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5hr ago
As I remember, the disputes were principally about factual questions that were relevant for the moral dimension - whether and how significantly the 2014 revolution was orchestrated by Western countries, to what extent neo-Nazi movements were a driving political force on the Ukrainian side, whether and to what extent the Ukrainians committed actions that ought to lower their moral standing by Western standards before and after the Russian invasion (extrajudicial killings, ethnic and political persecution, various forms of corruption...), and to what extent either of the two armies was "clean" or engaged in atrocities (targeting civilians vs. using civilians as shields, allegations of massacres (Bucha) vs. allegations of false-flag massacres (Kupiansk), abuse/killing of POWs and whether it is systemic, both sides accusing the other of using "barrier troops" with orders to shoot those who retreat or surrender).
The thing is, manipulative advancement of a moral case for some cause through selective reporting/FUD/editorializing is exactly what most of the resident witches would accuse the Western media of in contexts where they are at odds with it. The NYT and WaPo were not disputing that BLM protests were happening, or that property damage occurred as part of the protests, but (were charged by those opposed to BLM to be) distorting the reporting on the scale of the property damage, amplifying information that made anti-BLM look bad and pro-BLM look good and thereby misrepresenting the moral qualities of the protesters and those they were protesting against to the point that someone who read their coverage would come to the opposite conclusion regarding which side deserved support from what those opposed to it thought was right. This is the shape of basically every progressive media establishment vs. basket of heterodox deplorables dispute, whether it is about added punctuation in Biden transcripts vs. removed punctuation in Trump transcripts or grifters sleeping around for reviews=?women artists trying to spread high culture to video games and getting a torrent of death threats trying to put them in their place. Yet, the same people who have no problem coming down on the media conspiracy theory side, and bemoaning the impenetrable wall of argument-by-authority and social pressure defending the official narrative, in each of those would then happily insinuate that you are a brainrotten conspiracy theorist if for example you expressed doubt about the Bucha story.
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14hr ago
Unfortunately, knowledge of Gell-Mann amnesia as a meme/antimeme is not nearly strong enough to overcome the temptation of a powerful institution's offer of ammo to defend your ingroup's membership-defining beliefs. Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?
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1d ago
Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy. Sure, they sometimes stumble upon true and interesting statements - perhaps even quite often, like a blind chicken, granted the leisure to peck at the yard all day because the farmer will spoonfeed it three times a day anyway, finding a good number of grains - but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence, hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out. Take, for example, the argument about incest towards the end. Stripped of its whoa-dude lingo, what's left of it seems to be some argument along the lines of:
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Marriage restrictions serve the point of creating the framing conditions for an economy where fathers sell off their daughters in return for other spoils. Sure, nothing wrong with that, because creating arbitrary systems of rules is cool in my books.
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However, you don't need to ban mother-son incest to enable the above economy!
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Some people say that there might be other reasons why incest is banned, such as biology. But that's nonsense! Farmers inbreed their plants and lifestock all the time, so how can it be bad?
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Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest. It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Disassembled in this way, the argument is clearly lazy and stupid. Human communities differ from the charges of a farmer in relevant ways - a farmer can breed 99 unviable monstrosities that he will promptly cull and 1 sort of viable semi-monstrosity with a desirable trait that can then be isolated in subsequent generations. The semi-monstrosity does not need to be healthy or fend for itself, because the farmer can just coddle and feed it until it is old enough to be crossbred with a healthier specimen in the hope of selectively getting rid of the deleterious traits only, at negligible cost to the farmer; neither the culling nor the coddling of the mutant impose any cost on the community of other farm animals/plants, because they don't really have a community or obligation to look out for each other; and neither of them will meaningfully resist their culling, introducing the choice between violence and dysgenic load, because the farmer is presumed to have an effective monopoly on violence.
This is not a particularly difficult counterargument to the counterargument to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom that the lowly students must compete with each other to understand, which a Continental Philosopher is supposed to project; and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something. Maybe some other student could help him out by writing a longer Lacanian tract expounding on how he doesn't get it. Who would side with some beta nitpicker over the chad sage who has his own (surname)-ian adjective as a lemma in the Collins English Dictionary?
