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Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.
In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
During discussion about things where you had strong opinions and then changed your mind, someone mentioned EMH. Do you believe in EMH and if so is it strong or weak version?
I used to believe EMH but not strongly. The pandemic changed my view because I managed to invest some money when the stock market dived and was clearly influenced by overly pessimistic view of the impact of covid. Some might argue that the market reacted to the irrational government measures, so it is not that the case that the market was mistaken. I still think that investors were equally irrationally pessimistic. I reject the view that this is a hindsight and I was merely lucky. I am not big expert and I did not possess any proprietary information. I had the same information as everybody else, I just didn't let my emotions take over me. This is further confirmed that even today when all the events have passed exactly as predicted, majority of people still maintain their mistaken views that covid was very dangerous to young and non-risk population.
It is the only time when I saw the rest of the society to be so wrong in their views and clearly this was my once-a-lifetime chance. I haven't see any other opportunities for easy money so far but I think that people who are experts in their fields and investors might have been able to find more opportunities.
One of them was found by Michael Burry who definitely saw that the 2008 financial crisis was coming. He wasn't just lucky because he had read and analysed all the documents and had to create special investment instruments to profit for it. In this way, it wasn't easily accessible by laypersons like me who have no time or understanding about investment. Again, most professionals were blinded by collective frenzy.
What is your opinion about EMH?
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“It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided... but by iron and blood.” So spoke Bismarck after the failures of the revolutionary year of 1848, a year whose actors very consciously sought to either repeat or avoid the years of 1793-94. But in this book author Timothy Tackett persuasively argues the opposite – that it was the emotional currents and fluctuations of the French Revolution that ultimately, but not inevitably, led to its bloodiest and best-remembered period.
I came across this book in the library and was immediately engrossed when I realized what it was. For a long time I wondered why there were not more “emotional” histories: monographs that cover an event or time period through the emotional reactions it inspired in the people who lived through them. The French Revolution is in many respects an ideal subject for such a treatment, given that it was a simultaneously transformative and utterly unexpected; but that it also came, not entirely uncoincidentally, at a time of great expansion in literacy and literary expression. The vast number of diaries, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, treatises, etc. that the Revolution produced no doubt made it vastly easier to approach with this framing. The book suggest this itself in its structure; despite it being the central event, it falls to one of the shortest chapters to cover the bulk of the Reign of Terror and the “Great Terror”, as all the previously prolific writers of Paris simultaneously mute themselves in an attempt to avoid Madame Guillotine.
Tackett assumes the reader knows most of the details of the standard narrative; little attempt is made to sketch out the larger situation at any given time and much of the material is structured thematically rather than strictly linearly. It helps to know the differences between the National Assembly and Legislative Assembly and National Convention (for this review’s purposes I will instead refer in general to “the legislature”). The pre-revolutionary political situation is covered in a scant six pages in favour of devoting attention instead to the worldview and circumstances of those who would become the revolutionary élites that the book primarily draws from. They were largely bourgeois, middle-class types: lawyers especially, but also shopkeepers, merchants, artisans. They were religious, but not exceptionally devout. They had no great criticisms of the nobility; they had little inkling or expectation that the current social structure would ever changed, and seemed content to relying on the existing system of noble patronage. They were men of reason, and unlike the peasantry took pride that they were not prone to being swayed by rumour and conspiracy. And most notable of all, Tackett stresses that among those Third Estate members who had written political pamphlets prior to the Revolution, only one – no points for guessing who! - gave indications of paranoia. So what could explain how these devotees of liberal enlightenment found themselves waist-deep in blood five years later?
