The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance. He claimed later that he would have vengeance. Not a magnanimous move, but Trump is not magnanimous. He has stated before that he enjoys destroying his enemies, with relish and verve.
In any case, when we fixate on one political figure or party, we lose sight of the general picture. In sociological terms, Trump is not very important. He is more of an expression of the times than their cause. He may catalyze certain changes, but he's hardly alone in doing that. In the broad sense, the general historical trajectory is not really deflected by him.
A wiser perspective is to look at broad trends. One should read Plato's Republic. The decadence of society described in that book - degenerating into timocracy (rule by honor), then oligarchy (rule by wealth), then democracy (rule by freedom), ending finally in anarchy - are a good context for understanding how these processes tend to play out.
So those boxes of classified documents were totally innocuous? "Find me votes" and alternate elector slates weren't to advance his stated goal of reversing his loss?
I think my point is you're expected to triage find me votes vs 911. And the fact that find me votes is in the news isn't indicative of democratic decline, its the way the news work.
I am not sure I understand. Both of those events are significant: a sophisticated terrorist attack on the United States and a president trying to coerce a swing state governor into changing its election results.
News triages the newsworthiness. Viewers triage what elements of the news that are most meaningful to them.
I don't really see the problem, except qualms about execution.
> To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance.
To be fair to reality, no, he wasn’t. He committed a number of very serious crimes flagrantly out in the open and the Justice Department was inordinately slow in responding to them out of a number of factors, including institutional partisan bias (even under Democratic Administration the bulk of the federal criminal investigatory apparatus has always been Republican, including political appointees at the FBI, and every single FBI director in the bureau's history), concern over appearing political trumping concern over enforcing the law, and, well, a number of other things.
One I wonder about but cannot prove: I wonder if the Justice Department wanted the prosecutions to wait until 2024, so that they would tar Trump during the campaign. If so, they were well-served for that bit of trying to put a thumb on the electoral scales. Trump was able to delay the cases until after the election. If they had begun a year earlier, we might be living in a very different world.
You don't need to go the reductio ad Hitlerum route. Distraction, lawfare, divide-and-conquer are old, tried, and tested tactics for diverting attention, grinding down the opposition, and scattering threats. It isn't unique to this administration nor to our times.
(Incidentally, in the US, divide-and-conquer often happens on racial grounds, for example. When American oligarchy starts feeling threatened, it can easily reach for the race card by giving the appropriate people a platform to manufacture paranoia, grievance, outrage, indignation, and antipathy. Solidarity breaks down. People stop talking about how badly they're being governed and manipulated by gov't and private interest and shift focus toward hating each other. Indeed, this is how democracies function in practice. Whereas dictatorships often rely on a good deal of brute force, oligarchs in democracies must be craftier in their methods - this includes the abuse of media, or the phenomenon of sexual lib, as described by Aldous Huxley, as another intersecting example. The citizen cannot know he is subject to manipulation or coercion. Media and education become instruments of conditioning and inculcation, with society functioning as a force multiplier.)
I don't think I did, at least not harshly. I was just seemingly finding a political pattern which I recognised from earlier, and that happened to be what it was. Was I incorrect in my observation or were you reminded of https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-... perhaps?
I partly agree with your general observation in parenthesis there, it seems this situation is being significantly sponsored by the American oligarchy (e.g. Thiel).
> You don't need to go the reductio ad Hitlerum route.
And yet, when the people at the top, the ones implementing these strategies and policies, are explicitly lionizing Hitler in a variety of ways, on top of mimicking his policies, strategies, values, and ideals, suddenly treating the comparison as if it's absurd or illogical starts to seem like it's trying to distract us from something...
Human identity is first a question for philosophical anthropology. What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of human identity? What is the nature of individual human identity? What does it mean to be a social animal, especially a human social animal? What does it mean to be an intellectual animal? A moral animal? What is personhood? And so on.
You will discover that there are different aspects to what and whom a person is. How we act is a matter of volition and thus choice motivated by reasoning. Our actions are expressions of the powers we possess, that is, exercised potentials that belong to us. Thus, our actions are the expression of our moral agency; I choose to exercise certain potentials for certain reasons. The reasons we do things have moral import - they are part of the act as two apparently similar acts are different if the motives are different, making our motives partly constitutive of the moral character of an act. The exercise of our potential per se likewise has moral import - it is the motive made manifest in act.
Each act is a step in some direction. There is an expression that each decision moves us either toward heaven or toward hell. A good act is both good in motivation and in the motivated act. A good act actualizes and develops the human person acting toward a fruition and fullness of humanity-in-potency. A bad act acts against such fruition, corrupting the person through ill motive and damaging acts, or squandering potential when there is a moral possibility of exercise.
So, from a moral perspective, we can say that we are our decided acts. The acts are not just ticked off boxes on a list, but actualizations of the person. There are higher actualizations and lower actualizations.
In that sense, to speak of actions and intentions as if they were distinct is a false dichotomy. You can speak of reasoning and motives as the "inner" aspect and the manifested act as the "outer" aspect, if you want. But they constitute a single act as a matter of fact. You cannot speak intelligibly of one without reference to the other for the same reason you cannot speak of a cause or its effect without reference to the other. The nature of an act is both in motive and in execution.
And "fake it until you make it" is a misunderstanding. There is nothing fake involved. I have potentials. Initially, I do not have experience exercising them. I have little familiarity with them. So I try to exercise them. Typically, first attempts aren't very good, but I learn from the effects of my trial, and perhaps from the feedback of others, to "calibrate" my subsequent attempts. This is called practice. I repeat in order to discover and work out and strengthen the actualization of a potential. This is a not error in a moral sense. It is a kind of dialogue with nature.
