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9d ago
The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
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5d ago
My main exposure to mainstream messaging on the topic nowadays is German news media + administrative mailing lists from various universities including US ones that I have managed to accumulate subscriptions to over the years, but a common thread to all of them is a pretty unabashed tendency to have cut out the usual conflation with "antisemitism" and directly talk about anti-Israel sentiment as something that is or should be illegal and punished to the maximum extent the framework allows (expulsions, blacklisting, using discretionary hate speech/symbolism statutes). In the German news media, I mostly see war reporting spin techniques deployed to a level that comes across as comical - on one hand you get articles reporting about Israel losing 10 soldiers in an actual ground offensive in a tone as if they were kids murdered by terrorists on a shopping trip, and on the other claims of Palestinian deaths or suffering are presented as flat statistics with no contextualisation or attempt to give emotional colour, and couched in a wall of reminders that figures could not be verified independently and notes that "according to the Israeli MoD, they were actually Hamas militants" (no reminders that this could not be verified independently). The contrast not just between the reporting on the two sides but also this and the reporting on Russia/Ukraine is stark to the point of feeling like a flex ("Yes, this is propaganda. Dare to call it out? No? Good, so you know your place").
"Resign immediately" seems like the (morally+personally) least fraught option. It's not quite the trolley problem, because if you redirect the trolley the lone person gets to beat you up or worse before they get run over (or just elect a different switch operator).
What would you have done differently if you were elected leader of Germany at some point in the WWI/WWII interregnum, perhaps on 1932-12-03 for a maximum sense of historical inevitability? (...in 1944? ...of North Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam war, for opposite political valence and ultimate outcome?) Nations and polities and the whole web of human interactions have enough momentum that at some point, their only available choices might indeed be surrender (wronging themselves) and villainy (wronging others). That Israel's population and Netanyahu in particular had no better options after the Hamas attack does not absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions, since decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.
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10d ago
I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions.
There might be an element of that, but I figure that "soandsomany people got arrested at protests for X" also is a necessary item for any media narrative about X being oppressed by the authorities. Note how no report of protests (say, Navalny-related ones) inside Russia is complete without some mention of hundreds of protesters taken away in prepared police vans, and most Westerners are also quite happy to read that and nod along about how brutal the regime is. Other protests such as climate activists gluing themselves to roads are also designed to elicit a violent-looking police response, and the overall effect of any well-crafted report incorporating such footage tends to be that genuine fence-sitters and normies conclude that the response was excessive. If you have any sort of sympathetic media that knows its craft and participants willing to sacrifice themselves, you would be foolish as a protest organiser to not make use of the opportunity; if you are a participant who cares more about the cause than about the expected adverse effects of being arrested, you would be foolish to not volunteer.
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4d ago
As I meant to imply with the comment about the differences to the trolley problem, I don't want stakeholders to punish/assassinate me for what I would see to be a morally net positive choice (at this point, this would include both negotiating abode elsewhere for everyone in Israel, packing up and leaving, and going full unabashed genocide on the remaining Palestinians, trading future negative utils for present ones). Why would I be obliged to sacrifice myself for these people I have nothing to do with, just because they unilaterally put me in charge as part of a thought experiment?
What would be your answer for my Germany/NorthVN scenarios?
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5d ago
I haven't lived in England in over a decade now so any respect for bus stop queues has atrophied. I regularly "jump queue" just by standing closer to the kerbcurb than the other aspiring passengers, thus reaping the rewards for my lower risk aversion.
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5d ago
Stumbled upon this unreasonably catchy parody of a Cheburashka (famous Soviet cartoon series) song on Youtube. Like most of the best Russian memes, apparently the lyrics themselves are way older than the rendition (70s? 80s?).
This made me think - I seem to know a disproportionate number of political songs, grassroots parodies (this one is about siphoning off ethanol rocket fuel to get wasted) and snowclones from Russia. Do other cultures make much of those? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is "Napalm Sticks to Kids".
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4d ago
Moving to/staying in Israel, not accepting a Turkey/Greece style population transfer two-state solution at the price of costlier territorial concessions earlier, and whatever miscalculation, if it in fact was one, made them not prevent the Hamas attack, among others.
Rounding that down to what you said is fairly comparable to how the US progressive coalition calls every part of the pro-trans agenda "trans people existing". Do you like that version of this argument too?
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29d ago
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").
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1mo ago
This forum isn't rDrama and I would hope that it doesn't turn into it.
The random mention of "goyslop" makes what would otherwise be a reasonable article to reference elsewhere impossible to use in "polite company". Why did you find it necessary?
To begin with, why would the Jewish/non-Jewish dimension even be relevant here? There may have been some case the JQ-posters could have made in the case of TV where I believe the term was originally coined, but Genshin Impact may be the biggest extreme spoonfeeding quest marker open world game out there at the moment, and it almost certainly has a higher fraction of Jewish players than Jewish developers.
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12d ago
The analogy only holds weight if you buy into the argument that Israel/people of Jewish ethnic and religious background have as much right to stay on the Middle Eastern clay as the Syrians do, which I doubt is the case for the protesters or most of those who sympathise with them. The communicative strategy of the pro-Israel powers regarding its legitimacy seems to continue being limited to "all polite people in the room will gasp and assert that you just did something beyond the pale if you deny Israel's right to existence", but this is clearly fragile and dependent on an unbroken chain of respect for the opinion for "polite people", which evidently broke at some point upstream from the pro-Palestine left.