When the Revolution came, it did so suddenly and by surprise. When Louis XVI called the Estates in order to address the state of France’s finances, the future revolutionaries of the Third Estate only had modest ambitions: lifting of total press censorship, freedom of assembly, greater influence in government for commoners, some kind of permanent representative legislature. The Estates-General convened on May 4, 1789, and after a sudden and intense period of political and class awakening, within six weeks the Third Estate deputies had broken off from the rest and formed a hostile and sovereign legislature, which immediately declared the entire existing tax system as illegal. The famous Tennis Court Oath where they swore to write a constitution followed a few days later, and a week after that the clergy and noble deputies grudgingly joined. Paranoia suddenly grew when foreign mercenaries began massing in Versailles – could Louis merely be feigning acceptance, while preparing to crush them? - but after the storming of the Bastille the King appeared to back down, coming before the legislature to give his blessing to their self-appointed powers. The patriot elites decided that the violence, while unfortunate, had regrettably been necessary. This basic cycle – enthusiasm about reforms, followed by sudden anxiety that they might be reversed, menaced by vast conspiracies that justify further violence – becomes the vicious circle of Tackett’s emotional narrative. One small-town barrister wrote of how keenly he felt the “striking contrast between good and evil, anguish and hope, joy and sadness, which so rapidly follow upon one another.” This turbulent emotional cascade is the throughline of the book.
The years of 1789-93 provided an incredible series of events to feed both anguish and hope. I cannot and will not attempt to write at any length about the course of the Revolution and its consequences because it is beyond the scope of this post (and the book it is trying to review). There’s a reason historians tend to use 1789 as the starting point of modernity. All of a sudden the philosophies which dominate the modern consciousness emerged all at once; from the void stepped out nationalism, feminism, socialism, conservatism, atheism. Even single days could seemingly change everything: on August 4, 1789 a staged speech of a liberal noble renouncing his seigneurial dues resulted in an “electric whirlwind” of changes as other deputies got caught up in the emotions of the moment. By the end of the night not just seigneurial dues but also noble courts, exclusive noble hunting rights, a variety of excise and consumption taxes that were noble-exempt, sale of offices, the entire patronage-appointed royal administration, Church tithes, and a series of other noble and clergy privileges had been eliminated: feudalism felled in a single day. The rapid and unprecedented shifts generated a wave of euphoria among the French commons. An institution that had ruled largely unchallenged and unchanged for over 1,000 years suddenly seemed mutable. Tackett frequently refers to the “spirit of ‘89”: this emergent idealism and utopianism that anything and everything could be changed, that one could create a new future for mankind. He quotes numerous onlookers who were simply stunned by events: familiar themes in the responses were that entire centuries had been condensed into a span of days. Many declared that only divine intervention could have led such a breathtaking transformation; churches across the country held special ceremonies so that people could give thanks to Heaven. Spontaneous instances of collective oath-taking broke out across the nation, swearing allegiance to the decrees of the legislature.
But there were threats to the gains that had been made. The virtually-overnight abolition of all the nation’s institutions did not come without a major breakdown of order. With the traditional power structures dismantled, regions were forced to create ad-hoc replacements of their own, with varying legitimacy. At the same time an enormous surge of new media entered the market now free from censorship, praising ideals of freedom, equality, and abolition of hierarchies. Army units mutinied, police and judges fled their posts, urban workers striked while peasants refused to pay all taxes. Dissident nobles had begun leaving in July and August 1789, fleeing from the potential of violence or seeking the aid of those who might restore their privileges. When the Church was subordinated to the national government in 1790, about half of the nation’s 50,000 priests refused to swear allegiance to the legislature instead of Rome, and many patriots feared what betrayals might fester in the regions these refractory priests held sway. Mass psychosis gave these mainly rural, humble priests extraordinary resources and influence, but some grand conspiracies were true. The King indeed was merely feigning cooperation with the legislature, and in June 1791 made a failed attempt to flee the country, leaving behind proof that he was conspiring with escaped nobles and foreign kings to crush the Revolution. The threat of war from reactionary foreign powers fuelled endless anxiety.
