heraclius

Your “few bad cities” also contain 24.5/40.0 million (Shanghai), 22.5 million (Beijing), 19.8/44.3 million (Guangzhou), 15.5/16 million (Tianjin), 15.4/25.2 million (Chongqing), 14.7 and 18 million (Chengdu), 12.4 million (Shenzhen), 10.7/19.8 million (Wuhan) and 10.0/21.1 million (Hangzhou).¹ China is 58% urbanised.² Most of the land area of China is not as polluted as Shanghai, that is true; but disproportionately many people live in those areas—which is unsurprising, because pollution is often due to high population density. (Pollution per capita is of coursed generally reduced by density, but that is another matter.)

1. see the Wikipedia page for largest cities in China

2. Yiping XIAO, Yan SONG and Xiaodong WU, “How Far Has China’s Urbanization Gone?”, in: Sustainability 10.8 (Aug. 2018), p. 2593, DOI: 10.3390/su10082953

One of the pan-dems doubts it’s more than the aftermath of 6/4 which was ~a million, but the opening of all the roads etc. suggests more than the art. 23 protests, yes.

Not sure that turnout is over a million. Even HKFP are being cautious and only switched from “tens” to “hundreds” of thousands about an hour ago. I do hope that you are right though! And even 1 in 10 or 15 would be remarkable.

Edit: the SCMP has some turnout figures. As usual they vary wildly.¹

1. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3013725...

It is worth noting that the ROC’s claims in Mongolia don’t reflect any ambition either from the Taiwanese or the Chinese to seize Mongolia; the ROC simply claims them because it used to a long time ago and for diplomatic reasons is not altering those claims.

> The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

They were “forced” but not in that sense. The Graun offered to do this instead, and so GCHQ came along to watch. There is a problem but not with forced labour.

There is not insubstantial evidence that authoritarian countries monitor coverage of their governments, so at least one part of the claim is correct.

The other part is probably nonsense though—I see and post criticism of China very frequently.

The PP aren’t even in power yet and when they are they won’t be able to implement it instantly. If you are in Spain at the moment this shouldn’t put you off.

Many people wearing burqas—and perhaps most—indeed are the victims of such an ideology. But many aren’t, and so it is sensible to be clear that the burqa can be but isn't necessarily such a symbol.

But as is pointed out, energy isn’t, because efficiency exists.

I am not denying that the economy has changed in meaningful ways; I am merely denying that we can quantify the overall state of the economy over time such as to enable simple comparisons implicit in concepts like “growth”—and that with the caveat that the problem isn’t too severe over short periods of time.

It’s not clear how meaningful these measurements are anyway. Consider two years: in the first, 1000 tonnes of wheat are produced, and in the second, 500 tonnes of wheat and 300 of steel. Which year, one asks, is more productive? We can measure everything in wheat-equivalent or steel-equivalent or (commodity-basket)-equivalent (i.e. PPP) but ultimately such calculations are just as arbitrary as reduction to wheat bushels (or carpet kilometres or whatever.) Incommensurability therefore seems to make all this fairly meaningless.

There are energetic constraints on the processing of information that eventually become relevant, though far beyond limits sans virtualisation.

I hope that the terms can be re-written to impose some sort of liability on anyone who tries this sort of thing. The only disincentive is the wrath of editors and the foundation, which, frankly, doesn’t amount to much.

I’m not sure how useful fallacy theory is when applied thus. We’re all quite happy to accept induction (well, software engineers probably should be), and so the use of formally incorrect heuristics is not necessarily a bad idea.

Ceteris paribus, a blocked service is better than no service, yes. But (1) VPNs exist, (2) decentralisation is surely not so infeasible as to rule out evasion of various blocks, and (3) the government might even decide to prioritise scientific development over absolute political control. (Certainly it seems that the scientists within the party are agitating for freer access to foreign papers.)

I hope that the outcome you describe occurs. However, it seems equally likely that a centralised alternative will appear in China, just as there are local Chinese variants of the services Google, FB, et al. provide. Indeed, this would be in the interests of the government, who would then be able to have GitHub without the political ructions that accompany it.

By normative beliefs I refer to your “motivations”, not intermediate ends.

Very few serious philosophers would disagree with Hume. However, I suspect that many non-philisophers are happy to appeal to reason as a source of normative beliefs, thus “facts don’t care about your feelings” (well quite—they are incapable of caring), complaints about the irrationality of populists, &c.

