To Pokimane, pt 41

This post is because I watched a video of Pey's, HELLO HAPPEY FRIYAY! :D from 10 Jan which will be deleted in a day or two, and near the end someone gifted 20 subs after asking if Pey would help the viewer learn to play World of Warcraft if he gifted subs. I think she didn't acknowledge the message before he gifted the subs as she was busy talking, but the end result was that the viewer was not helped. I wanted to try to help him, but I cannot do whispers on Twitch due to lack of a phone number. This person has done some streams, but if they did not, I would have no way to contact them, instead of just a chance of contacting them.

The person, Xiaoyu, whose Douyin accounts I linked in the previous post seems to have deleted all the videos on her secondary account. The message I got when trying to view those videos on a tab that I had open was, "该视频已被删除" "The video has been deleted."

I have seen some headlines or video titles about Israel getting attacked by more countries. I know it's fighting with Lebanon now; I don't know if that means Lebanon's official military or what. I don't know what countries other than Lebanon and Iran might be fighting with Israel right now, but what I know suggests that other countries decided to help Iran because of a shared religion, despite the slogan used in Iran, Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran.

So I'm making this about religion. Noting that person who controlled the Chirp Club account @fancyfenty before it was deleted is Muslim, based on comments she made about haram and so on, and that Turkey/Türkiye as a NATO member that stores "approximately 20 United States B61 nuclear bombs at the Incirlik Air Base" is probably not fighting with Israel despite being 99.8% Muslim.

If you don't share the idea now, it means you think Islam is dumb and that Islamic countries deserve to be viewed as worse than other countries.

To Pokimane, pt 40

Info:

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+salty+fish+slacker+explained

https://x.com/tiff_ilosophy/status/1946519461034688627

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/06/stop-trying-to-make-lying-flat-happen/

https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/nj41el/anyone_know_the_meaning_of_salted_fish/

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/04/china-spiritual-capitalists/

User with Douyin ID @79230039490 changed her display name from "肉肉丸" to "·摆烂小鱼", which Google translates as "Slacking off Little Fish" or "Sluggish Little Fish". The name on her second account @xiao.ru.888 went from "咪咪爱发癫" to "*鱼酱", even though she only uploaded one video in the past month.

I think it's fair to say that glasses usually make someone look less attractive. (Pey was happy when she got laser eye surgery and no longer had to wear glasses; I am just making an objective statement about appearances.) And yet she wears glasses in all of her videos, doesn't use a lot of image warping, doesn't use zooms or algorithm optimization tricks like blurring the start of the video, and leaves a lot of empty space above her head. In short, the 'slacking little fish' label seems accurate.

To be honest, the third explanatory link made me think about my motivations. It showed a male sprawled on a couch, who compared to the male leads in Chinese dramas did not look attractive. This idea is about working less, so it makes sense to try to associate working less, or slacking off, with attractive people.

The lighting her videos makes me want to work on the MMD shader that I haven't made because I'm concerned that me doing so could act as a reason for someone to delay sharing the idea. It's basically the same in all of her videos but more obvious with some outfits, like this one (another dance with same outfit). The light that illuminates her also shines through a window onto a bright floor, which isn't visible and which would look bad if it were visible. This makes surfaces that point towards the floor much brighter than in other directions.

People are more likely to change their name if they think they aren't important; maybe her name actually sounds like 'little fish'. (Apparently the character in A Dream Within A Dream is literally named 'little fish'.) And maybe she works hard in the job that earns money, but making and posting Douyin videos is her way of slacking off.

Apart from A Dream Within A Dream, other dramas have female leads with a 'slacking off' attitude. When Destiny Brings the Demon was translated on Viki by the Salted Fish Team. I think the female lead in Back From the Brink has a 'slacker' personality; also, I think I did not recognize her as the female lead in Legend of the Female General, despite watching like eight episodes of it and all of Everyone Loves Me, where she also starred. Showing how good she is as an actor to become a character with a completely different personality.