It was this simultaneously chaotic, hopeful and paranoid society that tumbled confidently into a near-uninterrupted stretch of wars that would last a further 23 years. Initially during the Revolution there was an international sense of fraternity: in May 1790 the legislature and agreed that never again would France declare war on a brother nation. 18 months later, a sense of bellicose nationalism was aggressively pushing a war on the entire world, a “universal crusade for liberty.” Confidence was extremely high: “if we firmly desire it, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants” one patriot predicted. The initial failures of the war and the sudden (suspicious?) surrender of key French forts fuelled a rise of extremism and violence across the nation which ended in the toppling of the King and the declaration of the Republic. Just as this occurred, a wave of French victories followed which simultaneously ended the internal violence and convinced the radicals of what they had always suspected: France’s failures were solely due to internal treachery. After the execution of Louis XVI, the now-invincible Republic declared war on Spain and the UK as well. “One more enemy for France will bring one more triumph for liberty,” declared one patriot. It was under this pressure of a four-front war that Paris demanded conscripts from the provinces, sparking a massive and long-feared counter-revolution in the West of the country. As war without and within threatened to consume the nation, the heat turned up on the government: could they secretly be traitors too? A mob stormed the legislature in June 1793 and forced the legislature to order their arrests. This launched a fresh wave of federalist revolts as many cities turned their back on the legislature. Seeing no alternative, the new Revolutionary government – now led by the infamous Committee of Public Safety - announced the levée en masse in August. The entire nation would be mobilized: young men would fight (1.5 million called up in the first round of conscription alone), women and others would support the war effort. The obvious question loomed: if all France’s fighting men were at the frontiers, who would defend the women and children against the vast number of internal traitors? There was only one solution.
Tackett rejects several of the traditional theories for how the Terror came to be. He takes a dim view to ideological explanations: the Revolutionary elites held nothing that could be coherently described as an ideology, let alone one that would inevitably end in Terror. Describing them as “liberal” functions only as a crude short-hand; they did not see themselves as such and some of what are now fundamental tenets of liberalism, like freedom of religion, was something the Revolution only stumbled into accidentally. The participants themselves in their writings and actions more typically drew from Classical writers than from recent Enlightenment philosophers. The Revolution itself was an accident of history and going into it those who would lead it had no inkling that they would oversee or even desire anything more than the limited aims they had when the Estates-General convened. Marxist theories on class struggle are similarly rejected: the most significant period of reforms, 1789-90, featured a legislature that was majority-composed of former members of the nobility and clergy. View of social class was much more analogous to that of immutable race, and many quoted in the book use that terminology exactly; that so many of the liberal nobles who willingly shed their own privileges ended up being executed reinforces this. Nor does he accept explanations that the Terror was the unique product of the external pressures facing France in 1793-94: the Revolutionaries were always much more concerned with internal threats than external even at the darkest stages of the War of the First Coalition, and the bloodiest stage of it was the last seven weeks after the worst phases of both internal and external threats were past. More remarkably, much of France had been largely untouched by the Terror: while some 35-40,000 were killed in the process of the Revolutionary tribunals, six departments saw zero deaths and over a third had fewer than ten. Meanwhile, the west bathed in blood: some 250-300 thousand died in the taming of the counterrevolution in the Vendée.
Tackett devotes much effort to cataloguing the development the paranoid conspiracy mindset that would dominate the Terror. He sees forerunners of this mentality in the wild rumours people would concoct in the early days of the Revolution; at the time they focused principally on murderers and robbers. Several times all of Paris was illuminated overnight in order to forestall some vague mass plot; this defensive measure would be returned to constantly during times of future anxiety. As the menace of counter-revolution grew, nobles and refractory priests took the place of common criminals. After the King’s failed flight, all manner of conspiracies were vindicated. Patriots prided themselves in their eagerness to sniff out betrayal. Various social clubs took blood oaths to defend the lives of accusers, or adopted the All-Seeing Eye as a badge of their vigilance. Prominent writers declared a “declaration of rights of the accuser.” One then-hero, future-traitor Mirabeau wrote “an act of denunciation… must be considered as the most important of our new virtues, as the protector of our nascent liberty.”
