For decades trusting the US was no problem at all. The relationship was mutually beneficial. Cooperation and trust among nations is possible and Juche (completely self-reliance) is not a worthwhile goal at all. So, sure, cooperation is great and should always be a goal – it also secures peace (people who are economically intertwined are less likely to go to war with each other).
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
The issue has less to do with intelligence silliness, and more to do with the fact that the overall geopolitical objectives of the US can not be trusted, and that rift has grown to a point where self-reliance on critical infrastructure may be in Europe’s best interest.
US started to eavesdrop on Turkey and Greece first. Germany pulled out of the project by citing this is going too far for them. Some citations from news:
The Germans were taken aback by the Americans’ willingness to spy on all but their closest allies, with targets including NATO members Spain, Greece, Turkey and Italy [0].
Operation Rubicon [1] has a map of spied countries, incl. NATO allies and "friends".
I failed to find that great long-read article. If I can find, I will attach it here, too.
See, this is a clear example why hypercynicism (everything has always been maximally evil all the time already) is not at all helpful. You lose your ability to differentiate in your cynical zeal to cast everyone as maximally (undifferentiably) evil all the time.
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.
> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally
If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this
> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling.
It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.
I don't think it's reasonable. If there's context I'm missing and this guy has written about culture war stuff before, fair enough, but based on this article alone, I'm not seeing any indication of that.
That phrase suggests more that the author believes this is done for spectacle, knowing that it will attract attention to the researcher far more than a nice-looking painted statue would. Basically he seems to be accusing these researchers of doing flame-bait for clicks, like those kitchen-top meal TikTok videos designed to get engagement by making people angry.
Maybe my brain is oversaturated with culture war nonsense from too much doomscrolling but that’s where my train of thought went too, even if it wasn’t directly implied.
By claiming our ancient predecessors had terrible taste you can make them look like primitive fools, and make our own modernity appear superior in comparison.
When boiled down to culture war brainrot the poor coloring in the reconstructions becomes a woke statement that the brutish patriarchal empires of antiquity have nothing to teach our sophisticated modern selves and that new is good and old is bad. A progressive hit-piece on muh heritage.
Anything you don’t like is a purple haired marxist if you squint hard enough.
Idk why my brain went there. I’m guessing the years of daily exposure to engagement-farming ragebait had something to do with it.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, these researchers have cultivated a public perception that the classical statues we admire looked totally ridiculous and were actually hideous. It is difficult to interpret it as unintentional, when the more absurd your reconstruction, the likelier you are to get press attention and get invited to special events at international galleries.
To get closer to an answer to this you should still talk to the people doing the actual work?
I know that many scholars have an uncomfortable relationship to the PR work their research institutions are doing, but they themselves don’t strike me as unapproachable or closed to nuanced discussion. Seems weird to ignore that perspective and wildly speculate from the outside.
Who is inside and who is outside depends on your (subjective) spatial interpretation of the situation.
It could just as well be said that a bunch of scholars disconnected from the culture, history, and technique of fine arts (except as objects of scholarly interest) are wildly speculating from the outside about the nature of the objects, and people interested in these things are starting to ask "Why are these silly things being said about the topic I'm interested in? Are the people behind this pranksters?"
Anyways, if there is a misunderstanding here, which I don't doubt is the case for at least some of the people involved, why can't the discourse be had in public about it? The question has been asked as you suggest...publicly. Polychromic revivalists are free to respond in public, and we can all benefit from hearing the more nuanced perspectives get expressed.
How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …
I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)
If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.
> Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside
You are ignoring what I said and just reasserting your hegemonic view of scholarly institutions / scientific work. On the contrary, if you zoom out it becomes obvious that our academic research in these matters is ephemeral heat and noise that gets rolled into the dustbins of time.
Your central claim is that scholarly academic (mainstream) work ist disconnected from fine arts and as such outside of it, no fit to give meaningful answers.
That seems like a wild and weird take to me, contradiction everything I know about how the world works. But if that is your hypothesis then I don’t know how you can answer ist without actually engaging closely with those who you say are disconnected.
You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves.
This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society.
What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
In discussions similar to this I often see parents expressing their happiness with a state taking the role of a "bad cop" so that the parents can just wash their hands off telling their children it is state's fault they can no longer use TikTok ("I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board." from OP) instead of having a proper conversation about harms of social media with the children. This is literally a cop out for them from a proper parenting.
From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...
You're missing the collective action problem. When 95% of kids have TikTok, telling your kid "no" doesn't just mean having a conversation about social media harms, it means making them a social outcast. Sure, you can be that parent, but you're choosing between your kid's mental health from algorithmic content versus their mental health from social isolation. Individual parents can't solve network effect problems, that's exactly what policy is for. This isn't laziness, it's recognizing that some problems require coordination beyond the family level.
You said you've seen it happen "often" and provided no examples other than the one you are using to make your point. You implied that you have heard it multiple times in different contexts. I was asking for some of those contexts because as someone who is a parent and interacts with other parents frequently, it is not something I've encountered.
The peace prize is often given to people still working on something, not having achieved something. In that way it is different from the science prizes.
I think that is a understandable approach (providing support), though it can lead to giving the prize to people who never achieve any of their goals. Whether that’s a worthy trade off I do not know.
Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
How fast has Germany's PV capacity expanded in recent years? In another subthread I wanted some estimate of how many hectares in Germany had PV on them, but the pages I visisted on the subject were outdated.
This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.
If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.
That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.
Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.
US post pandemic economic recovery has been astonishingly great measured against other major economies.
Obviously (real) wages did take a hit like everywhere but have been recovering, too.
My working theory is that noticeable inflations makes people go crazy and trumps anything else. Completely closes people off to rational thought and that’s what sunk Biden. Despite awesome economic recovery given the circumstances.
It’s worse than that. Everything leading up to this and this reversion right now is a perfect demonstration that the current US administration cannot be trusted and behaves in irrational ways. You cannot expect consistency and enduring policies. It’s all fickle and capricious. How are you supposed to do any planning with this?
This is all so obviously dumb and I’m frankly astounded by so many people (especially here on HN) playing devils advocate or, I don’t know, honestly believing that this all makes sense.
Even if you agree with the stated (also somewhat incoherent, by the way) goals why do you think this implementation can achieve any of that?
I believe the point is power, and from that lens everything makes perfect sense. Trump is exercising available levers of global influence -- for good or for bad -- in a way that hasn't occurred since Hitler initiated World War II.
Tariffs are appealing to him because they are incredibly forceful blunt instruments over which he alone has almost complete control. They give him immense, immediate influence over the entire world. What we're seeing is that the US President today, if the full capacities of that office are pushed as far as possible without violence, is arguably one of (if not the) most powerful human beings ever.
Beyond this, Trump has said that one of his greatest weapons is uncertainty. He wants to be feared. Having people genuinely afraid of you is the next step of power that he is already flirting with by posting videos of people being blown up in warfare on social media.
And what will he do when China and rest of the world tired of his untreated Narcissistic Personality Disorder will start selling US debt, like $trillions in bonds in say less than a week? I bet you finally someone broke the secret to him today, so he reverted the policy.
This is some weird American version of Juche, not reducing dependency on China. Can you explain the dependency reduction mechanism to me?
Just as an analogy: If you were to detonate all nuclear weapons in the US inside the US you would also reduce dependency on China. Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The path matters.
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
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