Notably, both A Dream Within A Dream and When Destiny Brings the Demon are 'transmigration' stories, featuring someone from modern times and modern work culture. (I guess the female lead in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy also sort of fits this pattern, as she 'slacks off' by thinking about or reading novels, but she doesn't really demonstrate this tendency within the story. Instead she gets her father within the story to do lots of exercise, to the point where he runs away to escape.) I can't much more about them because I haven't finished any of these three dramas, but the characters must have been written and acted with this type of personality because of viewers who identify with it.

It isn't the only personality type in dramas, for modern characters who are transmigrated into a story. Fateful Love features a female lead (who also appears in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy and A Dream Within A Dream) who is an elite military operator, far from any 'slacker' stereotype. In A Dream Within A Dream, the female lead dies many times in the first episode (and in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, the female lead dies so many times she almost stops caring), but in the donghua How Dare You, the transmigrated female lead is very afraid of the possibility of dying (Ep04) and works hard to achieve a good outcome within the story.

Maybe I only started emailing you in December because you had said and done some controversial things. And based on events, like Greta not posting anything on Instagram since 18 Feb, I can't rule out the whole 'government conspiracy' thing, and the possibility that your actions could have been influenced by my emails to other people, that mentioned you.

So maybe you might feel guilty. "A lie is justified if one does not benefit".

—luckily, I remembered what I was going to say, after spending way too much time looking up dramas. You know how the explanation of inequality, which I hope you read, compared people to children? That was deliberate; like Sergeant Lim comparing the soldiers to drew cartoons in the daily logbook to little children who kill insects without feeling guilty. ("Naharnet is the first independent Lebanese Digital Media providing real-time news and information in English and Arabic about Lebanon, the Middle East and the World.")

This isn't to say that young people never do terrible things. In Till the End of the Moon, the main male character is bullied at a young age by other young males. In the first episode of Lost You Forever, the main male character is bullied by other young males after his parents die, until he is defended by the main female character.

I didn't spend time planning this post out. It was supposed to take just a couple minutes, link a few things and say something brief. Maybe you did know that I mentioned you in emails. Maybe I wouldn't have tried to email you if you hadn't bought yourself the ring or said that you missed when streaming was about playing games, which let me know that you hadn't recently died.

Something about how you're probably the most-followed female English-language streamer, but most people still haven't heard of you. Like in the World of Warcraft stream where you speculated that someone you knew in high school who has a cool name didn't know that you streamed. Today I encountered a Douyin video from a few months ago with 28 million likes, almost as much as Gangnam Style which has 31m likes, and I had never encountered the creator before.

Other than to mention the slacker little fishes of the world, this post is to say that I will think of you as someone who does not feel guilty. If your actions do result from feeling guilty, then I will misunderstand them and attribute your motivations to something else.

(It took three hours to write this post)

To Pokimane, pt 39

Knowledge specialization: yesterday, I came across a video (title "The Big Bang has a Big Problem", thumbnail "Where is all the lithium?"), and rather than watch the video I checked Wikipedia for "Lithium problem". It has a chart. I spent a minute trying to understand the chart with its helpful description, and could not. Someone wrote the description with the intention that people would gain some understanding of a complex topic, that relies on calculations that are well beyond the scope of the article.

A comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Hg0LIKKn8&lc=UgzSX7UmFkZPrA1yqd94AaABAg

The video, "Deepwater Crew Arrives (Mark Wahlberg) | Deepwater Horizon", shows people with a different knowledge specialization, in like oil wells and drilling. Unlike many popular movies these days, the movie isn't about fighting. The audience is supposed to be impressed by characters, but by their competence in real-world topics, not by their ability to win a gunfight or their superpowers.

Like, another comment says,

“That is correct, morning Mr Jimmy” gets me every time 😆

which is about the competence of characters to infer the reason for a conversation and assign blame without appearing to assign blame.

