FWIW I took it as a joke. Mostly. Maybe with a little bit of true anti western sentiment under the hood but Im a grown-ass adult and I can laugh even if I disagree. The other guys points are pretty much valid but he missed the humor.

Obviously not “a joke”. It was a transparent deflection to single minded uniparty collectivism. Nonsense on the order of “democrats good” “republicans bad”.

That wasn’t a “little joke”. That was purposely deflecting to the collectivist “western idealism is naive” narrative. Not unlike pre-WW2 democrats - including FDR himself - smugly sneering at republicans and Churchill for worrying about Mussolini, like Obama, Biden, the NYT, and Hillary laughing at both Romney and McCain for worrying about Putin, or 1930s collectivist “Antifa” infamously being perfectly happy with Stalin and totalitarian violence.

Western aspirational idealism successfully maximizes overall happiness and minimizes human suffering. It isn’t naive - it defeated slavery worldwide and Jim Crow.

But the ”collective good” folks? They’ve certainly done an extremely poor job at balancing out the equation: those that cleave to it are particularly blind to the danger of rejecting individual agency and individual rights.

The “collective good” folks essentially push fascism in everything but name by rejecting individual rights, with the inevitable consequence of INCREASED human suffering.

I wish I had manna to vote you up.

> People are mostly using AI to generate new SLOP in sloppy languages.

The AI itself is heavily trained on hipster slop (I’ve heard it called “resume driven development”). So I wonder of most of these people don’t realize their following a pied piper. When they vaguely ask an LLM for advice instead of carefully guiding it towards simplicity, it’ll tend to fork over the umpteenth layered framework du jour.

That is essentially straw-manning. Hdyoung made no claim that western thought as a whole is best. His only claim is that the aspirational parts of western thought are worth pursuing, particularly as they deliberately make room for objectively assessing other philosophies without resorting to violence or polemics.

Presumably he’s including western ideals like blind justice, equality of opportunity, judging by merit instead of identity, valuing the sanctity of individual life, recognizing every man is a sinner (imperfect), free speech, property rights, decentralized judiciaries and government, rule of law, objective empirical reasoning, etc, etc.

Virtually all of these ideals, by the way, are variously labeled as “fascist”, “colonialist”, or “bigoted” by Critical Theory.

This. I had the local assistant town clerk ask a me "What happens if I don't buy a new computer?" because their current machine doesn't support whatever the new version of windows is (I don't use windows but I think it's 11). And I thought 'The machine doesn't have the resources to run the operating system.' Now, I know windows does a lot more than just be an OS but ... really...that's what it is. Sigh.

Yep, it’s supposedly Russian “lies” that:
- Europe has spent more on Russian fossil fuel than defending Ukraine
- Germany has essentially moved significant industry to China and called the result “greening”
- German chancellor Schroder literally went on to work for Gazprom
- Germany, Obama, and Biden enthusiastically supported Putin’s natural gas lines
- Obama, Biden, HRC, and the NYT labeled republicans like Romney and McCain silly and old fashioned for being concerned about Putin

Similarly, it’s pretty likely you pretend to believe that Hunter’s laptop is a Russian plant, and Tulsi Gabbard a Russian super spy.

Who’s the actual Russian?

We export twenty percent of our food grown. The number was LESS than I expected, I thought we exported more. But yes, I agree with you.

That's fine, we need a bunch of animal feed to rebuild the beef herd. I dunno why they aren't just feeding it to cattle.

I am sorry you have met pseudochristians the way you have. As I live in the Bible Belt I know exactly ZERO Christians who believe like that.

that quote is a good example of something that sounds incredibly intellectual and worth thinking about, but it still quite wrong on several levels if you dissect it.

To translate this liberal-professer-garble into plain speaking:

Apparently since 1) western thought is dominant across the world right now, 2) that very dominance prevents us from thinking about the non-western history that gave rise to it? Um, no. Statement 1 does NOT lead to statement 2. Just because I'm at the top of the dog pile, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily blind to how I got there.

Getting a bit further in the weeds, the writer questions the universality of western thought. That's the sort of self-loathing that'll trigger just about anyone outside a liberal arts department. I'm not denying that western ideology is full of inconsistencies and hypocrisy. Such as the US founding fathers making sure that everyone is free, excluding women and brown people). But, western thought has almost always aspired to be better and, yes, universal. Do western countries subvert and twist it to fit their own agendas? Sure. But the ideas of the enlightenment were pretty close to universal, which is quite different than a lot of non-western ways of thinking. Most of those amount to some form of "my race/religion/ethnicity/city/country/village is the chosen one because *insert nonrational reason here* thus we should rule and everyone else is lower on the hierarchy.

I'll take the "western epistemiological approach" any day of the week, thank you very much.

I thought AI would fix this...I thought WRONG! For my entire career, I have been passionately fighting bloat...and losing. Why? Because I show someone how to do the job in a nice compact way...then they move me to another project and some POS charismatic 24yo rewrites the fucking thing in Python with 40 frameworks...in slightly more time than it took me, but he's younger and better looking...and now management has a choice...listen to the passionate, but slightly autistic greybeard saying "no...we can do this with a minimal Java REST service and it'll nicely fill into your existing architecture"...or listen to handlebar moustached skinny jeans wearing hipster with his metrosexual turtleneck and oversized scarf...telling you about all the cool frameworks he's going to integrate...oh, and he's going to write part of it in node.js...because JavaScript is the language of the internet!!!!...that old guy?...he's trying to deliver something that runs in the language of the old internet...Applets!!!!...My version is tangibly faster...I delivered it faster...it costs less to run, but the hipster swears Python makes you more productive...so management has to figure out which one of us is wrong....and spoiler alert, they're not going to look at the evidence.

Why?...because fucking management is dumb AF....at the end of the day, I need a paycheck. I don't take it personally. It's a mild frustration. This is not my religion. However, I deliver REST services that do the job in megabytes of RAM using 15yo frameworks in Java that are well known industry standards, faster than the hipsters and even with less lines of code....young people who think "Java is hard" try to force everything to Python and megabytes becomes 100s of megabytes if not gigabytes...and the fucking thing is slow as molasses and breaks constantly with every change because Python and Node rely on the developer to write PERFECT unit tests...

And EVERYONE writes PERFECT unit tests, right?...no need for those annoying compilers getting in the way

So why did I bring up AI? Well...OK, dumb fucks can't figure out Java...let alone C++/Rust...one of the first use cases I pictured was AI taking your SHITTY SHITTY node and Python apps and rewriting them to not be shitty...it can't be that hard. Take functioning Python and convert it to Rust...or if you insist, Java...or C++...fuck...do assembly if you really like pain...The AI should be able to handle it, right? I've managed to convert a few pieces from Java to Rust nicely...but nope..that doesn't seem to be a popular option. People are mostly using AI to generate new SLOP in sloppy languages. So...instead of taking existing code and making it faster and cheaper to run and lowering their cloud spend, companies just want garbage buggy new python apps...because python is more error tolerant than C/Java (Claude and OpenAI still can't generate code in correct syntax 75% of the time, in my experience....they can't put commas or semicolons in the correct place or match braces). I don't know if that's a limitation of the tools or just the people using them.

It's all Snowball's fault.

> Comrade, you just gave up the fact you are Russian. Nice try Putin.

Great job! You caught me! Genius!

Sigh.

This is the entirety of climate emergency. Obvious, known-to-work solutions like nuclear energy are not being utilized. This tells me that decision makers are not serious about minimizing anthropogenic climate change. In turn, it tells me that it is likely not anthropogenic.