Blogofex Maximus

A few years ago, there was a scandal revealed at the film school in my home city. A professor was engaged in Whiplash-like abuse of the students, up to and including throwing chairs at them.

At the time, it got me thinking. Prospective actors need to be in very good physical condition to pass the exams. Able to dance in tune, to hold difficult poses, etc. If you bully a long enough set of people, eventually you should roll snake eyes, and bully someone who realizes that he's much bigger and stronger than you, and unstable enough to result in the professor getting his teeth kicked in. But nothing like that ever happened, year after year all the students yielded. Why?

A friend of mine theorized that serial abusers like that get a pretty good grasp at psychology, and so they're able to recognize potential threats and just bully other people, or fail them at the exam - the decisions are very discretionary, I've heard of people getting failed because one of the examiner didn't like the pattern on the clothes they wore to the exam. In fact, it's expected that everyone will fail at least once, and you should just apply next year if your heart's really in it - accidentally (?) makes for a pretty good filter to remove most defiant people.

So back to the UK. You can't filter at "entry point" like that, because the horrific abuse happened to semi-random people. But I've been told that at multiple times, police stopped fathers who were on their way to rescue their daughters from the rape den. So my guess would be that the force was adept at finding the most assertive and combative families of victims, and ruthlessly punished them to keep others in check. You don't need to stop everyone, you just need to make everyone believe that they will be stopped and punished if they act out.

And this has been going for decades. I don't think it's an accident that people who dared to fight back against Muslim attackers (sometimes with ridiculous improvised weaponry like a narwhal tusk) and Poles and other non-native British. They didn't spend their whole life under the demoralization propaganda.

Many people might not even notice that something had been stolen from them and say "wow, isn't it wonderful that all of this stuff is free?" and not even ask where it came from.

Some people might know where it came from but not care because it is free and they can go there and load up everything they can carry and make off with more than they are robbed for.

Some people will shut their ears and not want to hear about where it came from because they don't particularly miss their junk and don't want to believe anything bad is happening.

Some people recognize their things and are offended.

Some people got robbed for more valuable items and see others making off with them or pieces of them, and yell at their neighbors who reply, "what? I didn't get it from your house and it is only one bead from the jewelry collection you assume is yours but it could have been anyone's lmao."

AI-generated art consists of verbatim quotes from its training data

AI training somehow deprives the owners of the training data of their original works

Unfortunately, both of the above are false. The original creators or owners of training data still have their works and the rights to it, and while you can certainly get an AI to stylistically imitate other artists, in general it's incapable of producing anything exactly.

Many people might not even notice that something had been stolen from them and say "wow, isn't it wonderful that all of this stuff is free?" and not even ask where it came from.

Some people might know where it came from but not care because it is free and they can go there and load up everything they can carry and make off with more than they are robbed for.

Some people will shut their ears and not want to hear about where it came from because they don't particularly miss their junk and don't want to believe anything bad is happening.

Some people recognize their things and are offended.

Some people got robbed for more valuable items and see others making off with them or pieces of them, and yell at their neighbors who reply, "what? I didn't get it from your house and it is only one bead from the jewelry collection you assume is yours but it could have been anyone's lmao."

AI-generated art consists of verbatim quotes from its training data

AI training somehow deprives the owners of the training data of their original works

Unfortunately, both of the above are false. The original creators or owners of training data still have their works and the rights to it, and while you can certainly get an AI to stylistically imitate other artists, in general it's incapable of producing anything exactly.

The goddess who views warfare as a fascinating exercise in abstract problem-solving, a chance for strategists to display their genius or cunning, whose followers are always seeking the opportunity to offer up another Cannae as sacrifice to her? To whom war is figures being moved across maps in generals tents, and the fact that actual people suffer and die in it is just irrelevant?

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

Above-average Classical Greek monumental building (Parthenon):

That said, it's not certain that 𐀅𐁆𐀪𐀵𐀍 da-pu₂-ri-to-jo does mean 'of the labyrinth' (it's a genitive) or what it's actually referring to if it does.

The fact that the first sign is da rather than ra (Linear B doesn't distinguish between r and l) is notable but not without precedent in Pre-Greek words: cf. δάφνη ~ λάφνη 'sweet bay', Ὀδυσσεύς ~ Ὀλυσσεύς ~ &c. 'Odysseus/Ulysses'. The second sign, pu₂, usually specifically stands for /pʰu[...]/ (as in e.g. pu₂-te-re 'planters', cf. φυτέω 'plant') and we don't have any other clear examples of it standing for /bu/, but then /b/ is very rare in Mycenaean Greek anyway (in later Greek, β usually results from earlier /gʷ/, but that sound change hadn't happened yet).

The word shows up in up to two documents, both from Knossos:

KN Gg (1) 702:

pa-si-te-o-i me-ri *209 1 da-pu₂-ri-to-jo , po-ti-ni-ja me-ri *209 1

pansi thehoihi: meli 𐃨 1 daburinthojo (?) potnijāi: meli 𐃨 1

to all the gods: honey, 1 amphora to the Lady of the Labyrinth (?): honey, 1 amphora

KN M-(-) 745:

a-ka-[ ]-jo-jo , me-ṇọ[ da-pu₂-ṛị[-to-jo ]po-ti-ni-j̣ạ ri *166+WE 2̣2̣[

This one is damaged, obviously, and harder to parse, but it's the same formula.

The Classical equivalent of da-pu₂-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja would be λαβυρίνθου ποτνίᾳ, and the Potnia in question is (all but) certainly a goddess. It would make sense for the da-pu₂-ri-to to be a temple or a place, but we really can't say much more about it. -νθ- is a common morpheme in Pre-Greek place names, but even if it's present in da-pu₂-ri-to-jo (which is not a given!), it's more widespread than the Minoans ever were:

This map marks a Λαβύρινθος in Crete with a question mark based on exactly this discussion; there is no good reason for it IMO.

As for 'labyrinth' originally meaning 'palace', in post-Mycenaean Greek λαβύρινθος just means 'labyrinth, maze', both literally and metaphorically, and not even particularly the one Daedalus constructed for the Minotaur (that actually shows up in literature surprisingly late; the story as we have it is from the late Hellenistic and even Roman period, and while it is older we don't really know what it looked like earlier on). The association with Minoan palaces comes entirely from Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos and was so impressed with its complexity that he suggested it could be Daedalus' labyrinth. Popular imagination kind of ran with it, but it should be kept in mind that that is literally the entirety of the argument.