Messages

(Assuming this is about Picking Cain's Brains in general, and not just about Middle East conflict. Please let me know if this should go somewhere else.)

I'm familiar with the history of NATO's expansion and Russia's realistic geostrategic concerns surrounding Ukraine joining NATO. What I can't wrap my head around is why we left the table of Diplomacy for this and guaranteed an invasion of Ukraine? Russia openly bolstered their Economic Security for years to ensure that sanctions would no longer be very effective (Except for oil, but my reading tells me this has a massive impact on other NATO countries like Germany, and otherwise backs Russia into an even more precarious corner that might make conflict less predictable.), and the State Department/President knew this, so obviously their plan wasn't to Sanction Russia out of conflict again. The only conclusion I can come to is that we generally saw this coming a mile away, and pretty bluntly did nothing about it because the path of least resistance from a Cost-Benefit scenario was to:

1. Let Russia invade Ukraine
2. Send Ukraine weapons/support that would barely constitute a drop from our military budget to maintain the appearance of caring about their sovereignty

Did we actually do this? Did we push these tensions by expanding NATO just so Russia could take Ukraine? It technically removes the conflict, as there would then be no nation to have join NATO, and therefore nothing to fight with Russia over for now.

I feel like I have to be missing something pretty big and obvious. Even a Capitalist/Imperialist country like the US couldn't be so apathetic that they saw the easiest solution to the crisis being the absorption of Ukraine into Russia via all-out war. Also, wouldn't this embolden Russia to push the envelope further once they realized they could get away with it? Wouldn't they wanna push to expand further? I feel like this is just an attempt to create the conditions that make the "New Russian Sphere of Influence" argument a material justification for further demonization of Russia.

After some further reading, it appears the main goal of this tactic was to ensure Russia had more work to do in order to expand and undo NATO, while simultaneously preventing direct conflict between NATO and Russia in the short term. If we let Russia invade Ukraine but ensure Ukraine's defenses are bolstered with modern NATO Defense systems, Russia has to expend more effort and resources to go beyond Ukraine. Combined with Sanctions that extricate Russia from the Global Economy, it appears the general goal is to bleed them out before they can pick up Westward momentum.

But this just begs the question, considering Russia's efforts to defend against Sanctions: Isn't this just kicking the can down the road? Or worse, backing them into a more desperate corner?

And isn't the easiest way out of this situation to back off NATO expansion and talk Ukraine and any other Russian neighbors "off the [NATO Membership] ledge"? I mean, what good is a military-based Peace Alliance like NATO if membership increase feeds conflict? Russians have made it clear that further expansion Eastward is fatal.

(Assuming this is about Picking Cain's Brains in general, and not just about Middle East conflict. Please let me know if this should go somewhere else.)

I'm familiar with the history of NATO's expansion and Russia's realistic geostrategic concerns surrounding Ukraine joining NATO. What I can't wrap my head around is why we left the table of Diplomacy for this and guaranteed an invasion of Ukraine? Russia openly bolstered their Economic Security for years to ensure that sanctions would no longer be very effective (Except for oil, but my reading tells me this has a massive impact on other NATO countries like Germany, and otherwise backs Russia into an even more precarious corner that might make conflict less predictable.), and the State Department/President knew this, so obviously their plan wasn't to Sanction Russia out of conflict again. The only conclusion I can come to is that we generally saw this coming a mile away, and pretty bluntly did nothing about it because the path of least resistance from a Cost-Benefit scenario was to:

1. Let Russia invade Ukraine
2. Send Ukraine weapons/support that would barely constitute a drop from our military budget to maintain the appearance of caring about their sovereignty

Did we actually do this? Did we push these tensions by expanding NATO just so Russia could take Ukraine? It technically removes the conflict, as there would then be no nation to have join NATO, and therefore nothing to fight with Russia over for now.