Anyway, the linked comment. Someone said on another clip by the same channel (or another channel by the same creators, with similar ending graphics) that the channel just deletes and reuploads clips to farm views, so this video and comment might get deleted in the future. The linked comment says,

I’ve been riding them helicopters back and forth to oil rigs all over the Gulf for 26 years now and they keep going further and further out in the water every decade.  Deep water was one of the first ultra deepwater rigs with a dozen more built since.  And The engineers are working on a rig right now that will be nearly 200 miles out to sea drill off the shelf.

My dad started his career in the 60s working on oil rigs just a few miles off the coast.  At the time they would shuttle crews to the rigs by John boats.

My grandpa started his career in the 40s drilling shallow well in the Texas sand.

The point here is we are running out of oil.  In a hundred years we’ve went from being able to sink a well 80 foot in the ground using a small loan from a local and have enough oil to run the nation.  Now, we are going 100s of miles into the ocean, spending billions on infrastructure, and billions on tax subsidies to get enough oil. 

A reply to that comment says,

And 20 years ago Al Gore said we were all going to drown due to rising water and called it man-made global warming. However all the millionaires and billionaires, are still buying ocean front property. Yeah that would include all the politicians.

The original commenter replied to this comment. But, why did someone go from "we are running out of oil, and it's a problem" to "global warming is not a problem"?

Most people probably haven't heard about the Lakeview Gusher. It is a big contrast between that oil, and going far out to sea to drill. The comment is helpful because it shows a trend, and why would the drilling be far away from shore if it didn't have to be? Why weren't these locations being drilled 20 years ago?

I can't help but think, every time this comes up, that if humans go extinct for some reason and in 10 million years another intelligent species appears, they won't have oil. They probably won't even have coal. So how do you go from the society we had 1000 years ago, to today's civilization and technology, without coal or oil? I'm vaguely aware that the Watt steam engine "was a driving force of the Industrial Revolution", and a search for 'coal' in the article confirms that it did use coal as the energy source. So, no coal means no industrial revolution?

Anyway, the reply to this comment. The use of fossil fuels is linked to global warming. The commenter who replied saw a pattern: "a problem that makes people unhappy". They didn't have any way to make people think that oil is not running out. But they knew of evidence that could make people think that global warming is not a problem. If people go from thinking that global warming is a problem, to thinking it's not a problem, then they become slightly happier. Peak oil is not the same problem as global warming, but in the commenter's mind, the issues were related, and so the comment they made was relevant.

People don't like to talk about problems with no solution. But the original commenter did, even as someone who apparently is still working in the oil drilling industry. The other comments indicate that many viewers also have knowledge of the industry, like with the comment reply chain about how loud helicopters are, and the comment I linked has 34 upvotes (and is the longest comment on the video).

I just have to comment on an incredible coincidence: for those who don't know, if logged in to YouTube you can see other comments from a user on the same channel. The author of the comment I linked, @catchallaccount9643, has 6 comments on the channel. The three most recent are shown, and the third is from 9 months ago, with zero upvotes, and I feel like I read it before:

Wrestling, Jujitsu, mat work is really good to know but in a street fight the last place you want to be is on the ground.  That's when one of his buddies kicks you in the back of the head.

Which is a second point, though not related to the clip, if you find you are up against two or three guys ready to fight by far your best bet it to get out of there, run. [...]

Like I really think that I read this and spent a few seconds thinking about it when I first read it, like "would someone really be so focused on fighting one person that they would have no defense against someone else". It is really amazing that I would ever read two comments by the same person on different videos on YouTube.

To Pokimane, pt 38

Doing a thing until I can no longer keep doing it. TTL5 Silver Playoff #3! (Gabi vs Bad Koala):

 

I've watched the first four games.

Not doing something because you don't have information about it isn't a mistake. It isn't useful advice to say to someone, "you should react faster when you get attacked in an unexpected location". It can be a mistake to be too focused on a particular area, but a spectator cannot describe the circumstances and priorities which determine where to focus one's attention.