If the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art?
I have little doubt that the Eisenmans of the world would go for this if they could get away with it.
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2d ago
the entire post-10/7 conflict in Gaza was a sinister plot for Israelis to expropriate Gazan land
That's silly only because there is nothing subtle about it. Israel was founded on taking land from the assorted Arabs that lived there before, and has repeatedly expanded by doing that over and over again. With everything it does, it grabs more land. Grabbing and holding land for its privileged ethnic group is its entire purpose.
But even here you're wrong; the unprovoked nature of the 10/7 attack,
Italics are not a substitute for an argument. You can't possibly be arguing that Israel did nothing to Palestinians before 10/7, so the only thing your argument can possibly rest on is saying that somehow what it did before is excluded from consideration as a provocation. Have you presented any argument for that, apart from "deaths dealt out tit-for-tat", i.e. saying that the "Palestinians started it", i.e. slicing up a sequence of mutual provocations in a convenient way?
This is what they are actually doing, probably to their detriment.
60% of Palestinian fatalities since 10/7 on the first infographic I could find are women, children and the elderly. I have seen plenty of pictures of whole blocks being levelled. If that is surgical precision, i.e. those killings were targeted and deliberate, I think we are deep in genocidal territory, though I'm sure its defenders will have a story about how they vetted everyone in those blocks they levelled and the children were terrorists too.
Note also that per the infographic, something like 2-3% of Israeli 10/7 fatalities are children, to 32% of Palestinian fatalities since then. And then you claim that the Palestinians are the ones killing indiscriminately?
the analysis of John Spencer, an instructor in urban warfare at West Point
Might be more interesting if it weren't by someone who would almost certainly lose their job if they came to a different conclusion.
Not a valid basis to wage war or attack random civilians.
Surely having your homeland invaded and occupied is a valid basis to wage war. I will concede that apart from a crazy fringe the Israeli side is not technically arguing that having random civilians on your side attacked is a valid basis to attack random civilians; instead they just engage in gaslighting and Soviet-level denials that they are attacking random civilians, all while continuing to do it. I am genuinely unsure if a greater evil masquerading as good is better than an unapologetic lesser evil.
Interesting way to describe the outcome of a lawsuit
Israeli court: "seems legit to me"
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework.
You are the one who started talking about scale, implicitly suggesting that the scale of the Oct 7th attack was what made it sufficient as a justification for Israel killing 43k Palestinians. I just took this implication, as I understood it, at face value. If this is not the argument you intended, then please explain yourself better.
The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
I'm sure the objective of Hamas could also be described by them as the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Palestinians - the Israeli state - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering any individuals that Israel has locked away. Israel says that its mass killings of completely uninvolved civilians are inevitable because it has no better way to break Palestinian organised resistance (Hamas) specifically without putting more of its own people at risk; I'm sure Hamas also sees no better way to break Israeli organised resistance than to spread terror and attack whatever civilians they can get their hands on. If you think it's unfair to demand that Israel restrict itself to surgical operations against Hamas militants that would probably result in 5-10x the military casualties relative to just levelling whole areas, then surely it's also unfair to demand that Hamas restrict itself to surgical operations against the IDF that would probably result in them just getting gunned down ineffectually.
from your own source (...)
Those seem pretty cherry-picked from the articles. The 2021 article starts with a description of Israeli police sabotaging a religious observance so that it would not disturb a political speech of their PM, and then later of Israel seizing the homes of some Palestinians, which resulted in protests being violently suppressed during which the first deaths occurred on both sides. You (and partially Wikipedia) are doing the same thing here again at smaller scale, taking a fairly uniformly distributed timeline of alternating incidents of Palestinians killing some Israelis and Israelis killing many more Palestinians - inevitably more civilians than militants on either side - and placing arbitrary cutoff points to break the sequence up into single "incidents" that look like they start with Palestinians killing someone and then Israel engaging in totally justified manifold retaliation.
