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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
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18d ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
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21d ago
Thanks for always posting these stories! I'm curious how the pro-Palestine monoculture you describe comes to be in the UK - is this stance already the predominant one in their media? Here in Germany, every mainstream outlet is solidly pro-Israel, and since COVID at the latest media skepticism has become right-coded. As a result, we get some wild right-side-of-history positions like "we should let Israel do its thing and take in all the Palestinians as refugees here", along with vegan housecat fantasies that Israel and Palestine could get along if Bibi just were replaced by a proper left-wing leader.
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21d ago
I always thought of it as a corollary of motte-and-bailey (arranged something like that old "their barbarous wastes" two-castle picture) - [I get to keep] my bailey > my motte > the opponent[ gets to keep hi]s motte > the opponent's bailey.
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21d ago
I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so.
What is an example of a piece of history of the conflict that you think would change people's minds if they were aware of it?
I seem to be coming from a broadly similar background as you (I was a grad student around when you say you lived in Israel, and visited the country around the same time, and am an "alt-left" outlier on this forum), and I see much of the same facts on the ground as you do (Israel is quite livable, Arab-run countries are shitholes, etc.) (though your benchmarking against the West Bank, which is kind of an Israeli-run open air concentration camp, is a bit disingenuous), and yet I'm increasingly falling in the delenda est camp just because the Israelis have proven time and time again that they are unwilling to compromise on their monomanic obsession to capture and subjugate. For me, this does not even come from a particular reflex to support "the oppressed", as I for example am leaning towards kicking all the Islamic refugees out of Europe to the extent achievable under the law. It's just that I do believe in some baseline of human rights including some degree of freedom, bodily safety and self-determination, and the very existence of Israel from the point of its founding seems to just amount to a wanton cruel ploy to deny these to the previous residents of the clay they took.
I think the Palestinians should be allowed to govern themselves in a miserable theocratic shithole, if they are so inclined; if the Israelis want to build a purposeful country with nice infrastructure and great food production, more power to them, but they should have done so on land they obtained fair and square. I'm sure I could run a very spiffy software development startup in tidy quarters where I also cook two delicious meals a day, but would it be acceptable for me to do that by commandeering a random crack addict's shack and keeping the previous owner locked up naked in the basement, subject to regular beatings (frequency and intensity increased if he lashes out against me) if I also sometimes share some of my food with him (surely better than the slop his buddy who got to keep his shack next door eats)?
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21d ago
My understanding is that some amount of actual stealing took place and was admitted to early on (the 2005 end of the dispute), and after that it was mostly arcane contractual disputes which can best be approximated by something like: Russia was selling gas to Ukraine at well-below-market/charity rates while it was a puppet state, but wanted to start charging market after they had the revolution to bring in the pro-Western guy, which Ukraine couldn't afford (and they might already have been in arrears from before), and so UA decided to basically hold westward transit hostage to demand continued sub-market deliveries (and may either have stolen gas from transit attempts, or asserted a contractual right to take it; hard to find objective information); while the Western states, having alternatives and not liking the idea that Ukraine would be incentivised with cheap gas to not be pro-Western, approved of this process.
EU also didn't find any proof that the gas was stolen IIRC.
This means as little in the context as if Russia found "proof", since the EU wanted to back their own puppet. If we wanted objective information, perhaps we should have put an Indian investigative team on the case as they did in the Korean war...
True. But if you do your diligence, you'll find that we (Russians) were rarely good guys.
Eh. My reading is that at least in several of the post-'90s conflicts, their moral batting average was pretty average. I do think it was evil on the strategic level that they essentially wanted to keep Ukraine perpetually poor and dependent, though the exact ways in which they did it seem more business-as-usual to me; on the other hand, e.g. in Georgia 2008, I think they were morally in the right (Georgia shot first, and I don't see their moral claim to the separatist areas). Chechnya, and the quite possibly false-flag apartment bombings - evil, for sure (though I think the Chechens were/are also a nasty bunch, so it was black-on-dark-grey warfare like the US invasion of Afghanistan). In the case of Transnistria, I also don't see Moldova's moral claim.