I think that the gap between trains and the number of trains per hour is different. I can believe that there are sometimes merely 30 seconds between trains, but train frequencies don't really exceed, let's say, 50 trains per hour (and this is being very generous) because of a combination of signalling constraints and the need to reverse the trains at the end.

It’s not clear that the situation is “geopolitical”, but, more importantly, simply pointing to terrorism is not helpful either.

(1) The area is not inherently Chinese. China does not need to occupy Xinjiang. It has belonged to other people at other points. (See texts on the Islamic conquest.)

(2) China has encouraged mass Han immigration to Xinjiang. The Han who moved were not moving because of hunger or thirst. They moved because the state provided incentives to do so.

(3) Radicalisation is largely driven by ideologies that the CCP helped to support in the first place, when sowing chaos in Afghanistan without deciding what to do next. Of course it did not do so alone—the Americans and Pakistanis were also involved. But it at least props up Pakistan who continue to empower the Taliban.

(4) The Chinese state is very violent—and more violent than most other states.

Ergo it is misleading to suggest that the Uighurs are being particularly violent, and to imply that they are simply being violent for the sake of it. China could try a number of things, including getting out, reducing violence against Uighurs, and ceasing to incentivise Han migration.

There are 11 million Uighurs, and about a million in the camps. There are over 30 million blacks in the US, and under a million blacks in jail. (2.2 million is the total number of prisoners.)

The situation in Xinjiang is therefore much worse.

Most of the people concerned should not be locked up anyway—think of people who can’t afford to pay fines in the US, or people who pray in Xinjiang. It is extremely rare that a population is so poorly socialised that it is necessary to imprison over a tenth of the population. Perhaps they are in some strict sense “criminals”, but China can choose who to criminalise (as can the US), and it is clearly making unhelpful decisions.

> Isn't Singapore political system famously authoritarian capitalist

Most of Southeast Asia is increasingly authoritarian.

> its people ethnically Chinese?

Mostly (this is a trivial Google), but importantly not entirely.

Singapore was the last country to recognise the PRC instead of Taiwan. This was for good reason. First, Singapore maintains internal harmony by pretending to be multiracial. (It isn’t, obviously—the best candidate for the PM by far was ignored because “the people aren’t ready for a non-Chinese PM”, even though he was the most popular.) This involves insisting on English translators when visiting China, asserting independence, doing military drills in Taiwan, etc. Second, Singapore historically had to do the same thing to convince its neighbours that it was not a Chinese puppet.

But the crucial difference is that Singapore optimises for minimal oppression given a certain developmental outcome, whereas China doesn’t. Repression in Xinjiang, the Tienanmen Square massacre, current crackdowns on liberal thinktanks, etc. are not necessary to secure the régime. No Singaporean government would bother. (That is why New Naratif is still around.) Singapore is in fact qualitatively distinct from almost all other authoritarian states in that it requires extremely little oppression in view of the outcomes achieved compared to any other state, where the tradeoff is much worse.

Inevitably I am unfamiliar with the vast majority of the historical literature. However, the historiography of late antiquity and the early middle ages features very much debate as to how much people travelled; the possibility of travel is always entertained.

As for Stonehenge, I am unaware of any substantial connexion with the Vikings. I am aware of recent findings concerning the DNA of those who built it, but the raid on Lindisfarne is separated by at least a millennium from the latest posited dates of construction of Stonehenge.

The monographs I have read concerning Byzantium do not refer to the Vikings particularly frequently. This is unsurprising. The Vikings were important, but not sufficiently important to merit repeated and deliberate reference without some other obvious justification.

In British practice my understanding is that it would be A v. R.; the website of the Supreme Court has judgements the form R. v. A and A v. Her Majesty The Queen. Whence your usage?

> When modernization occurs, economic activity eventually requires degrees of consistent identification of individual people, to enable accounting and distribution. Without identity and credentials, volume of trade can’t scale.

I see no reason why they can’t; trade can operate based on immediate transfer of goods, and thereafter the prospect of continued further trade is incentive enough to continue to behave honestly.

> So, how to integrate with a wilderness busily operating according to its own rules? Well, if you have to let the wilderness come to you, isn’t that inviting collisions?

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “inviting collisions”. If you mean that more advanced civilisations have to integrate places like Congo otherwise some sort of invasion will occur, I would suggest that this is implausible for fairly obvious reasons.

Obviously environment has significant political and economic effects, but I would caution against excessive determinism. Many more stable polities have existed in similar physical environments—just look at the Republic of Congo next door, for example, or the relative stability of Switzerland, notwithstanding transport difficulties in the mountains. The Second Congo War was abnormal even in this state of underdevelopment.