The humiliation and fear of trusted individuals being revealed as traitors was a reoccurring theme: not just become some were indeed schemers, but also the increasing radicalization of the Revolution meant to stay firm in your principles eventually shifted you from being a revolutionary to a reactionary. The metaphor of a traitor with a mask being more dangerous than an armed enemy was a frequently espoused sentiment. In the various organs that were set up to process these accusations of treachery, they turned increasingly inward until they were mainly aimed at other revolutionaries.
This conspiratorial mindset aided greatly in the factionalization of France. Tackett makes the argument that such splits – first between the Jacobins and the Feuillants, then the Jacobins and the Girondins, and then within the Montagnards – were largely not rooted in ideology, but rather breakdowns of personal relationships. On the major issues the legislature voted with near unanimity; there was no great partisan split in the actual operation of the country. There was even a charming – if ominous – act of solidarity when all the deputies swore together to die rather than let foreign enemies alter the constitution they had written. Rather, at the beginning of each of these schisms seems to have been some kind of personality conflict, that only later manifested itself into an ideological shift. “There exists only two parties in France,” Robespierre declared in October 1792, “the party of good citizens and the party of evil citizens.” One woman who is frequently quoted through the book and had been brimming with a sense of fraternity in ‘89, later wondered of her former friends, “how could such good individuals have become so vile?” The most outspoken individuals who would take charge of each faction were incredibly cavalier with accusing their counterparts of vast treasons. During the trial of Louis for example, leading Jacobins claimed that their opponents were secret monarchists working on behalf of the King; the Girondins likewise claimed that the Jacobins were being funded by the British to kill the king so they could declare themselves dictators. They never bothered to support any of their claims with proof – after all, why would their enemies be so lax as to let proof of their misdeeds remain behind?
The term “stochastic terrorism” has predictably become abused in online discourse. I’m not sure whether Tackett knew of the term while writing this or deliberately neglected to use it, but it is the one that feels most apt at many points. The term “terrorism” of course comes from this Terror, though the revolutionaries used in unambiguously in a positive sense: “make terror the order of the day!” was a common refrain in fall 1793. But a strong impression I got from reading this book was how reluctant the shifts towards mass violence were. While the revolutionaries were very eager to use vicious invective and happy to level the most extreme accusations of treachery at their political enemies, it was rarely the elites themselves that began the violence. It was the mob that stormed the Bastille, assaulted the Tuileries, massacred prisoners, invaded the legislature. After each of these incidents the elites seemed somewhere between embarrassed and furious. For example, after months of accusations of treason at their Girondin counterparts, when the mob stormed the legislature and forced the Montagnard deputies at gunpoint to arrest these traitors in June 1792, they were still given very lenient treatment (and most ended up escaping their very lax house arrests). While the violence was typically justified afterwards, the elites seemed genuinely disturbed that people would take their words to their logical conclusions. The polemicists were of course to some degree aware of the potential of arousing the fury of the mob, and this was one of the reasons Robespierre targeted them with a purge in spring 1794.
It was certainly amusing to see how much of contemporary discourse on misinformation, press freedom, and conspiracy theories could be fitted (albeit somewhat awkwardly) onto the situation in 1792-93. With the sudden transition from the rigidly-controlled media environment of the Ancien Régime to the total free-for-all of the Revolution, there was a complete lack of social mores, acceptable standards of conduct, and a fundamental aversion to honesty in the wave of newspapers and pamphlets that flooded France. It’s not hard to draw parallels to the present, nor is it difficult to find examples of public denunciations for lack of civisme. So maybe that element hasn’t changed, but this feels like a raw deal: I’ve felt the anxiety and paranoia, but not the euphoria. I’ve never been able to escape cynicism, I’ve never felt that utopian spirit of ‘89. But now at least I can partially convince myself that it’s for the best.
