95 karma · joined August 14, 2021
othman (at) undefine (dot) org
Constitution aren't truths, they're collective lies we agreed upon. In Morocco, authority is a social contract that is bound by customs, not by a blind belief in the moral superiority of law.
An impeachment clause is only necessary when you believe that government is the ultimate authority. If Moroccans believed that, then yes, your argument about hereditary monarchy would make sense.
That's not the case. No-one believes in authority here; we only accept it. So we know that if the king loses legitimacy, a popular revolution will happen. And the king knows that, so he won't push the buttons too much either.
The reality is we're all subjugated. Moroccans, Sahrawis, or Americans. And we're all minorities in Morocco: Sahrawis, Riffis, Chlouh, Doukkali, Chamá-lo, Fassi, Meknessi, Soussi, and I can keep going. The issues people are saying about the Moroccan government's behaviour in the Sahara are just as true in other places in Morocco. And they're just as bad as what any government who's taken by oligarchs does to its population.
"Economic integration" = more trade = more power together.
The investment incentives let the local elites coopt the Moroccan government, while the card buys the assent of lower income Sahrawis. It's caused systemic unemployment, despite Sahrawis GDP per capita being 26% over the national average (The PDF is from an NGO so it gives a relatively unbiased view of the situation)
From the Moroccan perspective, Western Sahara is just the Southern provinces. I'm guessing if you're part of a Sahrawi tribe, you get the card. It's less about where you live.
Also, people who relocate from the refugee camps to Morocco get that card + housing.
We kinda voted for it, so it's quite binding on the king. We also have elections in a couple of months. The king has clear areas where he's limited, for example that he has to appoint the chief of government from the party that came in first.
In practice though, democracy doesn't seem to work at enacting very long term plans. The current dynasty knows how to balance out the different sources of power within the country (local/tribal, economic, and institutional), and they've done it for several centuries. It helps, in our regions, to have symbols to unite so many people who are so different from each other.
Now, the king and the palace are very rich and benefit from their positions. Institutional insiders rig the game. But elected officials do so the most in Morocco, and elected officials extract from the system in the West as well. It's an oligarchy anyway no matter which side you live on.
Morocco OTOH is a Muslim state, with most laws being secular except for family laws, sexual freedoms, and inheritance. Before Western colonial times, the Moroccan royal dynasty built a lot of its soft power on spreading Morocco-based Sufi orders South, and one of the king's titles is "Commander of Believers", which is how caliphs of the original Muslim caliphate called themselves.
People like that he has this role because it helps keep Islam somewhat out of politics, but it cuts both ways: it's harder for religious conservatives to argue against more liberal laws when the institution (called the "Makhzen") proposes them, but it's even harder for individual liberty advocates to argue for a more progressive society when it goes against the Makhzen's plans.
- most (90%) of Morocco's phosphate mining is done in non-disputed territories (it's mentioned in the article). The most disputed resource is actually fish, and to some degree predicted oil reserves.
- Tribal allegiances to the Moroccan crown date back from way before colonial times. Today, part of the Sahrawi population supports Morocco and another part supports independence.
- There are efforts on both sides to bolster their numbers: Moroccans emigrate to the disputed territories, and Polisario brings in migrants to its refugee camps. That's partly why organising a referendum is almost impossible: no-one agrees on who's allowed to vote.
- Morocco and Algeria (/ the Ottomans before Algeria) have been fighting over access to southwards trade for centuries. Geopolitically, the endgame for Algeria is to encircle Morocco.
- Polisario itself is quite antidemocratic. Only two leaders in 50 years of existence, and lots of corruption.
- Morocco's plan is actually of "advanced autonomy", which would let Sahrawis get their own parliament, amongst other things.
- Today, Sahrawis on the Moroccan controlled areas basically enjoy a welfare state with free transport, no VAT, and many other benefits.
All in all, it's far from the colonial story we'd reflexively apply onto this situation. I'm biased as I am Moroccan. In my opinion, Morocco is already a deeply multi cultural country, and we need a stable political environment to unite.
This conflict keeps the North Africa region one of the least economically integrated areas in the world. It prevents us from building sustainable people power against oligarchic and authoritarian powers, who are at least just as bad on the Algeria/Polisario side as they are on the Moroccan side (Algeria and Polisario are military dictatorship, Morocco is a constitutional monarchy, pick your poison).