More importantly, though, I think it doesn't matter because orthogonally to interior politics, the post-WWII US (and friends) is more evil than Russia. (I mean, just in this year, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has in Ukraine for the whole duration of the war!) I'd rather have zero tyrants on the world stage than one, but if we have to have at least one, I'd rather have 2+, so they at least have to throw some morsels to us in the NPC countries occasionally lest we all align with the respective other. When I argue against the morality of the US camp, it's strictly in the service of the implications of this viewpoint: a world in which every credible challenger to the US has been neutered is worse than the one we currently inhabit.
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22d ago
· Edited 21d ago
In an alternate history of nuclear-armed Ukraine, I believe Putin will choose a different country to invade instead
...which one? Do you figure there is some priority list of countries he wants to invade? What does it look like?
In our history, Ukraine is always a somewhat Russian friendly country before Russia fucked them hard by all the means after 2000, would Russia fuck with the government of a nuclear-armed, Russian friendly Ukraine?
The Russian view there is quite different - as they contend, at some point after the early 2000s, Ukraine started responding to its economic malaise by stealing gas meant for transit to EU customers to help itself meet its own demand, with some complicity from EU states who refused to hold Ukraine responsible for this diplomatically while also working to sabotage any projects for new pipelines that would bypass Ukraine completely (in EU propaganda, this was framed as the bypass pipelines "enabling Russia to blackmail Ukraine" - as in, blackmail it with the threat of taking away the free gas). If a nuclear-armed Ukraine becomes a pariah in your scenario, is the dominant consequence that its economy is in even more shambles (so it needs to steal more gas) or that the EU objections to bypass pipelines disappear (so it never gets the opportunity to steal as much gas)?
A scenario in which Russia still depends on them for transit but now they are even more desperate to extract unnegotiated concessions for it may not be one in which Russia sees it as friendly. Certainly, my memory is that even in reality, the gas siphoning resulted in a lot of grassroots resentment towards Ukraine among Russians at the time, to the point that they could have easily been persuaded to endorse some punitive aggression against it by a thus inclined statesman.
(I find it interesting that the gas transit story is never mentioned in mainstream reporting on the war, not even with a framing that puts all the blame on Russia. Through my conspiracy goggles, this looks like another instance of a general pattern of producing simple good/evil narratives by cutting off history at a convenient point - in the media, the Israel/Palestine war started on 24-10-07, Russia/Ukraine started in 2014 with a little exemption for the Budapest Memorandum in murky prehistory, and everyone/Iran started with the Islamic Revolution. No hard questions about who shot first. Not that this is new - America/Japan, they claim, started with Pearl Harbor, too.)
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23d ago
How does this follow? Ukraine could do great damage to Russia if it used one nuke or a handful, sure, but Russia could use a fraction of its nuclear arsenal to turn Ukraine into an uninhabitable wasteland. Besides, there is already a level of escalation available to Ukraine that is of the nuke nature without being of the same degree, which is that they could use their ample supply of mid/long-range drones to strike civilian centers with incendiary charges. Why do you figure they do not do that, by the same reasoning, whatever it is?
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23d ago
Thanks for your kind words.
I think that you are on to an important aspect with your consideration of the history of nuclear war - this history is also a history of our theory of and intuitions on deterrence, which may not be fully applicable to modern-day situations. Most of our expectations around it evolved in the peculiar setting of two fragile apex powers locked in what felt like an unstable equilibrium in a life-or-death struggle - both the US and the USSR saw themselves as standing atop a slippery slope to complete defeat, as a USA that lost a single direct engagement with the USSR would thereafter just be a strictly weaker, less intimidating USA (and vice versa), and if they were barely stemming the tide of global communism (capitalism) now, how would they fare then? In such a setting, a "not a step back" policy is sensible and credible.
On the other hand, is this true for Ukraine? One can argue that a Ukraine that has lost Crimea, and even Donbass, is in some meaningful sense a leaner and meaner Ukraine - they are rid of the albatross around their neck that were the initially about 50% at least ambivalently pro-Russian population, both by capture and galvanization of those who remain, and backed by a West with a significantly greater sense of urgency and purpose. As 2022~ showed, Ukraine's subjugation is not in fact a monotonic slope but comes with a very significant hump around the 25% mark. What should be the theory of nuclear deterrence for that scenario? I think there is at least circumstantial evidence that it is different - since 199X, aggression towards nuclear-armed countries has not proceeded in line with the Cold War at all, whether it is India/Pakistan or in fact US/Russia.