The commitment to this strategy to the exclusion of all others boggles my mind - at least come up with some apologia involving how Palestinians are really also culpable for the Holocaust because Hitler admired Islam, or some body of Foucaldian jargon-laden papers churned out by a network of Jewish Studies departments which purport to present a critical theory of how occupying the Holy Land was just. Most successful movements in history that depend on a claim (such as an assertion of morality) that can't be strictly proven seemed to recognize that you need to maintain multiple lines of persuasion to cover different audiences - Christianity had the social censure for those who think judgement by the elites makes right, charitable organizations for those who thought displays of altruism do, tales of miracles for those who thought a God better have godlike powers, theological faculties for those who were most impressed by the trappings of scholarship, and smoke-filled community rituals for those who were most swayed by gut feeling and dissolving the self in a crowd.
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17d ago
I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.
If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
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22d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
Medvedev
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries?
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
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17d ago
Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.
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1mo ago
Everyone I talk to in real life regularly goes to the toilet, but that doesn't mean I want them to drop their pants and do their business as I talk to them.
But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
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21d ago
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
What do you think was the reason, then?
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
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21d ago
For the same reason as why you want to cut the top off your power economy by having rule of law and a constitution, presumably.
More pragmatically, historical precedent shows that if you don't the plebs eventually rebel and you have to spend a lot more resources on suppressing them, or actually just wind up being hung from the lampposts.
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1mo ago
This all reads as "cultural victory of the nerds, as delivered by an evil genie" to me. I read for fun, don't like relaxing on the beach or partying, and travel for the same feeling of immersive escapism that I would have gotten out of a good book or game while shutting out as much as possible of the "real world", and have been earnestly telling everyone I want to go into academia so that my work is my hobby is my work and "work-life balance" is just for the poor suckers who sold out 8 hours of their every day doing something they hate since long before this HN grindset hustle culture took root. Now, suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who apparently feel compelled to pretend to be me, because it's the cool thing - and they hate every moment of it, and respond to any displays of the preceding genuine sentiment roughly in the same way as one would to a teacher's pet or the guy who honestly believes in Our Corporate Mission and excoriates the cynical coworkers who just want to collect a paycheck. At best, I get reactions that parse as "wow, you're trying harder to pretend than I ever could, I should learn from you".
This seems like it touches upon the same topics as all the secession/independence debates do - who is obliged to get out of the way? Do the people who want nothing to do with the secessionist project have the right to a state of their own, and who has the obligation to get out of the way for that? The idea that any group of people can consensually obtain their own clay on which they only answer to themselves is appealing enough to me in theory, but the practice of it runs into insurmountable problems. Any such group seldom already controls a contiguous piece of land, and fair division algorithms (forgetting for a moment about their asymptotic complexity) only work if the subdivision valuations are independent (so you don't have preferences like "I want parcel A iff I can have parcel B"), which is basically never the case for land.
In concrete terms, you can't build a viable country by aggregating the land held by all ethnonationalists in Europe - so either there is no ethnostate, or someone will have to move, or someone will have to forfeit their freedom of association. All to often, secessionists just wind up arbitrarily privileging their cause - their enemies should get out of the way of their clubhouse state, but they shouldn't have to get out of the way of the enemy enclave stuck in the clubhouse. (See e.g. North Kosovo) This is also what I wind up hearing when these people talk about "white racial solidarity" (as opposed to a more narrowly writ "solidarity among white nationalists") - it sounds suspiciously like a demand that I should have solidarity with them, and join their ethnostate against my will.
Also,
An Irishman can become an American, but a Nigerian simply can’t.
I'm not sure what the working definition of "American" is here; Black Africans have been part of the continent's population since before anything resembling the author's presumable definition of "American" emerged. If he means "White American", then sure, but then the statement is so tautological as to say nothing ("my favoured grouping is defined in such a way that Nigerians can never join").
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29d ago
My point is that it's unsurprising for people who are perfectly capable of watching gore/scat/gross video to still be viscerally disgusted by racist language, and therefore to want to terminate consumption for reasons that are not the gore/scat/gross content fundamentally shaking their worldview (any more than the people who were shocked by me intonation-matching their "poggers" with its ni- counterpart were so because the single word made them realise some truth they were suppressing).
Also, I've seen American flyover country content that is more viscerally disgusting to me. I can't say that rats bother me much, but I'd say a hot dog lost inside the folds of some trailer blob's gut for a few months before being rediscovered by EMTs is strictly worse than feces.
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21d ago
What's the evidence that absolute poverty is what matters, rather than inequality? Many uprisings happened in societies where the 5th-percentile poorest person was better off than the 5th-percentile richest person in some historical society that remained stable. It seems to be a common belief in many circles that humans are mostly motivated by relative status.
I think there's an interesting "The Dress" style divide in how this statement is perceived that's basically determined by your belief about whether these boys would rape someone [if they could get away with it]. There's probably a genuine divide between a large number of men who wouldn't and can't conceive that the median man would, and a large number of men who would and can't conceive that the median man sincerely wouldn't, and they are prevented from sizing up each other in part by the circumstance that signalling needs create large sets of those who are in one group but claim to be in the other.
Depending on whether you are a believer that rape is widely accepted (and here the belief about others really seems to matter more than whether you would do it yourself), "unrapeable" sounds either like "I wouldn't take this one for free" (but I would take the others for free - free stuff is good!) or "this wouldn't get stolen if it were left out" (it's not like I'm a thief, but it's so bad that it's beneath even outgroup bad people like thieves).
(I tried and failed to find a realistic instance of something like "the dogs wouldn't eat you if you were thrown to them" being used as an insult, so I have to settle for the weaker point that a hypothetical insult of that type would not be taken as an endorsement of cannibalism.)
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