> It seems like colonialism and race are big juicy targets of exploitative blame, but if you look around, there’s a certain reality that the gravitational forces of modernity would have caused these tribal groups to collide and descend into conflict with any amount of activity that didn’t ease the exposure of ethnic tribal groups into modernization (and thus accounting, identification and representative credential provisioning) over multiple generations, very, very carefully. I don’t know that such a thing ever would have happened gently.

Tribal identities do not inevitably lead to conflict. Their propensity to cause conflict is determined by previous conditions. Colonial reliance on identity as a tool of division is one reason why these identities lead to conflict. Otherwise, they are one plausible dividing line, but by no means a determinative one.

If the claim here is that tribal identification is necessary to enable trade because identification is difficult, this is probably untrue. One path to trade is based on tribal identification, as I think you are saying. Collective responsibility ensures that tribes must maintain credibility by ensuring that individual members are honest. But trade can quite easily take place without much trust; it simply requires immediate exchange of goods. This is the method by which trade operated in much of human history.

> That the wilderness persists, and with it conflict among diverse customs, traditions and ways of life, seems to show that maybe it’s less about the colonialism, and more about way the (now entrenched) urban areas are forced to interact with a coarse intolerance for disorganized demand. It’s probably been this parasitic/addictive feedback loop for long enough that the equilibrium is a known quantity determined long ago, through layers of stacked moral hazards.

Sorry, a little confused here as well—who is coarsely intolerant for disorganized demand?

Economic patterns in the Congo are largely the product of Belgian decisions. The exploitation of natural resources is most of the economy; that started under them. Pre-colonial Congo is not my area of expertise but I imagine that whatever equilibrium was reached was not associated with slaughter of the scale of the Second Congo War. As for moral hazard, could you elaborate?

> Those layers are certainly the ghosts of a colonial era, but now what? The colonial era is over, but the parasitic core of an urbanized gravitational whirlpool still produces the effects of a faceless entity, an architecture of amoral economy. The tribal ethnic groups still fight, and their spoils get eagerly mopped up and wrung out in buckets harvested by spectators.

The situation is more contingent on international interference than is immediately obvious. To start, the current government needs to purchase weapons from somewhere; it purchases these weapons due to money earnt as a result of international involvement by mineral companies. The DRC would not be able to manufacture many weapons by itself. At the very least this would cause a reversion of tribal conflict to a state without modern weapons; this would likely reduce the death rate. The situation is not particularly easy to solve, but probably not intractable yet.

I think “scan” here was in the sense of “scan the ISBN to catalogue the book”, not scan the insides. Since many of these are old books, many of them will not be perfect bindings. Scanning their contents therefore either requires opening the books and moving the pages (as Google Books did) or cutting the spine, which would be highly unhelpful since that would preclude any rebinding of the books into anything other than a perfect binding, reducing strength, repairability, and the ability to fold flat.

Politico says that this website is part of a Russian government institution.⁰ Perhaps that’s bunkum, but both sides fund propaganda about the other; most of the time, they will fund propaganda about things that are true—I remember Xinhua writing something entirely true about police brutality in the US for example—because true things are more credible.

The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient.

It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn’t to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified.

As for the use of “separatism” as code for “a priori bad”, this usage is entirely unjustified.

It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹

0. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russi...

1. https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-sec... — on the nature of the campaign; https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repr... — on mass surveillance.

I agree that hatred would be increased. Peace would only follow from disease where:

1. one can avoid infection by avoiding proximity (so no waterborne disease for example),

2. knowledge of this is widespread,

3. avoidance of proximity is feasible, and

4. the increase in hatred is not sufficient to remove fear of death.

However, I think that most of these conditions are met in large parts of the DRC, apart from (1), where there is no such disease yet.

EDIT: Also (2) is endangered by the spread of unscientific beliefs; presumably political actors wouldn’t be attempting to convince others that Ebola doesn’t exist were there no possibility of succeeding in this venture.

One plausible explanation of high rates of conflict in the DRC is the Belgian approach to colonisation.

