heraclius

> timely commutes

Billions of people seem to have worked out how to do this on bicycles and public transport.

In that were the real concern, the DDR would have restricted travel from the West to the East by residents of the West, but not travel by its own residents to the West and return journeys—yet it prohibited the latter.

Moreover the DDR cannot seriously have had such concerns, since it too e.g. employed former Nazi officers in its army.

What’s an ‘official magazine’?

Bin Laden certainly has been to Oxford, but I’ve not heard of any connexion with the university.¹ I wouldn’t say that those attending language schools and similar tend to interact much with students of the university. With the exception of a few cramming programmes for admissions, the ‘best and brightest’ (I assume by this you mean those sufficiently academically able to get into Oxbridge as matriculated students—I daresay the average Imperial mathmo is brighter than the average Cambridge land economist) tend not to take courses in Oxford outside the university, since they mostly use the name ‘Oxford’ to entice gullible tourists who don’t realise that these places have nothing to do with the university.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1595205.stm

One can note certain rhetorical similarities without holding that in every aspect China and India are doing the same thing.

It’s not that Malaysia isn’t a threat (there has been sabre-rattling too, e.g. in 1991 when the army was mobilised in response to a Malaysian exercise)—just that it’s not only or most important one. Merely geographically Indonesia is probably in a broadly comparable position to try to blockade Singapore to that of Malaysia. There are fewer e.g. Javanese citizens of Singapore, and many Indonesians assimilated to a Malay community principally associated with Malaysia and not Indonesia if anything, so fears of dual loyalty do not tend to focus on Indonesia; for example many Malays will have Javanese ancestry.

Changi is not, as you point out, really a big US base, but I imagine that putting strategically important thingums for the US Navy at risk would not be regarded well in DC which, (inter alia!), would deter Malaysia and Indonesia. It would also hurt US economic interests regardless because of the port and various investments, so I suppose the US Navy might not even be terribly important.

The report mentioned in Haaretz (https://www.haaretz.com/1.5053685) was plausible but by no means incontrovertible.

Malaysia is not necessarily more threatening than Indonesia so it’s rather unclear why you mention it in particular. Indeed, Indonesia bombed various things in Singapore during the Konfrontasi period, whereas Malaysia has never done anything like that. (Well, I’ve heard rumours of actual hostilities about some islands supposedly from a relative in the army, but either way both sides have kept it very quiet if that did happen.)

I don’t really see the point of an iron dome system for SG: Singapore can hit KL or Jakarta in a matter of hours (if that), their relatives shop and children go to school at international schools in Singapore, there’s a big American base, if Singapore gets hit they’ll immediately end up in a terrible recession, etc.

> These sorts of people are notorious for being unable to recognize that Nazi-ism was an ideology of the hard left, an ideology that the academic classes are extremely susceptible to.

There is pretty substantial disagreement amongst historians and political scientists (see Kershaw, The Nazi dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, which unfortunately I don’t have to hand.) This dispute predates 1968. Many bog standard liberals or centre-right types, insofar as such classifications apply to historians, subscribed to the Nazism as totalitarianism thesis (whilst, crudely, a Marxist view was that it was an outgrowth of the contradictions of bourgeois liberal capitalism). The view that it was hard-left was pretty fringe in the 50s and is still fringe now. There are several good reasons for this—amongst which is the fact that Nazism was an essentially illiterate tradition, in the sense that it had no meaningful intellectuals, whereas Marxism is an extremely literate family of ideologies—in fact, arguably at the expense of a proper connexion to actual reality. So the notion that there is even a substantial body of Nazi intellectual output with the same importance as, say, Lenin had to Soviet life, seems rather misconceived. (This of course is subject to the caveat that Marxists are very argumentative people and one can probably on nearly any given question find Marxist authors who disagree; Nazism, by contrast, barely developed a canon of authors, and had little theoretical unity or basis, so whilst there were substantial contradictions in utterances there were relatively few in practice, which is all we really have—and indeed on that metric there was quite substantial diversity amongst the various Marxist states—even Maoism and Stalinism differed in their choice of revolutionary class, for example, and then if we take Pol Pot, Tito, Juche before the constitutional revisions about a decade ago, and so on, there is even more diversity.)

To consider your argument—

> in their own analyses of their enemies they were inseparable from the Soviets they were fighting

This seems to elide the obvious places where they would be different, viz., the sort of society they wanted to build. Now, you might subscribe to the, shall we say, totalitarianism thesis of liberal and liberal-conservative historiography—and that’s perfectly respectable as a view!—but one ought to at least discuss this to a certain extent.

> even after the defeat of the Nazis and the fall of the USSR, in the western world this type of racist leftism was not wiped out as commonly assumed but merely retreated to its stronghold in academia

It’s really not obvious whether you’re referring to bog standard social democrats who primarily focus on class or randos on Twitter who advocate the extermination of whites. Whatever it is, the latter clearly have far less institutional power within the left than advocates of the total extermination of their racial enemies did under the Nazis.

> The exact sort of people who are obsessed with equating Nazis and conservative white men are also the sort of people who write glowing reviews of Nazi propaganda magazines

Perhaps the author is indeed this sort of person, but in that case you could probably try finding something to cite. I have no doubt that such people exist, but it is rather lazy to sneer at, let’s say, at least a third of the political spectrum (on a crude left-centre-right trichotomy) on the basis of one article.