"He randomly punched me, then I broke his arm. Then he randomly punched me again, and I broke his leg in response. Then he randomly kicked me in the nuts for no reason with his other leg. Of course I stabbed his eye out, I mean, who wouldn't? Being kicked in the nuts can have serious consequences and nobody should have to put up with that. What, you say I started it by stabbing him in 1948? Do you realise how crazy you sound, claiming that he has the right to kick me in the nuts over something from 1948? Besides, his dad who was also beating him all the time back in the 1940s said I was free to do to him whatever I wanted!"
4bpp
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2d ago
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7. More were killed by Israel just in 2022, and many more in 2021. I don't think being at a disco festival conveys a uniquely high value to your life, as opposed to, say, just being blown up in your home.
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements.
The relevant timeline just around settlements has plenty of evidence to the contrary, including from Israeli sources. Either way, it's easy to offer peace from a position of overwhelming strength.
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2d ago
Having recently spent a couple of years in Sweden, what struck me about it was actually how, despite this reputation, its native culture was actually strikingly strong and resilient to universal culture intrusion. Compared to other European cultures I have lived in, they have an abundance of native rituals ranging from involved (midsummer celebrations) to small (corporate Christmas buffets, the sacred annual pastry cycle and other random food traditions, grown adults holding annual Skansen passes so they can go and dance to små grodorna around a tree whenever the occasion calls for it) which approximately everyone observes without a hint of irony. There is a harder-to-pin-down social/temperamental cultural package that struck me as every bit as peculiar as the Japanese one, political culture that has largely resisted US brainrot (I saw a peaceful and constructive 6-ish-way public debate between representatives of every major party including the turbofeminists and the anti-immigration populists in a town square) and plenty of civil-society institutions like only slightly culty countryside compounds hosting debate retreats for politically interested youths.
Moreover, most immigrants I encountered were getting rapidly and obviously assimilated into this package. A second-generation Swedish-Iranian invited me to a kräftskiva they were hosting at their place in some famous problematic suburb, and I have more than once been given the stink-eye by East Asians who lived there for a few years (but came to stay) for not making enough of an effort to learn the language. (I'm sorry! Towards the end I could do simple everyday conversations and read/fill in most of the paperwork that came my way, but I never found the time to take a course or deliberately practice.)
This all was a far cry from what I've experienced in Germany or Austria, where the immigrants proudly keep to themselves or at best get assimilated to anglophone universal culture directly, skipping the local step, and the natives are sheepish about what little distinct native habits remain, while the political culture can be summed up as binging on US news and being excited for native developments only insofar as votes for FPÖ/Greens/AfD/NEOS may contribute to owning the American outgroup or embolden them. In summary, Sweden is among the countries I would be least worried about.
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2d ago
If this is a justification, why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack? There is an obviously truthful reading of the situation, which is that Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out or someone stronger swooping in and separating the combatants, and then there are the two competing narratives that aim to marshal support for one of the sides by selectively word-gaming away the justifications that the other side invokes when turning the ratchet.
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このMOLOCHだ！
2d ago
Right, well, moderation compounds. If in two weeks you were to ban somebody else for making posts like this, maybe the user you just banned would be there to complain that you are being too harsh.
If providing a home for it was not the goal, the sneering and blatant culture-warring from the forum's right edge should have been contained much more relentlessly from the outset. Now that they have numbers and precedent on their side, it's natural that belated attempts to moderate this behaviour away will result in defiant "community sentiment". I'm sorry that I'm joining in on making your life hard, but I see no better way to level the incentive landscape.
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3d ago
Only warnings for those two posts (and then padded with reassurances like "which usually we'd probably let go"), and now a mere two weeks? Was there an executive decision to let the forum turn into an /r/CWR-lite space?
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3d ago
The three main theories would be (1) that accusations of blatant partisanship are actually starting to hurt the self-perception of some of those involved; (2) that they are trying to build up a defense because they are expecting a backlash against anti-Trump media; and (3) that some PR advisor told them about a significant pool of people that is unreachable by traditional media messaging because they think the media is blatantly partisan, and they need to take steps to raise the weight that those voters assign to media reporting.