> I can't begin to count the number of times I've encountered someone who holds an ontological belief for why AGI cannot exist and then for some reason formulates it as a behavioralist criteria.
Unclear to me what you mean. I would certainly reject an ontological possibility of intelligent computers, where computation is defined by the Church-Turing thesis. It's not rocket science, but something difficult for some people to see without a sound and basic grasp of metaphysics and the foundations of CS. Magical thinking and superstition comes more easily then. (I've already given an explanation of this in other posts ad nauseam. In a number of cases, people get argumentative out of ignorance and misunderstanding.)
However, I don't reject out of hand the possibility of computers doing a pretty good job of simulating the appearance of intelligence. There's no robust reason to think that passing the Turing test implies intelligence. A good scarecrow looks human enough to many birds, but that doesn't mean it is human.
But the Turing test is not an especially rigorous test anyway. It appeals to the discernment of the observer, which is variable, and then there's the question of how much conversation or behavior, and in what range of circumstances, you need before you can make the call. Even in some unrealistic and idealized thought experiment, if a conversation with an AI were completely indiscernible with perfect discernment from a conversation with a human being, it would nonetheless lack a causal account of what was observed. You would have only shown a perfect correlation, at best.
For mathematics and certain fields, that is true. But the formalism matters, and as some have argued, the Fregean style that came to dominate in the 20th century is ill-suited for some fields, like linguistics. One argument is that linguists using this style inevitably recast natural language in the image of the formalism. (The traditional logical tradition is better suited, as its point of departure is the grammar of natural language itself.)
No formalism is ontologically neutral in the sense that there is always an implied ontology or range of possible ontologies. And it is always important to make a distinction between the abstractions proper to the formalism and the object of study. A common fallacy involves reifying those abstractions into objects of the theory, at least implicitly.
I just had a similar discussion with a coworker, he was advocating that LLMs are practically useful, but I argued they are kinda bad because nobody knows how they really work. I think it's somewhat return to pre-enlightenment situation where the expert authority was to be taken for their word, there was no way to externally verify their intuitive thought process, and I believe success of science and engineering is based on our formal understanding of the process and externalization of our thoughts.
Similar in mathematics, formalization was driven by this concern, so that we wouldn't rely on potentially wrong intuition.
I am now in favor of formalizing all serious human discourse (probably in some form of rich fuzzy and modal logic). I understand the concern for definition, but in communication, it's better to agree on the definition (which could be fuzzy) rather than use two random definitions and hope for their match. (I am reminded of koan about Sussman and Minsky http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html)
For example, we could formally define an airplane as a machine that usually has wings, usually flies. This would be translated into a formula in fuzzy logic which would take, for a given object, our belief this object is a machine, has wings and flies, and would return how much it is an airplane under some notion of usually.
I freely admit this approach wouldn't work for dadaist literary writers, but I don't want lawyers or politicians or scientists to be that.
Formalism isn't the right tool for a lot of semi-factual fields like journalism or law. Even in business, numbers are of course used in accounting, but much of it depends on arbitrary definitions and estimates. (Consider depreciation.)
Lawyers (here on HN) have said that contracts that specify everything are too expensive to come up with. Better to cover the most common cases and have enough ambiguity so that weird eventuality end up litigated.
> And it is always important to make a distinction between the abstractions proper to the formalism and the object of study. A common fallacy involves reifying those abstractions into objects of the theory, at least implicitly.
I agree 100% and feel like I have seen a lot of people in physics kind of fall into this trap. The model is not the thing itself.
Are you sure you are really talking about Physics? Are you talking about actual research in physics, or physicists applying their way of thinking in other things?
The people that make theorem provers, because they are type theorists and not set theorists doing ZFC derivatives, are very aware of your last point. Painfully aware, from years of people dismissing their work.
Read Andrej Bauer on them many foundations of math, for example. Clearly he is a believer in "no one true ontology".
> The people that make theorem provers [...] are very aware of your last point.
> Clearly he is a believer in "no one true ontology".
My point wasn't that you should aim for some kind of fictitious absence of ontological commitments, only that whatever language you use will have ontological commitments. Even the type judgement e:t has ontological implications, i.e., for the term e to be of type t presupposes that the world is such that this judgement is possible.
You can still operate under Fregean/Russellian presuppositions without sets. For example, consider the problem of bare particulars or the modeling of predicates on relations.
Indeed, and e:t in type theory is quite a strong ontological commitment, it implies that the mathematical universe is necessarily subdivided into static types. My abstraction logic [1] has no such commitments, it doesn't even presuppose any abstractions. Pretty much the only requirement is that there are at least two distinct mathematical objects.
That's one reason for the corporate backing of globalism. It's sold as "mobility", but what it actually means is having the upper hand. It's not about a lack of "talent". It's about a lack of a pool of people who will put up with their crap.
Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.
That's essentially the entire reason illegal immigrantion and the H1b program exist. They are both in precarious positions that allow them to be treated as indentured servants, forcing them to tolerate conditions Americans never would.
None of it is about talent, it's about giving companies the ability to abuse employees, with a nice side of wage suppression.
Before I read the article, I was reminded of a somewhat relevant quote attributed to Vincent Scully lamenting the replacement of old Penn Station with MSG.
"One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."
What an insult to human dignity ugly architecture is. You can infer the manner in which human life is valued in a culture by the architecture and the art it produces, especially relative to its means.
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