Could you imagine, in 1980, US-made weapons hitting Russian cities using US targeting and US satellites? I'd say that the reason this is possible is that there is common knowledge that some HIMARS hits on Belgorod do not in fact leave a Russia that is strictly less able to prosecute a conflict against the West in which it is already barely managing. The modern theory of deterrence may look more like identifying the humps that disrupt the slippery slope, and trying to beat your opponent back to one of those humps but no further, versus... trying to push your humps as far up the slope as possible?
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23d ago
I would find that quite interesting if true - both because I'm in the affected demographic, and because I consider MPB as one of the main pending milestone cases for radical medical life extension. In many ways it's an ideal baby version of the problem: age-related, highly prevalent, great market potential, no stigma around research, external, easily measurable objective success metric with quick feedback, doesn't directly involve any critical organs. It's quite likely that age-related organ failure involves a lot of metaphorical "hair", so as long as we couldn't figure out how to stop and reverse age degrading actual hair, I figure there is no chance that we could do this to the "hair" that might be some ion channels on the pancreas that we only have a tentative understanding of.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
One question I feel is underexplored is, to what extent would things have gone differently for a hypothetical nuclear-armed Ukraine? It seems plausible enough that in the first few weeks of the conflict, when Russia was actually aiming for the jugular, Nuclear Ukraine could have countered with a credible nuclear threat. However, if Ukraine magicked up a full nuclear triad now, would much of anything change? That is, would it be able to credibly threaten MAD to demand back Crimea and Donbass alone? (I don't think so. It seems pretty obvious that the more realistic form of their current war goals - EU and NATO membership for a rump state minus approximately what Russia has taken, plus or minus some more parts of Donbass - is too valuable to go va banque over, plus the West has an enduring interest in maintaining the nuclear-strike taboo lest the End of History gets undone any further.) Consequently, could it have credibly threatened MAD when Russia grabbed Crimea? ...when it supported the Donbass separatists in uprising? ...if, instead of doing the push for Kiev, Russia only had blitzed for the territory it controls now from the start, declaring that it wants to seize a buffer zone for Crimea and the Donbass separatists? In the worst case, Ukrainian nukes would merely have stopped Russia from making its grand opening mistake (blowing its confidence and certain classes of special force reserves on a useless operation).
Ukraine's fundamental dilemma is that while the EU/NATO exists and is friendly to it, it is very hard for it to credibly signal that it has its back to the wall; but if the EU/NATO backstop were to disappear, it would become very hard for it to marshal the will and unifying purpose to resist Russia.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
25d ago
US/Israel/Iran/Russia.
It seems quite conspicuous how on one hand US engagement with the Israel/Iran war, widely seen as something that is very personal for Trump for whatever reason, coincides with a much-lamented acceleration of the softening of his stance on Russia; and on the other hand Russia is also conspicuously sitting on the fence regarding the conflict, despite their previous military collaboration with Iran and it being ostensibly natural for them to take this opportunity to set another trap for the Western coalition.
Do you figure it could be the case that Trump decided to buy Putin's neutrality on the matter by offering him at least a period of US stonewalling on further pro-Ukraine action? The null hypothesis I can think of is that Putin just independently appreciates that Israel has been reticent to support Ukraine directly so far, while Trump's rapprochement with Russia is just a natural continuation of his preexisting trajectory and not particularly connected to Iran.
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25d ago
Is there a difference between this level of "not taking [the principle] literally", and it just not being the real principle? If you can "misread" international law as "the US and those in good standing with it should be the arbiters of what is permissible between nations", then you can also misread "do not kill humans even if they are of negative age" as "women should be raising children, not fucking around", and in both cases I would say it's not so much that you don't believe anything, as that you believe the latter but realise that touting that principle is a bad look/likely to decrease support for you.
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25d ago
In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)
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26d ago
In what way is this integrity? If this is actually what is going on, it's more like motte ("abortion is murder, I want to stop murder") and bailey ("nothing to force hoes to become housewives like saddling them with a baby").