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4d ago
My single encounter with his speeches (as I generally can't stand video/chatter content) has been a live stream of some recent rally that I only tuned into because I randomly entertained the thought of playing the Polymarket "will Trump say Border more than 25 times" game, and my immediate first impression was that he really just sounded shockingly old and tired. I don't think I got a sense of mental decline beyond what is a necessary consequence of old age, and he sounded way sharper than I remember Biden doing in the one video I saw of his fatal debate, but he certainly didn't come across as either spry or quick-witted. I don't think I have any particularly negative emotions towards him nor that he has declined to a point that would be extraordinary for a head of state, but it did seem to me like those who claim that he currently presents a picture of rhetorical brilliance and strength must be suffering from a case of reverse TDS.
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5d ago
This seems to be saying that beating anti-wokes with a newspaper convinced those who were already members of the progressive coalition to get with the program and update to a different sub-ideology in their camp, not that it had any effect to dissuade those who were targeted by it. You could argue that there was a similar pool of proto-allies that merely needed to be scared into backing a promising new strategy when Trumpism first came around and had to fight against older schools of conservatism in the Republican coalition, but by now that pool seems to have been largely exhausted.
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5d ago
The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout.
Repetition and italics are no substitute for an argument for a claim as strong as the one you are making here. Not only can't you think of any other way, but you are also convinced that the rolled up newspaper would work? On what basis?
Do you think that with the tables turned, it works on you? Does the cultural strategy run by progressives for the past n years, with your candidates dragged through courts and media, your adherents marginalised from work and education, and your cultural artifacts vandalised, not amount to repeated blows with a rolled-up newspaper to the nose of anti-wokes? I assume that their doing of this is based on a very similar sentiment as yours, so why is it not working for them? Why are you not convinced yet that anti-wokeness is Not Okay?
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5d ago
The Xwitter claim does not check out for me. Journalists continue being utterly addicted to it, and I also recall them being unconditionally defensive up until the point of the Musk takeover (which they resisted and continue to resist). If they wanted it destroyed, surely they should have supported it at the time, as it was foreseeable that it would make it less influential and make a future ban easier.
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5d ago
Why does it matter for purposes of determining whether a "genocide" of Indians is going on whether an Indian woman is made to have fewer children in India, or whether she is shipped to the US and then made to have fewer children there? Would you consider it less genocidal of US Whites if the same numbers (so something like 100 million?) that is currently enticed to move into diverse US cities and goes on to have lower TFR there instead were enticed to move to India and died childless over there?
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6d ago
From a quick look, Springfield, OH housing prices look about the same as those in any small northeast US metro area I've seen, and well within the margin of what one can afford with a $20-30k/year salary.
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6d ago
The stories that are commonly related as evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans all involve mass murder, though (Srebrenica etc.); the usability of Yugoslavia as evidence for natural usage of the term is also further complicated by a fat US foreign policy goal thumb on the scale (compare to how the media would even have evacuation of orphaned children from captured parts of Ukraine by Russia count as genocide).
State-subsidized relocations into areas drive housing prices up and wages down (along with all sorts of other first and second order effects) and the state subsidized part makes it literally impossible for the native population to compete.
What's a concrete example of an area that you believe was ethnically cleansed in this fashion?
Thanks for the citation. It's a bit of a rough read, being a working paper (which also means it has not fully gone through peer review), but if I read it correctly, Table 5 suggests that with sufficient controls, diversity drives down other races' birth rates by at least about as much and in many cases more (Blacks, East Asians) than those of Whites. This makes your gloss of it rather tendentious. Who is being genocided here again?
(Assuming the rest of the paper is sound, I would take it as evidence for a more general point along the lines of "diversity drives down birthrates".)
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6d ago
The degree to and way in which they shape the world is also mediated by your own country's government. You could vote for a government that would show transatlanticists the door, which would significantly reduce American influence over your life, or for one that is willing to play hardball with them and extract concessions rather than being completely deferential, which may give you more influence over American governance than a vote in the US would (especially if you live in a small but important country with a more representative political system).
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6d ago
Foreigners drive down native birth rates. Diversity drives down White birth rates.
[citation needed]
The lowest birth rates are found in very homogeneous countries such as South Korea and Japan. In spite of all its diversity, the US white (non-hispanic) birth rate is still greater than that of comparatively homogeneous countries like (much richer) Norway or (barely) (much poorer) Hungary. What gives?