I feel like I have to be missing something pretty big and obvious. Even a Capitalist/Imperialist country like the US couldn't be so apathetic that they saw the easiest solution to the crisis being the absorption of Ukraine into Russia via all-out war. Also, wouldn't this embolden Russia to push the envelope further once they realized they could get away with it? Wouldn't they wanna push to expand further? I feel like this is just an attempt to create the conditions that make the "New Russian Sphere of Influence" argument a material justification for further demonization of Russia.

Wanted to clarify that Think For Yourself Schmuck isn't necessarily only tied to survival situations, or systems that focus on those areas of the brain

Actually, in survival situations, TFYSS is a non-starter.  Group thinking does, after all, have its advantages when the chips are down.  Everyone pulling the same direction is better than scattershot responses, even if everyone is pulling in a non-optimal direction.

That being said, the person that panics first usually survives.  It's never too early to panic.

That's a good point. I guess I was only thinking of situations where Group Think is directed by a centralized Power, and therefore manifesting out of one's need to maintain status quo - Pressing buttons to get the cheese, if you will. Or manufactured environmental pressures that require one to place higher importance on Productivity over personal and social growth (To pay the bills/survive).

But I see what you mean. Unless you have a significant amount of Influence in an environment like that, Think For Yourself, Schmuck really may need to be traded out for Think For Everyone Else Too, Asshole. Or at the very least, TFYSS should be applied in the context of directing the herd.

But if we're panicking, I have dibs on all the Sudafed, Nicotine Patches, and blue pills. Due to adrenal deficiencies of some kind, I'm not be able to panic first, but I'm certainly going to be harder than whoever does! 

[TFYSS™ manifests when those networks identify a better, but more conscious path that requires the front-brain.]

The point here, is that Motivation is complicated, and [fun] is not a very effective motivator when the back of your brain is tiringly focused on what the Power Structure wants for reasons Dok explained. When you can convince someone that the Power Structure is responsible for their general stress (AKA, accurately identifying "Those Bastards Over There" in a high-tech, highly complex society.), the back of their brain wakes up the front of the brain because the back doesn't know how to deal with organizational complexity and nuance, and TFYSS™ manifests naturally. This is because stress over-invokes the survival networks in the center/back of the brain, which tells the front to pipe down. When you're in that State, you look for the path of least resistance. TFYSS™ manifests when those networks identify a better, but more conscious path that requires the front-brain. Those who wish to prevent TFYSS™ have an interest in reducing visibility of those paths with layers of back-brain placation and situational helplessness (If you're stressed and you think there's no way out, there's no need to stop doing what you're doing.).

Wanted to clarify that Think For Yourself Schmuck isn't necessarily only tied to survival situations, or systems that focus on those areas of the brain. This was just an example in an adjacent context to your original post. Consciousness, being the culmination of a constant struggle between various major neural networks vying for control based on necessity (Identified through environmental feedback from the Nervous System.), can be subject to TFYSS™ over things as abstract as existential purpose-driven questions, or anything else that sits within the context of "personal fulfillment".

When one is able to get to a State where they don't have to worry about Survival, higher-order networks become more frequently active in a kind of front-brain auto-pilot (Pondering life questions, planning future events, etc.), but ultimately run into their own problems as they try to sort complex shit out. Some of those problems, if particularly stressful, start making back-brain auto-pilot easier to default to, which focuses primarily on completing mundane tasks and letting the Environment drive activity. This is further complicated by inherently Social Environments, especially in the context of work life. If much of your daily life is based in collaboration with a group, the back-brain auto-pilot focuses on letting Social Queues in the Environment drive activity in a sort of Group Think. Someone can also fall into this trap even if they're not particularly socially exposed, as signal from people on the Internet whom one generally respects can fuel this Group Think (Think Influencers). You can tell if you're heavily influenced in this way by whether significant group paradigm shifts, cause you to tune out completely, as opposed to redirecting your focus on adapting to the new paradigm and/or fighting it/supporting it. Maybe a fact comes out about some political topic that makes your "Tribe's" Reality Map fall apart. Front-brain auto-pilot will favor incorporation of the new information into your personal Reality Map and presenting it to your Tribe for review. Back-brain auto-pilot will take you offline for a few weeks, and then you'll be back to beating the same dead horse. Or maybe you don't even need the downtime to escape, and you're able to forget the information or use memes to (in your mind) refute it without extra consideration.

that's a good point - funnily enough i think i saw someone writing recently about not mistaking a deliberately adversarial environment for a neutral one. i really should get around to learning about marketing

Just make sure it's about Marketing, if you know what I mean. Marketing, as a practice, is just profit-motivated sociology for nihilists when a collectively beneficial purpose is undefined.