It is a mistake when someone is looking at an area but makes a bad decision. At 43:21, Gabi rushes the tower but does not wall its four sides to trap the five villagers inside of it. No one does this, but it's the best play, and to not do it is a mistake. The caster comments that she "could quickwall this", but I'm not sure if he understands how ungarrison mechanics interact with walls, and how to fully trap the units without them being able to escape to the right. When Gabi walls in production buildings, like at 41:00, she unnecessarily walls the corners, and so might not be aware that walling the four sides of a tower traps the villagers.

At 1:02:07, she could have run her army to her ships just north of the fighting. (I thought the houses being built at 1:02:30 were kind of funny.)

The thought that I had was that "I am trying, by not trying". I have avoided mentioning the North Wind and the Sun, which probably a surprising number of people are unaware of, because if I was not trying to get you to share the idea, then it wasn't relevant. But, like, it was supposed to be that if I was enjoying myself, then Greta wouldn't get upset from thinking that her not sharing the idea was making me unhappy.

There are various things that players could do to perform better. People are more likely to listen to me if I can show that I am a competent player, which will not happen unless people share the idea. (When I could actually play AoE2, before my computer's fan broke and then the replacement fan that I paid for using Covid money got lost in transit due to Covid problems, it took something like 6 hours to play a 1.5 hour single-player game due to all the pausing that was needed for the UI to register actions and update itself.) So it's too difficult for me to enjoy watching people play when someone I want to win makes mistakes, and I can't do anything about it. I'm not ashamed to say that I hope Gabi won this set, as the best female player in AoE2 (she lost to another female player, Guki, in a tournament a year ago, but Guki does not seem to be active right now).

There was a time when I deliberately didn't reply, which was the last time Elyse emailed me. I was uncertain if her account had been hacked (or if my old email address had been hacked and started sending out spam), as the email didn't seem to make sense, but it's true that I didn't attempt to reply. And less than a year after that, I didn't reply to an email from Mei, and she might have thought it was intentional. A month or two later I had forgotten this email and was not sure if I had deliberately not replied or what had happened, and the same is true now, that I don't know why I didn't reply.

So the thing that I said is not to be tolerated is something that I may have done in the past. Wasn't sure if I should mention all of this.

So the question, do I want you to like me?

Maybe no one ever talks like this. I sort of asked Mei if she wanted me to like her, but I did it by referencing an email I had sent her by asking, "you know I'm crazy, right?" and she replied, "only a little".

Tangent: https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2011/12/king.html

the best way to get close to people is to make yourself seem less than you are, or

the best way to get close to people is to make yourself seem more than you are.

I just describe myself the way I am. For example, "I have never been on a date." Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In the drama, Everyone Loves Me, EP15, it's implied that this could be a good thing. But a common opinion is that a male with no experience must be unattractive. So, am I making myself seem more than I am, or less than I am? Am I trying to get closer to people or to push them away?

Maybe I am trying to make myself think that you don't like me, but I'm not trying to make you not like me. But there are considerations. Obviously, it doesn't matter if you like me if you don't talk to me. Although I am poor, maybe you don't care. What does matter is the idea. It's clear that if people don't use the idea, I will never be in a relationship. So, possibilities:

1) You don't share the idea, but you're confident that someone else will share it, like maybe Greta. I said that I wouldn't watch any more dramas unless you shared the idea, but maybe this outcome is still fine.

2) You don't share it and can't say whether anyone else will share it. It makes sense then to think that it will never be used, and therefore that you would be happier if you liked someone else, with whom you could actually expect to be in a relationship.

 

There was a quote from a TV show, which I think was the Singaporean drama Heroes in Black (2001). It was something I saw on an actual TV (I didn't own a computer at the time) in a common area of the house that I lived at, in the days or weeks when I was waiting to be shipped off for US army basic training. "Loves begs not for eternity, just for once to be a reality."

I stopped using or thinking of this quote after I mentioned it to Mei, before she left for Japan (a few months after the aforementioned events, with the unanswered email and me going crazy etc.), and she said that it wouldn't make her happy if we met.