> At the outset, only groups officially acknowledged as indigenous were entitled to a native authority, and with it the right to a tribal ‘homeland’ administered by chiefs appointed from within their own ranks. Not only were non-indigenous groups denied this right; they were required to pay tribute to ‘indigenous’ chiefs in the native authority where they lived. The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside. The native authority system continues today to create suspicion and animosity between two politically defined groups – one indigenous, the other not – and to set the scene for violence. What used to be called tribalism – and is now called ethnic conflict – is the expression of a structural contradiction between the economics of a market system and the politics of a residual colonial system. Markets move people, and not simply products of labour, across boundaries, but a colonial mechanism such as the native authority disenfranchises anyone who crosses tribal boundaries, as millions of Congolese were obliged to do, in the service of a fluid migrant labour system. This contradiction was at its most acute in the southern province of Katanga and the eastern provinces of Ituri and Kivu. With independence from Belgium in 1960, there was a prophetic round of ethnic cleansing in Katanga and Kasai, repeated on a more dramatic scale in 1992-93, and shortly afterwards in Ituri and Kivu.⁰

Since independence, the DRC has seen millions of deaths due to conflicts largely caused by ethnic strife, principally during the Second Congolese War, which alone appears to have caused approximately 4 million deaths.¹

In this context it seems that Ebola is not particularly threatening; certainly, if one views human conflict as a disease, it has not killed particularly many. The principal conclusion from this conflict, I should think, is that the DRC is quite vulnerable to the spread of other diseases that are even more infectious.

Transport in the DRC is notoriously difficult. Many “roads” are not visible either on Google Earth or in attempting to use “remote sensing”². There may therefore be some hope that the spread of a more dangerous infectious disease could help to reduce conflict by increasing fear of contact between populations. As things stand, it seems that most contact consists of violence instead of useful things such as trade. If the jungle cannot stop the militias, perhaps disease can. (It admittedly failed to do so during the Plague of Justinian.)

0. Mahmood Mamdani, “The Invention of the Indigène”, in: London Review of Books (20th Jan. 2011), pp. 31-3, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/mahmood-mamdani/the-invention-...

1. Benjamin Coghlan et al, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Nationwide Survey”, in: The Lancet 367.9504 (Jan. 2006), pp. 44-51, DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(06)67923-3

2. DR Congo Snapshot: Roads in the DR Congo—Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/dr-co...

I quite understand that there is a tendency to marketise decision-making in an unhelpful fashion, but I’m not entirely sure how this scheme is too much of a problem, beyond using the word “tokens”. Could you elaborate as to the specific problems of this scheme as opposed to those of general attempts to marketise?

And “quadratic voting” may have uses beyond the areas governed by the US constitution. Even within those areas, there are minorities other than property owners. Blacks, for example, do not seem to have been very successful as a minority in preventing the various things that the state does to them that are plausibly unhelpful (though the quantification thereof may well be intractable). The particular use case here, however, seems to be to make the specific institutions you describe more effective, as opposed to relying on their being pitted against each other to make things work. I think that it is more desirable to have a single institution that works well, where possible (which it generally isn’t) than multiple institutions that operate against each other in an attempt to avoid pitfalls, because one generally falls into more pitfalls in the process, even if the balance of advantage lies with the latter case.

It’s tempting to think that we can operate politics without emotion. However, it is unclear what the foundations of our political beliefs are if not intuitive reactions of the sort that emotions are as well. For example, most people who oppose torture oppose it because they have an intuition that it is unacceptable and value that intuition. We can construct “objective” methods to derive political claims from other claims, but ultimately they involve a value judgement—politics without value judgement has no way to decide between competing objectives. “Reason” does not provide a coherent morality, as the failure of the Enlightenment project shows; “emotion” is quite capable of justifying a centrist view—I should imagine most have negative emotional reactions to the Leninist and Hitlerite states. I imagine that one reason for the decline of the liberal order is its abandonment of emotional claims and pretence to objectivity as if that were possible. Those who continue to use emotion, to appeal to our intuitions as to what is right, instead of simply referring to empirical concepts whose connexion to such intuitions is severely dulled, appear to have the most success; unfortunately they do not seem to be particularly constructive at the moment. Anger and fear are not entirely unreasonable as emotions go: we fear and are angered by the spectres of poverty and dictatorship, and those are not unreasonable positions to hold.

Attacks on morality and value judgements in politics often take the form of, to take an example, Sir Humphrey’s utterances in Yes Minister. Government, in his view, is about order, and the prevention of chaos. Hacker, the minister, suggests that it is about doing good. Why is Sir Humphrey so scared of chaos? His fear thereof is the same sort of fear that drives morality; we might even call it a moral belief. It is not an implausible belief—chaos has its problems. Most of the time what seems “objective” is no longer on demanding a further reason. “Lowered emotions” should not really be the end; a sensible method of dealing with competing emotions is the need of the hour.