If we're talking about State/Corporate Power Structures, they are fundamentally adversarial in many cases (And their adversarial "scale" is directly related to their Organizational Architecture of choice, and where one sits in that structure.). I think Dok is just emphasizing that one's aversion to adversarial/coercive environments isn't the only factor preventing TFYSS™ from manifesting. This oligarchic compliance factory has many means by which it assassinates creativity, so no need to focus on just one. That being said, many of those means are based on appeal to the "back of the brain", as he put it, so I'd say that's a great place to start if you're trying to understand them all and reverse them.

Of course, usually, the most effective method of reversing those means is making them and their nuanced structures and results obvious to those they effect. For example, I'm slowly converting one of my pro-Trump managers into a dirty Anarcho-Commy by frequently outlining, in detail, the means by which our company's Directorate plans how they're going to let their shit roll downhill onto him and his overfilled to-do list, and calling out situations where organizational hierarchy is directly contributing to each of his problems.

They called a meeting about "how [My] time card never getting done affects Management/Finance processes", and after I gave a few choice words to misdirect the conversation and wake up his front-brain, he was calling for management-level changes (Solutions, really.) that were not only antithetical to the purpose of the meeting (And pissing off my boss, who had called the meeting.), but also directly opposed to the organization's implementation of time cards and Finance in general. The day prior to this meeting, I suggested a business model that he initially disagreed with, and he modified it to serve as the basis for his arguments in the meeting. Being that he's in a Senior position, he's now leading an internal initiative to implement a new Model to reduce all of our work loads.

The point here, is that Motivation is complicated, and [fun] is not a very effective motivator when the back of your brain is tiringly focused on what the Power Structure wants for reasons Dok explained. When you can convince someone that the Power Structure is responsible for their general stress (AKA, accurately identifying "Those Bastards Over There" in a high-tech, highly complex society.), the back of their brain wakes up the front of the brain because the back doesn't know how to deal with organizational complexity and nuance, and TFYSS™ manifests naturally. This is because stress over-invokes the survival networks in the center/back of the brain, which tells the front to pipe down. When you're in that State, you look for the path of least resistance. TFYSS™ manifests when those networks identify a better, but more conscious path that requires the front-brain. Those who wish to prevent TFYSS™ have an interest in reducing visibility of those paths with layers of back-brain placation and situational helplessness (If you're stressed and you think there's no way out, there's no need to stop doing what you're doing.).

If/When we're no longer under constant abusive pressure as a society, TFYSS™ will be ever-increasing as people start taking on less-survival-oriented problems and more elevation-oriented problems.

OR, they'll just do more drugs (like I do).


Ultimately, you're right. TFYSS™ is a group activity, but it's suppressed by multiple manufactured AND unintentional means, but most especially appeal to the back/center of the brain.

Won't SOMEBODY think of the bottom line?

Newsfeed? Or a Disco variant, like:

"PD.com: Someone had to think of the bottom line."

Or even simpler:

"PD.com: We thought of the bottom line."

HIMEOBS:  YOU CANNOT LINE YOUR BOTTOM ENOUGH.

 

Won't SOMEBODY think of the bottom line?

Newsfeed? Or a Disco variant, like:

"PD.com: Someone had to think of the bottom line."

Or even simpler:

"PD.com: We thought of the bottom line."

We're averaging 760,000 new cases a day, go us!