There was a comic that I linked in the last mass email I sent about this idea, in early 2013 (just before Mei's birthday, which naturally was the reason I was stopping my emails at that time). I won't bother to look it up or describe it. But compare it to the seated dialogue scene between the two older characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). (I remember in the director's commentary, a discussion about how this scene could have been placed at other points in the film.) Just generally, the idea of people doing the things they think they ought to do, instead of what they want to do.

So, it's possible to like someone even if you never end up in a relationship with them, as with the older characters in that film. And it's possible that when I just said above that "if people don't use the idea, I will never be in a relationship", I was wrong. But if people don't use the idea, then there is a slightly higher risk of death from like mass shootings and so on, or global pandemics that are handled poorly by all countries except for China, which actually contained the very infectious Omicron variant in Shanghai, which was the early 2022 spike in China's total cases.

Also see the video that I linked to Demi Rose Mawby (Mecha Love by Hadouken) and also linked in an email or post in mid-2012, with lyrics "you wanted the world, you wanted it all".

What's it going to be then, eh?

To Pokimane, pt 37

First the random things which I might forget.

'pt 15' has 113 views, compared to most of these posts with 2~5 views. I'm not sure if this was random search engine traffic because I mentioned a movie or more meaningful. It seems Blogger does not list traffic sources.

In the previous post, I forgot to mention the random fact that one of the GCB reports said that Israel had 80% of people who said that things are done based on who you know, more than any other country.

(With Douyin, it might be necessary to first visit the homepage and browse some videos to avoid seeming like a bot, if not logged in, before visiting a video link)

Best Douyin video I watched in the past few days:

霖木097 @49958705200 不理我那就… #相扑猫 #幻笺集卡牌 #幻笺集 #幻笺集瑞马启新 #幻笺集 新春集卡 Gohc rolm, that we is cool

Video where audio is 0.13 sec late, which should be like 0.3 sec late with added playback delay, and Like count shows that no one cares (despite being way over the recommended limit of 0.125 sec):

清颜好困啊 @22592496084 看得出来脑子一直在想动作 #慢摇 #卡点舞 ajudando non peja son

Video that I didn't find to be notable, with audio 0.26 sec early:

甜甜圈吖🍩 @? #随时随地开始扫腿舞 #扫腿舞 #喜悦X扫腿舞 #喜悦男团 @喜悦-X sexy dirty

About this third video. It almost seems like the audio sync was off by an entire beat, or ~0.9 sec early in total, and I even tested it to check. TikTok dances are almost always based off of 4-beat measures, with new actions coinciding with beat 1 or beat 3. (Compare a dance like Reversible Campaign, which is unpredictable enough that a lot of MMD videos have audio delayed by almost half a beat. The "u" at 0:27 is on beat 4.5, so movement that's half a beat early seems to match it. Or at 1:22 and 1:25, big movements are on beats 4 and 3, not beat 1.)

But I don't want to say anything bad about this video by 甜甜圈吖🍩. Saying good things: she hides her face with the bunny, but it looks like she did go to the effort of putting on eye makeup. The sync on the transition matches the overall sync of a 0.26 sec audio delay, suggesting that it looked like good sync on the device she used to create it and she wasn't sloppy with the transition timing. When she does the leg sweep, she rotates her leg each time she reverses direction so her knee is leading, except for at the very end. So the variation at the end is deliberate, and a detail which is supposed to make the performance better. The bunny moves at the end to cover her face, but in discrete steps instead of automatic tracking, so it again shows the work she did in creating the video. The overall sync is consistent, despite using two cameras which often leads to poor sync after a transition.

 

Why didn't I comment on your YouTube short about the ban review you did during your stream?

The excuse was "I'm not talking to anyone", which was supposed to include not commenting on YouTube. If I signed in to comment, I might have responded to other comments or replies, and people might have interpreted my comment as a general message, since it would sound crazy for a comment to be written as though only you would read it.