At the end, in both cases, it's a back and forth with an LLM, and every request has its own lifecycle. So it's unfortunately at least a networked systems problem. I think your point works with infinite context window and one-shot ting the whole repo every time... Maybe quantum LLM models will enable that
The 'LSP' that would allow new frameworks or languages to shine with coding agents is already mostly here, and it's things like hooks, MCPs, ACP, etc. They keep the code generation aligned with the final intent, and syntactically correct from the get go, with the help of very advanced compilers/linters that explain to the LLM the context it's missing.
That's without hypothesising on future model upgrades where fine-tuning becomes simple and cheap, local, framework-specific models become the norm. Then, React's advantage (its presence in the training data) becomes a toll (conflicting versions, fragmented ecosystem).
I also have a huge bias against the javascript/typescript ecosystem, it gives me headaches. So I could be wrong.
In front-end as well—I've been able to go much farther for simple projects using alpine than more complex frameworks. For big products I use Elm, which isn't exactly the most common front-end choice but it provides a declarative programming style that forces the LLM to write more correct code faster.
In general, I think introspectible frameworks have a better case, and whether they're present in training data or not becomes more irrelevant as the introspectibility increases. Wiring the Elm compiler to a post-write hook means I basically have not written front-end code in 4 or 5 months. Using web standards and micro frameworks with no build step means the LLM can inspect the behaviour using the chrome dev tools MCP and check its work much more effectively than having to deal with the React loop. The ecosystem is so fragmented there, I'm not sure about the "quality because of quantity of training data" argument.
For many Moroccans, welcoming tourists is their livelihoods. The best thing you can do to support them is to keep your plans in place.
The best thing you can do to support us is to keep your plans :)
Islam has no concept of empathy for all beings, or enlightenment really. The assumption is that without the fear of God and Hell, people would sin by default, and religious practices are meant to please God.
Often progressive Muslims mention Sufis but they have been persecuted enough, for holding God-consciousness type beliefs amongst others, to consider them a different thing altogether.
I welcome these changes... Yes we'll need to rethink our urbanism, but if anything this switch feels like a coming back of what our urban centers are supposed to provide us.
Imagine parking spaces becoming local artisans/food stalls, conference rooms becoming event spaces, coworking spaces adapted to people's lifestyle and living patterns (e.g. a suburban cowork with childcare and a dog park).
"gutting downtown" might be true for those who are wary their office real estate investment will not have a positive ROI. But the way I see it, this change in urban patterns is a paradigm shift in wealth distribution patterns and in economic opportunities for leisure services, both locally and globally.
That field is also, in my humble experience, in a bind. Very few people outside of the coach/consulting sphere seem to talk about this as fervently as they do. I think mass adoption will require the concepts to be attractive and simple to people who may not be ardent supporters of the cause quite yet.
There's also a whole contingent of people who have built orgs that already do this, they just don't advertise themselves and do their work.
I think the next step is to deeply integrate the concepts of Enspiral and such into organisational design tools. Something like murmur.com but with a super low conceptual barrier to entry, that makes it obvious what the next distributed leadership shift is for a given group. That's what I'm developing, if you're curious contact me :)
Honestly though I don't get the Wayland hate. It's been stable to use and a joy to configure. X11 survives because of legacy and inertia, and I haven't looked back one second since the ~3 years I made the switch to Wayland/Sway.
One library that could be useful is elm-ta-interop maybe...
No idea what you'd do beyond that though... Maybe I introduce some competitive aspect, like "you're already more involved than 60% of our users. You can get to 90% with this"? Or translate it in terms of real value gained from finishing the onboarding? Idk
Also, most of the ore is not in contested territories. You can look up the sludge pipeline for a more modern take on exporting phosphates that was built 15 years ago, it's not in the Sahara.
The biggest natural resource of contention there is fish, not phosphates. That industry is huge and extractive, and not talked mucb about.
Also the Western Sahara issue is geopolitical more than anything else. If that country were a thing Morocco would be surrounded by Algeria (the separatists are kept alive because of Algeria's support at this point, it's a puppet state of the Algerian military).
And yeah it's an important resource that will become increasingly important as climate change and overpopulation become current issues. Hopefully it doesn't bring the bad juju that other non renewable resources have brought on developing countries
Side advantage, Elm-UI frees you from CSS: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/mdgriffith/elm-ui/late... it's like Tailwind but deeply intertwined with the language.