It's so bad, my employer did the unthinkable, and postponed our return to the office by

5 WHOLE FUCKING DAYS

How am I supposed to meet my social interaction quota for this month without our Back To The Office Party? My Productivity for the entire year will suffer.

Won't SOMEBODY think of the bottom line?

So, how did it turn out?

This work is being continued in the Power Structure Architecture thread in Think For Yourself, Schmuck.

Currently taking a break from writing to chew on some recent research. Unfortunately, I'm getting uncomfortably close to an Existential Theory Of Everything, which means some information needs to be digested more and refocused through grounded, real-world inspiration. Planning to re-evaluate and continue writing some more next week.

Best I can do is ANTIFA

I THINK ABOUT ANTIFA 19 HOURS A DAY

I SIT IN MY BASEMENT AND ROCK BACK AND FORTH, AND FOAM GUYS OUT OF MY MOUTH

ANTIFA CAN SECRETLY FLY

ANTIFA SECRETLY RUN EVERYTHING AND OWN EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE

MY DOG IS SECRETLY ANTIFA.  I SHAKE HIM FOR ANSWERS BUT HE WAS TAUGHT TO KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.

ANTIFA CAN TELEPORT

JERRY SEINFELD IS A SPACE ALIEN WHO CAME FROM THE ANTIFA MOTHERSHIP

ANTIFA OWN AND RUN EVERYTHING BUT THEY ARE NOT SMART, NO SIR, THEY ARE REALLYDUMB

I LIKE TO ACCUSE ANTIFA OF MANY THINGS AND THEN ACCUSE THEM OF WHINING WHEN THEY RESPOND TO MY ATTACKS

YOU ARE SECRETLY ANTIFA

EVERYONE IS ANTIFA

THERE ARE NO ANTIFA

HELP ME, THE VOICES IN MY HEAD FRIGHTEN ME

OHHH MY HEAD HOW IT HURTS

ANTIFA ARE SECRETLY AFRAID OF FRUIT

WHERE IS MY MEDICATION?

*Steals*





Unrelated:

3 hours after a meeting, wherein my team watched one of our customer's Execs shit all over Hewlett-Packard Sales/Account Execs for consistently lying about the OS that their Point of Sale Hardware supported (Causing our customer to waste around $100K+ purchasing said hardware and paying for its integration into our Solution), my Project Manager and I discovered that HP did the EXACT SAME THING to another one of our customers, who were just about to purchase hundreds of similar devices and begin Solution Integration with them.

After checking their documentation, it's actually starting to look like they just decided to put the most common Retail Linux Distribution (Without relevant specificity regarding Minor Version, which absolutely matters in Retail Hardware.) on every new Hardware Datasheet as a supported OS to guarantee purchases from unwise retailers, and then play Dumb/Mister Helpful when someone had to add a new OS/Infrastructure Upgrade Project onto their Hardware Upgrade, and subsequently hire them for further consulting. If the new customer had actually purchased all those units, I'm sure this would have been a huge, potentially class-action lawsuit.

But for now, I just get to tell the first customer "You're not gonna believe this  "

[Attempting to understand Power Structures without the context of Thermodynamics and Information Theory is futile. Sociology does not sufficiently account for the underlying Forces and Constraints that guide the creation of Power Structures or their design - It only describes their Social Motivations and High-level Design at a level of abstraction that is merely statistical and philosophical, which is not enough to attribute accountability and indicate solutions to the problems they create.Attempting to understand Power Structures without the context of Sociology and Class Struggle is pointless and evil. Any person pushing for a Structural View of Power that makes no reference to methodologies for Social Progress should be regarded as in favor of the current Power Paradigm (Best described by Elite Theory).Determinacy, like most properties, is relative and sits on a spectrum related to Entropy. Just because the Universe tends toward Determinacy, does not mean all Systems within it tend toward Determinacy.]