"I don't have a plan if you don't share the idea." I find it hard to remember that this was ever the case, but I think it was. The logic behind the plan: if you don't share it, I don't think anyone else will either. I don't like to say that I think Greta knows about this idea and yet I don't expect her to share it if you don't share it, because it's mean to say, but maybe other people would not want to think that it's what I expect, and so me saying it as a truthful thing will help.

So: "what if I didn't think there was anyone who liked me?" This is a different thing from no one liking me. But with sufficient evidence, people can be made to believe things that aren't true.

There was that scene from one of the novels in the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. The characters have just broken into the Royal Mint, I believe, with a probably-implausible plan involving a zip line. One character reveals that he has betrayed or lied to another character, who responds that whatever he did is not to be tolerated, and so begins a sword fight. The swords clash, and then both characters pause to see if a spark will detonate the gunpowder that surrounds them.

People not talking to me? Not to be tolerated.

To Pokimane, pt 36

I'm saying this to you, but the only real reason I have to talk about it is 'for science', and nothing you have done in the past two months suggests you care about 'science' (meaning explanations of problems). I am just trusting that you do, when you are not doing anything to indicate it.

I was really going to just link to the Global Corruption Barometer as an update to my previous post, if it showed data on corruption for China and Islamic countries. But the charts that show the breakdown of perceptions for each country are too hard to find; maybe I'm looking the wrong report and it's in the Corruption Perceptions Index. Two of the ones I have open, 2009 and 2013, don't even mention China, and neither those nor 2017 include Iran.

Maybe I should try harder, and actually check the Corruption Perceptions Index. But I'm lazy.

The 2013 report, p10, lists Jordan and Vietnam in the group, '30~40% paid bribes in the last year'. (Taiwan is also in this category, as a proxy for all of China.) In the 2017 report, p8, Jordan (where Yara's family is from) is in the 'less than 5% paid bribes' group, while Vietnam is in the '50~75%' group. I think everyone would prefer for their country to have a low bribery rate, but it seems probable that the 2017 data is wrong for Jordan, and that Jordan is more similar to nearby Arab countries, as Jordan is not a big outlier in terms of GDP or religion.

I am interrupting this analysis to say, because my swap space usage has been creeping up the past few minutes and is now 90% full despite plenty of unused memory, that I would like to watch Is Gen Z Really That Dumb?, but two seconds in it literally says "science news" and has a screenshot of an article. I don't think I can interpret it as "not a news video". So I'm closing it without watching it.

Interesting and slightly shocking, similar to how Costa Rica was at the top of the Happy Planet Index for four years in a row despite a really high robbery rate: the 2017 report, p4, Thailand is at the top of countries that say their government is doing well against corruption, with 72% saying this. 5th place out of 119 countries is only at 54%. And yet, in the same report, p8, 40~50% in Thailand had paid a bribe in the past 12 months.

This could be bad data, like with Jordan and Vietnam. The 2009 report, p10 (labeled 8), puts Thailand in the '7~12% paid a bribe' group.

Notable result in 2009 report, Singapore. Chinese culture, but they also speak English (which is why my previous post had a bunch of bookmarks from Yahoo Singapore, which was previously Yahoo Asia). 2009 report, p34 (labeled 32), paid a bribe (one report notes that females are less likely to have paid bribes, but says this is solely because they interact less with institutions; this question says "your or your household" and I assume this phrasing is used with all the reports):

Hong Kong 7%

Japan 1%

Singapore 6%

Southern Korea 2%

The next page, "HoW WoUld yoU ASSESS yoUR CURREnT GovERnmEnT’S ACTIonS In THE fIGHT AGAInST CoRRUPTIon?" (changing this to lowercase in a text editor, with Ctrl-L, would be easy but this is funnier)

Ineffective Neither Effective

Hong Kong 12% 0% 88%

Japan 68% 21% 11%

Singapore 4% 0% 96%

Southern Korea 81% 3% 16%

 

It also has Thailand, and this data seems completely inconsistent with Thailand ranking at the top in the 2017 survey: here, only 28% in Thailand say goverment is effective, while many countries have a higher percentage.