If you've never read a standard history of the French Revolution, I would highly recommend you do. I don't think there's another historical event more instrumental in shaping the present - at least not one so constrained, geographically and in duration. Beyond its importance, it is so rich in drama and twists that it makes for endlessly fascinating reading - even larger histories have to give short shrift to some of the most flamboyant and influential characters. The "emotional" approach to the Revolution that Tackett takes in this book makes for a compelling and persuasive narrative for how the Terror came to be. I would definitely be interested in seeing other events tackled in a similar manner.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
This drug is a true gamechanger
In the SURMOUNT-1 study, people who took the highest dose of tirzepatide, most of whom had a BMI of about 30 or higher but did not have diabetes, lost about 21% of their body weight during the 72 week study. As researchers point out, for people who have bariatric surgery, typical weight loss is about 25% to 30% of their weight, one or two years after the surgery. In the tirzepatide study, 36% of people taking the highest dose lost 25% or more of their body weight.
this is comparable to bariatric surgery
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023
Recognition Diplomacy
Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023
Transitive Reasoning
Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023
- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."
Discriminating Taste
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
In an Infinite Loops podcast episode with Venkatesh Rao, Art of the Gig, the discussion revolves around the importance of courage and taking risks in order to find meaning in life and business.
They talk about the gig economy, and argue that one of the most important things for meaning in life and business is having the courage and nerve to take risks.
Rao explains how many people start out with naive optimism, then get punched in the face by life and don't know how to regain agency. Agency and using it creates meaning, according to him. He casually dismisses the meaning crisis as a failure of nerve and a lack of courage on the part of young adults. I could probably write a whole piece on extended adolescence.
On the other hand, he does acknowledge that many people are so overburdened by life's traumas that they may not even reach the naive optimism stage. Even if they do, some people get lucky and are never challenged, whereas others get screwed and are thrown out of the economic system. This division looms especially large in the developing world.
These conditions lead to a bifurcated system where, as Rao calls it, the "tragically lucky" go through life with naive optimism, but near the end of their life have a crisis because they never learned to deal with challenges or change themselves to have more agency. This archetype would be the guy who comes from a rich family and "fails upward," just collecting titles and promotions without thinking deeply or having to engage with the darker side of the world. The tragedy here is that they never have a chance to truly grow or develop as people, because they never have a real opportunity.
On the other hand, those who deal with adversity when young, or those who don't have strong models in their life who display courage and a sense of agency, either can't have a positive viewpoint on their lives due to trauma, or enter the workforce/college/wherever, fail badly, then feel cheated and can't work up the nerve to take another risk.
These two life experiences are so distinct that they're almost perfectly mismatched for people to understand each other. I don't think it neatly aligns with different political groups, but I'm sure many are likely to make that comparison.
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
Unfortunately, our modern society seems designed to do the opposite of this training for courage. Children are increasingly coddled, their parents' minds befuddled with safetyism and the precautionary principle. In the Western world especially, people are presented with one track in life. Typically, this track starts with schooling, which goes directly into a career, dovetailing neatly into retirement the moment you turn [insert cultural age of retirement here].
People have a narrative where they either stay on the track their whole lives and are successful, or they fall off at some point and are failures. Risk-taking becomes incredibly difficult because the perceived risk of getting off the beaten path becomes much larger. The standard PMC careerist feels that if they take even small risks, they risk throwing their life into disarray. Learned helplessness and non-courageous behaviors become instilled, in my view, due to early-stage trauma, which makes this process even more weighted against risk.
With these priors, we come to an interesting problem. On the one hand, we need to help kids have less trauma and not learn as many passive or non-agentic behaviors. Reducing trauma is often a stated goal of many safetyist maximizers and those who hold a torch for the precautionary principle.