This seems to be a pretty thin rebuttal. There’s a perfectly sound case against calling Trump a Nazi—which is not what the article does. It’s not really very obvious what your objection to the actual content of the paragraph is. Then you seem to jump on sociology simply because it’s in the submission headline—but it’s far from clear that the article is a representative example of the practice of sociology, so it’s rather mysterious how you get from whatever was in the article to the claim that sociology should be named ‘far-left propaganda’. I’m afraid I don’t really see any substantive content here, and posting that is, I thought, the point of this website.

> Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked.

If voting is unimportant, why do you care about racist requirements for physical ID cards? Perhaps there might be some sort of connexion between the two!

Scotland’s Procurators Fiscal are fairly important and frequently referred to.

> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.

It’s not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I’m not familiar with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the following:

> Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains, multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence, theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights - we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment" (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157). This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution" (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual error has the power to open closed minds and trigger reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment" (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change" the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305). Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4). Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).

(J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States", Law & Social Inquiry 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)

Perhaps it’s somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at ‘intellectuals’ whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument without trying to determine whether it’s been anticipated, but it strikes me as rather dishonest.

The whole thing may well be dystopian.

That said, you don’t seem to have looked up what test to release actually is. It’s a scheme for travellers to get out of quarantine early. So no, we aren’t ‘all’ captive to ‘test to release’—we (inhabitants of the UK) are captive to many other regulations though!

Narratives can be correct or incorrect (and this one is mostly correct insofar as it makes specific claims about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.) Calling a set of claims a narrative for the purpose of pointing out some people don’t agree doesn’t entail that those claims are wrong.

There is no UK prohibition on exports.

The UK is not blocking exports. The EU were free to conclude contracts with the (not very productive) UK manufacturers at the same time HM government was doing so.

I broadly agree but I usually trust one of the big ones (e.g. ‘recovery’ in the UK) since they have pretty big sample sizes and seem to be on top of stats.

I have a perfectly good one (Russell Hobbs, 3000W, no noises and so on, no lights, 1.7L, &c.)—https://www.amazon.co.uk/Russell-Hobbs-Colour-Plus-Kettle/dp.... I suppose it’s because in Britain kettles are essential (for tea and so on.)

Well I suppose one could say we call the analogue of reparations the welfare state at which point that prospect doesn’t sound quite so ludicrous after all.

Well all sorts of things were taken offline due to the cold—anything can be made to work properly in cold weather.

Why not backup nuclear in place of backup gas? That combined with enough long-distance transmission obviates the need for gas.

One has the right to any other job. Compare soldiers: generally one probably ought to have the right to unionise, to sick leave, to certain health and safety standards and so on—there are substantial derogations for particular jobs though based on their nature, and the nature of exercising the coercive authority of the state is such that it seems reasonable to demand all sorts of monitoring (when on the job).

I find a compose key (see Wikipedia) quite helpful for diacritics, em dashes, &c.—once you get the hang of it, it’s really quite fast and intuitive. One can even add new combinations.

Given the HKHRDA passed the Senate unanimously and in the House by 417-1,⁰ bipartisan consensus even ignoring your entirely unsourced claim that Biden is a Chinese puppet means that there is some will to resist this prospect.

The problem in the US is not intent but competence. Biden can be relied upon to not e.g. flip-flop as Trump did on North Korea or petulantly ask what the point of a long-term alliance is, and therefore is much better for those countries in Asia who want to resist China but want their major ally not to behave so erratically. In fact, Trump seemed to think of China as a counterparty with whom a ‘deal’ could be struck for his own political purposes:¹ he had no actual ideological objection to e.g. the camps in Xinjiang; Biden, like most members of the blob, at least pretends (probably even to himself!) to consistently and resolutely oppose that sort of thing (the obvious examples of e.g. support for Saudi Arabia notwithstanding), which means far more consistency. And consistency is good for alliances.

0. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/183...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/us/politics/trump-uighurs...

This is ludicrous. Guidance is not law, and unclear laws are not to be interpreted at the discretion of the police. The notion that merely going outside on a walk far from others contributes non-negligibly to the risk of transmission is misconceived: unlike most prohibited activities, it would be fine if everyone were to do it.

A High Court judgment would also bind lower courts, including the Magistrates’ Court.

It occurs to me that this:

> Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour.

is rubbish interpreted in the natural sense. Of course I meant without the use of forced Uyghur labour as we see at the moment. It is arguable that growth 1970s-now mostly was not underpinned by forced labour, but the strategies of the 50s-60s certainly involved a lot of what we should call forced labour.

Uyghurs are important to a large part of the economy, but it’s presumably possible to discuss parts of it without discussing Uyghurs at every stage.

Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found.

If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs.

The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis.

In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.

As much as it’s important to remember the plight of the Uyghurs especially in formulating a broad strategy towards China, it seems odd to extend this to ‘nobody may discuss any aspect of China without mentioning the camps’. Would you do this to, e.g., some intellectually interesting but (at the moment) otherwise entirely useless pure maths paper posted on HN written by a Chinese researcher?

Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.

The assumption was that some of the vaccines weren’t going to work. If they all work, governments can indeed just resell them.

Many (ethnic) Chinese people take Western first names and go by them in the West and/or non-Chinese language environments, so yes, this is quite common. For example, Lee Kuan Yew was Harry Lee to many British acquaintances. (Note that the surname is first here—people vary in which order they put the names of Chinese people—and there are two non-family names, which is common for Chinese in Taiwan, SG, etc., but not in the Mainland.)