Japanese people not having an opinion shows up here, compared to southern Korea. Similarly to how they are less likely to have an opinion on the BBC/Globescan country ratings polls (like 2012 and 2014 editions).

Countries with low bribery rates having sharply divergent views of success of anti-corruption: officials can be paid small amounts by ordinary people, but they can also be paid large amounts by companies. So low bribery rates is not proof of lack of corruption.

This has all been "interesting things from skimming a few parts of several reports with contradictory data". Also, the 2009 report does have on p30 (labeled 28) the breakdown by sector, though it doesn't separate out police and military as Gallup does in the US. (A great deal of trust confidence in the military, and while 50% having confidence the police may not seem like a lot, it's behind only military and small business, and way ahead of confidence in "The criminal justice system".)

Still: corruption of "Public officials/Civil Servants", which includes the police, is rated the same or lower than the average corruption score in Hong Kong, Singapore, and southern Korea, but higher than the average in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Morocco.

These are the cultural conditions for revolution over the price of bread or the price of energy, even if the revolution leads to worse conditions as with Libya.

Anyway, basically the reason I'm writing about this is Russia. I think Russia is a country with a fundamentally individualistic moral system, that tries to have group-based and rule-based morality. (Rule-based is when saying bad things about the Communist party was illegal, and punishable by death, and then the rules suddenly switched at some point.)

So, even if the US also has individual-based morality, the US is honest about it. People are crazy about their guns in the US, and a bit less crazy about 'freedom of speech' or in general freedom of behavior, which can result in people exercising their freedom to insult or abuse other people who are trying to use their freedom of speech.

So it apparently can result (perhaps surprisingly, given reported bribery rates) in lower rates of theft in Russia, but maybe the 'dishonesty' of trying to force a different type of morality on people who do not really believe in it leads to high bribery rates.

Like, the reason I noted Singapore is that Singapore pays its leaders well. Quick search says,

As of early 2026, the Prime Minister of Singapore receives an annual salary package of approximately S$2.2 million (approx. US$1.6–1.7 million), making them the highest-paid political leader in the world. This total package includes a 13th-month bonus, Annual Variable Component (AVC), and a significant National Bonus based on performance.

Structure: The salary is set at twice that of an entry-level Minister (MR4 grade), which is S$1.1 million, bringing the total to S$2.2 million. 

This is the highest in the world, for official salary. (Of course many leaders are much richer, or gain a lot of wealth through corruption.) This is supposed to reduce corruption, and 96% of people in Singapore think it works.

So: if police officers were paid much, they might not take bribes. If a culture says "we can't pay police officers a lot because they are supposed to be public servants" (compare the Servant of the People TV series, set in Ukraine which is basically like Russia other than the language), but the police officers interact with a lot of people who earn more in the private sector, it isn't surprising if the police take bribes.

Overall, especially with the "bribes from common people vs bribes from big corporations" component, corruption is a matter of priorities. And like many problems, it can have low visibility when people don't talk about it; if someone has a 30% chance to their knowledge of a problem with other people they know, awareness quickly dies out, compared to a 90% chance. I recently watched all of [92k views, 26 Feb 2026]If This Dam Fails, It Pollutes Half of Europe. - YouTube. The creator blames it on corruption, and Romanian people did prevent the gold mining project from happening. But mining is a business, which earns money, and maybe — at least in the past 40 years, and until the mine stops earning money from copper and the toxic tailings remain behind the dam — Romanian people have benefited from it. But awareness of it is really low. Even the Romanian Wikipedia article for it is really short.