However, we've also got to figure out how to challenge kids. It seems that the artificial hoops we have them jump through in grade school, then the workforce and/or college, don't have an even enough distribution. A lot of this probably has to do with the narrative associated with school and the one-track life I discussed above.
I'm in favor of having high school include some sort of working apprenticeship, and I'd even support time being split 50/50 with half of the time having kids be in a working environment, the other half in the classroom. This inclusion of work would solve a lot of the problems with hyperactive kids that can't learn in a classroom environment. It would also make more well rounded adults, as they'd have a taste of the 'real world' while still being in a relatively safe environment. The big issue would be getting businesses on board and making sure there aren't any legal issues - parents would be a nightmare here I'm sure.
We could also create a sort of bank of school years, or at least make it more culturally acceptable to go back to school. Have kids graduate at 16 and enter the workforce, with two years of schooling 'banked' in case they fail out. Maybe make it mandatory before 30 so there isn't a sharp social distinction. The extra two years could focus on business skills or help students that can't carve out a place in the economy find their niche.
I've tried to be as charitable as possible in this piece, and I'd ask commenters do the same. I firmly believe that one of the reasons this topic stays muddled is the constant refrains around fragility and people being 'snowflakes' or whatever the term de jour happens to be. I don't see how harsh language and derision will help solve this problem, it seems far more based on structural issues in our schooling or overall narratives, rather than a personal failing of individuals. I'm open to disagreement here as a separate point, of course.
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I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"
https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.
I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.
It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".
I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick
... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.
Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.
Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Submission statement: Eternally interesting blogger Matt Lakeman goes on a (very) deep dive into K-pop. He covers the history of Korean pop music, obsessive fans, gruelling popstar cram schools and the corporate machine behind it all.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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I posted about the ESC in the Friday Fun thread, and then started thinking about it more deeply in the sense of "Can it even be explained?", so I jotted down 9 different aspects of it.
In 2023 there were 37 countries sending an artist or a band performing one song, with the assorted light show and/or pyrotechnics. Apart from the Big Five – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and UK, which automatically participate – and the last year’s winning country, i.e., the host country, most of the other nations will have to first pass a semifinal, organized on the Tuesday and Thursday of the ESC week, to participate on the Grand Final, which is on Saturday. The results of the semifinals and the Grand Final are decided by a combination of televoting and juries, using a complicated scoring mechanism partly explained below.
ESC has gone on for 67 years now, starting from a contest for a few West European Nations and suddenly exploding in size when the Wall fell, Yugoslavia and Soviet Union crumbled to pieces and suddenly tens of Eastern European nations poured in. It is this Eastern explosion that fully set the stage for how Eurovision evolved, as these nations brought in a lot of new interesting political interrelations and a new sense of showmanship and extravaganza, quickly embraced by the Eurovision community.
Scott has posted a discussion of the conversation about eugenics, framed as an actual conversation. I found it thought-provoking, as he made better arguments for both sides than I am used to seeing from either.
A: Given that mild, consensual forms of eugenics have historically led to extreme, horrifying versions, we have reason to believe the topic is a slippery slope which ought to be avoided outright.
B: This proves too much, as there are plenty of other ideas with similar history but much higher body counts. Thus eugenics ought to be carefully investigated rather than tabooed outright.
In the footnotes, he also presents C: Ehrlich did nothing wrong, and sometimes expected-value calculations don’t plan for the long tails. Democracy, as a form of distributed consent, is our best way to square this circle. This (correctly, IMO) leaves Scott uncomfortable. I appreciate that he included it.
I was not at all familiar with Ehrlich’s work, or with the quintessentially-McNamara history of Indian aid programs. Both add some valuable context for the argument. Oh, and I guess Scott talks about HBD a little bit; that’ll be catnip for this community, but it’s really secondary to the main thrust. Seriously, just read the article for a better version than anything I can write.
Discuss.