Just a forewarning: I've been diving pretty deep into ways to quantify (Or at least establish quantification Laws/Constraints for estimation/comparison of) Power, and in so doing am directly relating it to Physics/Thermodynamic concepts (Power as an aggregation of exergy motivated by negentropy. But don't worry, it's NOT like this hilarious bullshit: https://www.icr.org/article/albert-szent-gyorgyis-theory-syntropy-creationism/). At times, it will appear as if my study is:


- Ignoring the Personable/Social aspects of Power due to heavy emphasis on Structuralist descriptions
- Attempting to refute Free Will


So before we go that far I want to clarify these principles:

Attempting to understand Power Structures without the context of Thermodynamics and Information Theory is futile. Sociology does not sufficiently account for the underlying Forces and Constraints that guide the creation of Power Structures or their design - It only describes their Social Motivations and High-level Design at a level of abstraction that is merely statistical and philosophical, which is not enough to attribute accountability and indicate solutions to the problems they create.

Attempting to understand Power Structures without the context of Sociology and Class Struggle is pointless and evil. Any person pushing for a Structural View of Power that makes no reference to methodologies for Social Progress should be regarded as in favor of the current Power Paradigm (Best described by Elite Theory).

Determinacy, like most properties, is relative and sits on a spectrum related to Entropy. Just because the Universe tends toward Determinacy, does not mean all Systems within it tend toward Determinacy.

Nick Lim, VanWaTech CEO and Nazi Platform Host is going Mask Off on Twitter right now. Full Fascist, no Free Speech disguise. I'm assuming his Hosting Enterprise is going down for legal reasons and connections to Russia/DDoS-Guard, and he's having a mental break.

I have COVID and I'm still gonna have a beer to celebrate his current or subsequent failure 

I'm grabbing snapshots of the posts in case he tries to delete and deny them later.

The best part is that this puts him on the National Security radar officially, instead of just theoretically. With the Free Speech disguise, he's able to maintain "Middle Man" status with plausible deniability, but when the Mask comes off, it makes him an organizational asset and direct target for investigation around any terrorist plots that take place on the Platforms he provides Infrastructure for.

Wondering if Russians might identify him as a loose end and unalive him.

Nick Lim, VanWaTech CEO and Nazi Platform Host is going Mask Off on Twitter right now. Full Fascist, no Free Speech disguise. I'm assuming his Hosting Enterprise is going down for legal reasons and connections to Russia/DDoS-Guard, and he's having a mental break.

I have COVID and I'm still gonna have a beer to celebrate his current or subsequent failure 

I'm grabbing snapshots of the posts in case he tries to delete and deny them later.

A rogue script of mine accidentally deleted about $100k+ worth of work from one of my company's Linux OS-Build Servers, not knowing this was the one server that wasn't scheduled for Snapshots. It was also the only Build Server using XFS as the Filesystem, which is only partially supported by most File Recovery Tools and happens to delete Folder Structure information at delete time. Now I'll be spending the next week or so rebuilding every OS Configuration we lost from a Flat Directory of Gigabytes of files 

Funny enough, the Script that fucked everything up was the Script that was supposed to negate the Local Storage requirement of the Build Server altogether once it was complete. In a sense, it kind of did, just a bit more forcefully than I'd hoped 

"Power Emerges from the relationships that govern how entities in an ever-cooling Universe store and expend energy to stabilize their own States, either directly through self-regulation, or indirectly by altering the States of other Entities in their Environments."

I'm going to call this the Stabilization (or Entropy Reversal) Theory of Power.

This would not extend to the point that it implies lack of Free Will, of course, like a Pure Structuralist (Founded on exclusive Reductionism) may suggest. Free Will, while maybe being less frequent under Systems that place emphasis primarily on the Reward Systems of the brain, does exist, and it's the execution of Will Power that sometimes causes the greatest amounts of destabilization. In some cases, this destabilization is for the better, as Discordians who promote Constructive Discord may tell you. In Chemistry and Particle Physics, we learn that sometimes a little destabilization is required to exit one State, and enter a more stable one.

The difference between Corruption and Constructive Discord is that CD accounts for and prevents externalities, because it has a positive greater goal in mind. Corruption involves destabilization in benefit to its own stability.