So when Greta learned of the global warming problem, she thought, "how can people ignore this big problem?" Sweden is listed in the 2017 Global Corruption Barometer report as a country where less than 5% paid a bribe in the last 12 months, much lower than the average. One might decide, as people in Thailand might possibly think based on conflicting data, that having to pay a bribe is not a big problem, as other countries like the US just have fees like the new visa integrity fee. Rather, this corruption is an indicator of other problems: people accept the bribes, and don't view it as important to talk about or spend a lot of their time on, because of other problems. Maybe crime like robberies; maybe problems in their personal life, like not being able to find a relationship. Or maybe problems which people have chosen to create only recently, like protests and fighting against the police in Iran.

Compare this post from March 2012, in which I compared the energy of a bullet to sunlight. (See: earthquakes, and wildfires: conducting controlled burns to stop a big fire later on.) (I don't remember anything else I said in that post, but I'm pretending that this isn't the case)

To Pokimane, pt 35

Something about war with Iran. I saw some videos, clicked on one of them, and then remembered that I'm not watching any news videos. So I know there were some explosions and Iran's supreme leader is dead.

I remember around 10 years ago when he posted a message on Chirp Club, basically trying to reach younger Muslims around the world. It was something that made me think he might know of this idea.

For some reason, maybe the fact that he probably didn't mind being killed, just like Soleimani probably didn't mind being killed, I thought of how the German general in charge of the Stalingrad offensive didn't commit suicide, but various Japanese officers did. Like the one who refused to help with the attempt to stop the surrender, General Anami.

Soleimani's Wikipedia article says, "CIA chief Mike Pompeo said he sent Soleimani and other Iranian leaders a letter holding them responsible for any attacks on U.S. interests by forces under their control."

I wonder who should be considered responsible for the US bombing and killing ~100 Syrian troops by accident? The US considered the top Iranian leaders to be responsible for any attacks, so was the US president responsible for the deaths of these Syrian troops?

There are also the protests in Iran that preceded this military conflict. Maybe the US killed Iran's supreme leader because he ordered the police to kill protesters.

What would people think if the Black Lives Matter protests had killed 200 police in the US?

So, why do people in the US view the police as more important than people in Iran do? I wonder, is it the moral viewpoint? US: individual moral focus, so people expect other people to be selfish and criminal. The police prevent selfish and criminal behavior (that "and" is necessary because laws can sometimes be hard to understand, like selling onion futures being illegal in the US).

Apparently, a society with a stronger focus on rules-based morality, like Iran, finds it easier to believe in the inherent goodness of people, or at least certain classes of people like 'people below a certain age'. If most people are 'good', the police are less necessary, and therefore a strong police presence is more likely to be seen as oppressive, not protective.

Test: attitudes towards police in China. I think that generally, security forces are viewed positively in China, despite dislike of chengguan. 2025's 9th most watched Chinese drama, "In the Name of Justice". (The list video I linked before was basically copying directly from this video from a few months earlier, even using the exact same view counts; a different approach was taken to describe some series, but for this series it's just copied.)

Inherently good, or inherently bad? Society ends up better if people don't think anyone is inherently bad. Chinese shows portray people acting bad, partly to give other characters something to fight against, but often they show why a character acts bad.

The Double: the character who r***d someone and caused injuries to her that resulted in her dying was treated badly by the previous magistrate, who is the female lead's father. He was treated badly because he was lazy, incompetent, or corrupt, but still, grudges are not the same as "inherently evil" (like the character in the Japanese novel Battle Royale who is 'evil' because of a brain defect or something). The female lead stabs him in the leg, but intends to bring him to justice, not kill him.

Till the End of the Moon: the entire story, and the main character, illustrates this attitude of 'not beyond saving', but I was thinking of another character: the son of a sect leader. The character is punished by his father by being instructed to kneel for a day or something. This helps to understand his later actions, which cause trouble. (English subtitles on Viki are better than YouTube, regarding dialogue alluding to how being close to the emperor is like being close to a tiger.)

The Legend of Anle: the son of the marquis who cheats on the exams and later commits serious crimes was basically incredibly spoiled. He never learned consequences for his actions because his parents always cover up for his mistakes. Another character, who betrays an important figure in the story, acts badly because he is treated badly by his father, who is the king of a different kingdom.