato a chair was not the result of the form of a chair, but the result of the forms of gravity and humans.
(Philosophy professors always use chairs for some reason. They are easily understood as the simplest solution to a certain need. This means that their form is almost exclusively defined by this need. Anything with support and a back is a chair, even a hollowed stump.)
I went to the school library and checked out one of his other works, I think it was Phaedo, and being deeply disappointed by it. Plato argued that the Soul was separate from the body (ok), that the Soul was solid (um), and, as a solid, material item, the Soul could not be destroyed (wtf, a solid material item us the EASIEST thing to destroy) and therefore, death of the body was not the end of Life. And so I was introduced to, and disillusioned by, Plato's sophistry all in one go.
I still have a fondness for agreeing to disagree and civil debate, but unfortunately there are some who take this for weakness, and only respond to the iron gauntlet. So, in the end, Plato was wrong about everything. Sad really.
> Platonism is widely misunderstood by the professors, in my view.
Well, it has been a while and I was still pimply and tripping over my own feet on a regular basis, but I got it from what Socrates wrote down rather than from a professor.
> Diogenes, the ultimate postmodernist.
I thought he was a fun figure until I met enough of his disciples.
> For me, it was always clear that life had a point... to live. > Most people refuse to do that.
The way Plato writes Socrates -- most of these are lecture notes, effectively -- sort of requires tying in the whole body of work.
But I might look toward "Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?" as a good start. This is the portion I cited in a recent piece.
Phaedo is basically the New Testament on expert mode.
Does life kill us, or the lack of life kill us? A question for the ages.
God is everywhere, and always perfect, What does he care for man's sin, or The righteousness of man?
She also left me a copy of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. I had to look this one up. If you haven't read The Prophet yet, you should. My favorite quote from The Prophet:
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
It is one of my favorite books, and the Mahabarata stands alongside the Eddas, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Kalevala on my shelf. Epic poetry is sort of the only poetry I can stand without raping a chair and killing someone.
The Hindus like the pagans saw the gods as amoral and unconcerned with human affairs. For them, religion was a list of what worked in real life, and then some stuff about transcendental goals like hierarchy, beauty, and sanity.
It is a far cry from the nagging moralism of the Abrahamic religions.