"Diluting" seems like a more accurate and value-neutral verb.
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このMOLOCHだ！
6d ago
Calling that ethnic cleansing is similarly wrong, and for what it's worth the Wikipedia article on it does not seem to contain the word "cleansing". I googled for the combination of the two terms, and the first two relevant-seeming hits I found are from Quora and some book on Amazon containing wording such as
The Irish were simply to be pushed off to poorer, less desirable parts, in a sort of early version of ethnic cleansing.
and
It was, beyond doubt, ethnic cleansing, but not of the worst kind because the Irish were made to leave rather than killed on spot.
If anyone thinks that it was ethnic cleansing on the basis that the Irish were forced out of the most desirable locations in favour of the Britons (so it was... ethnically cleansing the best parts of Ireland only?), I guess that's fair, but this is a premise that is also not present in the US immigration case - there is no forcing of the current population to relocate to less desirable areas, and in fact the new immigrants tend to cluster in the least desirable ones.
When progressives fail in their goals, they don't admit defeat. They write it off, avoid mentioning it again and may even pretend it was never their idea... unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on. When they win, they just write the history to make it seem inevitable.
This seems to be what would happen by default for any long-lived political movement that is actually winning enough that the losses on objectives that don't get dismissed in the churn can be written off as an exception in the style of "unless they hold onto it and try to bring it up again later on". Do modern Christians admit the end of witch trials as a defeat? What about Mormons and polygamy? Outside of an edgy fringe, are US conservatives admitting defeat on their erstwhile goal of preventing women's suffrage?
I don't quite understand what would even be the intended purpose of getting progressives to own alcohol prohibition and eugenics and "admit defeat" on those goals.
- Are you suggesting that they still secretly believe in those goals, and just don't want to say them out loud in order to not reveal that they stand for unpopular and discredited ideas? (That would be a bold claim.)
- Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again? (Useless without persuading them that they themselves and past progressives actually took marching orders from a progressive hivemind, as opposed to fighting for what they themselves believe to be right.)
- Is it just a base desire to associate your outgroup with losing in order to lower their status? (On brand for politics, but off brand for what this forum strives to be.)
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7d ago
I don't think the native blue tribers I have met in the US would actually be bothered by their kids being gay; to the extent this sentiment still existed it was confined to first-generation immigrants. Any objection to their own kids going trans is probably not about not getting grandkids either, considering that this is a culture that increasingly isn't even convinced to have kids of their own. Rather, the crux is that people are not actually convinced that transitioning is predetermined and makes their kids happy, despite outwards pressure to subscribe to this view. Few people have nagging doubts that gays are at least as happy as straights.
Sorry in advance that I'm only responding to part of your points (and thanks a lot for writing them; I thought I should be more explicit about appreciating it since you are otherwise just eating downvotes from the lurker gallery) - I have read and thought about everything, but it was a choice between not responding at all and procrastinating way more than I can justify to myself.
I don't think "poetic" is the right term for what I see in these writings. A poet, I imagine, is someone who finds new, surprising and accessible ways of expressing a complex or rare sentiment; an obscurantist finds complex and inaccessible ways of circumscribing a common or simple one.
Well, it equally wears on you when you repeatedly have an interaction with people who essentially say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's deep". I'm sure you could see some symmetry between those who are serious about philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of the tribe that is opposed to the philosophers' coalition and those who are serious about anti-philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of Team Philosophers, but the symmetry is broken by the philosophers alone being in the position where they could have chosen to express themselves in a way that forestalls the "I don't know what that means" part.
Relatedly, insofar as it addresses why there are such foot-soldiers on the philosophers' side, and why people like you may underappreciate their number and impact -
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?" Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy." As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments (this is mildly overstated for the sake of argument; I have only dabbled in stuff with human subjects and most of my work is mercifully untouched beyond the 60% institutional overhead that is used to subsidise the humanities); we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
(The most prominent not-obviously-political counterpart of the same dynamic result in cities tiled with brutalist wannabe 1984 film sets. I think people feel the commonalities between a two on a visceral level: it's no accident that Orbán's Budapest is one of the few European capitals that is basically devoid of modern architecture.)
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