Something of this form (easy and accessible way of signalling preparedness and baseline belonging to a more aware and professional group) seems to get memed up often enough - the bear safety thing reminds me a lot of the older "trigger discipline" fad, which was characterised by an endless torrent of people who wanted to be adjacent to American gun culture making a show of nitpicking media that depicted characters as keeping their fingers on a firearm's trigger without imminent intention to shoot. The particular choice of subject matter is probably opportunistic.
(Trigger discipline scissor question: "Which of these two situations is more dangerous? Lone woman at frat party with handgun, finger on the trigger to be ready to defend herself at any time / lone woman at frat party, unarmed". The 2A demographic will probably contend that she's more likely to hurt herself in an accidental discharge in the former than to get raped in the latter.)
The standard commentary says that it's mostly just meant to focus a chaotic redeployment from other sectors of the front on the UA side, since even losing some irrelevant frontline villages would have an adverse impact on UA morale that is already cracking. The Ocheretino breakthrough seems to indicate that rotations and redeployments are currently Ukraine's weak spot - single brigades hold stretches of the front successfully even if they grumble as they have been forced to do so continuously for over a year, but the moment they are rotated out it's a gamble whether their green replacements will even take their positions or flee upon their first encounter with a FAB shockwave. Entrenching a new defensive belt presumably requires at least some experienced troops to be pulled from elsewhere (rather than throwing new conscripts into a new frontline to figure out things for themselves from scratch), creating a myriad of such opportunities as their former positions have to be replenished with new troops.
RU might also correctly expect that in that particular area, the remnants of the RDK (for whom Ukrainian leadership evidently has little love, but who are also a priority target for Russian spite) will be used as first-echelon cannon fodder.
Finally, do we know the 50k actually represent an upper bound on what could be committed to this offensive if it develops in a promising direction? How hard is it to rapidly redeploy troops to somewhere within 50km of the old Russian state border? Surely attacking with ~200k right away if you can afford to would be better, but in this conflict in particular massing so many troops at once might actually just make them an easier target.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
2d ago
2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.
AI War is an asymmetric RTS where armies/fleets scale into the thousands/tens of thousands. I can vouch for the original game being quite fun, but I haven't tried AI War 2.
There is also Planetary Annihilation (:Titans), an RTS played across one or more planets (yes, spherical maps), which is intended as a spiritual successor to Supreme Commander which is mentioned below. The micromanagement there feels more finicky than in AI War, but the graphics and feeling of scale are vastly better and I would still consider the game to be an underrated gem (hobbled by the typical Kickstarter project issue of having been half-baked at initial release).
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.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11d 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?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11d 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?
"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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11d 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").
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12d 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".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
16d 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"
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
17d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
19d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
20d ago
Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
23d ago
It seems manifestly the case that the majority of whites most everywhere are against WN and reject their ideas, including ones that I imagine you include in the "truthful" category. Is the campaign of persuasion and reeducation that WNs would have to run to overcome this not adequately described as "brainwashing", in the original, unironic sense of the term (like, removing the taint of dirty ideas)? And hey, famously the Third Reich had a "ministry for propaganda" with no negative connotations intended; I think it is very fair game to let modern WNs inherit that tradition whether they want it not, seeing how any modern negative connotations are largely creditable to their non-disowned ancestors.
Sure, that would be sufficient (though the first half of your statement has to be extended to cover groups that want to seize a role that I expect to speak in my name and/or fight for my interests, such as the government of a country I live in). Having that black on white would make it easy, since then there would be no debate that I can treat them as enemies with all that entails. "Either you owe me some clarity regarding whether I'm in your circle of care and to what extent, or you can direct further inquiries to the business end of the police/military representing me" is a binary choice I'm happy to offer.
You might want to protest that BLM-like groups also want to govern, but there the uncertainty that matters for me is fundamentally different. They would presumably claim that they want a government for all, and only intend to stop unfairness that black people currently experience. There is no sense in which fluctuations in their definition of black could become relevant for me; I would only doubt that the "government for all" part would be executed in earnest. On the other hand, the WNs leave no doubt that they do not want "government for all", but the exact boundaries of the set of "whites" for whom they intend to govern would have a great deal of impact on me and things I care about.
To be very concrete, I believe that WNs understand that most whites are against them, but think that given sufficient power and time they could brainwash most of them to support the WN agenda, and kick the remaining ones out as race traitors. The real definition of the "whites" they fight for is therefore "Caucasian + will be persuaded by our propaganda". This is not a very good pitch to those in this set who have not yet been persuaded by the propaganda, and therefore they want to remain coy about it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
23d ago
No, but I seek to/am part of states that WNs want to make into white ethnostates. (Ignoring the part that I no longer live in the US nor was ever a citizen) I don't think that BLM ever wanted to make the US into a black ethnostate, or split off a part to form one, either; and even if they did, I for sure would not meet the definition for inclusion, nor would anyone I know or have care for beyond of the level I have for the generic stranger (as I somehow managed to spend my $many years in the US completely insulated from the African-American community).
To the extent to which they do want to seize control of things that I or those in my circle of care currently have (possibly shared) access to to hand to those outside of my circle, BLM would be a straight-up enemy to me, but how they define their membership in detail is then not so relevant to me. Unlike in the case of WN, they would presumably not try to lure me or anyone in my circles with a dubious promise that they are fighting for our benefit; it would be beyond any doubt that it is not so.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
23d ago
I hold any ethno-identity interest group that seeks control over a larger group I want to be a member of to this standard. If I sought to be part of a black community, I would apply the standard to BLM; if I sought to be Ukrainian, I would apply it to Ukrainian Nationalists (and indeed, part of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians trying to apply this standard to Ukrainian Nationalists is a nontrivial component of the civil war!); if I were or sought to be a citizen of Israel, I would apply the standard to Zionists, and so on.
I am generally pro-whataboutism, but in this particular case it's really silly to insinuate that being concerned with the exact definition of the WN ingroup and the ingroup of, say, Zionists are at all comparable. WNs want control of countries that I live in, or at least to split off parts of them. Of course it concerns me to know whether I, and other people I care about, will be inside their circle of concern, in a way that is orders of magnitude apart from what happens in some enclave across the world. I doubt that you do not understand that, so what exactly is it you are trying to say? Simply that WNs are under no obligation to answer the question because they will do what is in their own interest and that's their god-given right? Fine, but then I'm under no obligation to stop asking questions or concern-trolling in a way that will make WNs look bad to prospective allies either, because I find that to be in my own interest and then surely that's my god-given right too. Once you commit to that level of conflict theory, there is generally little point in hosting a debate at all anyway, unless you stand to benefit from seeing one of the sides humiliated and expect to be able to railroad the debate to make that happen.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
24d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
24d ago
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
24d 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.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
28d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
Then make it a taser or something. I would've thought firearm sentiment to be more who/whom - not that this is actually realistically going to be championed by anyone, but would a "guns for women only" policy be instinctively opposed by most blue tribers?
More options
Context Copy link