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26d ago
· Edited 26d ago
More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong.
I mean, I know - I'm one of them! The case you describe still does sound morally wrong to me, in the same way in which drugging your daughter and submitting her to a cosmetic surgery would be. This is still not "women can do no wrong" - it's interesting how culture warriors on both sides refuse to believe that the other side could actually disagree with them on the moral status of fetuses, and think it must actually all be about women (blue: "red just wants to punish women for recreational sex" - red: "blue thinks women can do no wrong").
(Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely different for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered, and it's not just a case of the real principle being rationalised by a loftier one like when people always remember international law when their enemies break it. It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.)
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26d ago
"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.
You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?
(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)
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27d ago
· Edited 27d ago
I feel like I occupy some sort of intermediate space. On one hand, a fairly comfortable majority of men I knew (including myself) paired up without much trouble, or at least had no trouble finding intermittent partners when they were not too busy actively wrecking their lives; but on the other, I do see some 30% of guys that seem to live the internet discourse stereotype (orbiting, being serially relegated to the "friend zone", or outright socially shunned by any women) without being terminally online, or with the terminal onlineness appearing downstream of their misfortune. For maybe half of them, it is somewhat obvious to me what about them tanks their chances (though I have to wonder how much of these traits is upstream rather than downstream of the outcome), but there is a remaining set where I feel like I just lack the UV cone cells that allow birds to tell that the flower is fake, or something.
In some cases, it also seems to be a case of product-market mismatch: certain guys elicit the "I couldn't ever see him like that"~revulsion spectrum of reactions only from a particular demographic, and do normally with others. This is unfortunate when they only target that particular demographic - some combinations where I have seen this patterns is nerdy white guys and white girls (which is why you can always find the CS department by following the gradient of WMAF couples), Chinese-American guys who have Chinese Dad aura and Americanized Asian girls, and Indian guys and Asian girls independent of assimilation. There are cases that go against the common patterns though - I used to know a particular Caucasian guy in CS who elicited baseless shockingly cruel commentary from the Asian girls I was friends with, but paired up with a (status-matched, in my estimation) girl of his own demographic halfway into grad school.
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28d ago
In general yes, and with the Saudis in particular I actually think they are long overdue for a drubbing on very similar grounds to Israel. (Since Saudi Arabia is not even remotely democratic, though, I think the moral case that its civilians deserve it is far weaker!) That being said, I think of the obligation to be a "good citizen" among the nations to only really come into full force after a certain threshold of national capability is surpassed - tasers and rubber bullets are appropriate for antisocial adults running wild, not antisocial children throwing a temper tantrum, with the latter being more appropriately subjected to gentler and more patronising modes of reeducation. If some random minnow on the order of Syria is impotently mouthing off against its neighbours, what they need is a stern talking-to and maybe a review if at some point it looks like they might be acquiring the capacity to making good on those threats.
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28d ago
I assume the "Gu" in the setting refers to this staple chuuni (pardon me, zhong er) trope? Between this, the trope, and random "eating your enemies' liver" lore that occasionally gets immanentized under extreme circumstances, it really seems like the Highlander worldview has been in the Chinese memetic water supply for a long time. Is this story actually unique in having such an outlook, or do you just figure it's the best example of a larger genre?
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29d ago
· Edited 29d ago
I feel like what's going on in this subthread can be described as "trading in culture war options". Clearly, people hope to get a greater win for their side by calling boo outgroup in advance, before it has actually been established that the bad guy was in their outgroup (the mechanism being something like "see, this proves that you get a more accurate world model by assuming that [my outgroup] is bad"), at the risk of egg on their face and a status drop for their ingroup if the call turns out to be wrong.
To make the trade count, whatever the shooter's politics turn out to be, we should parade those who confidently claimed the opposite through town with dunce hats and signs saying "[my tribe] sucks".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
30d ago
Not really related to main point, but I think this is bit selective. Israel has existed today longer (77 years since 1947) than "Germany" had existed as a country in 1939. If you count back to Confederation of the Rhine, you get a "beef" beyond 130 years, but you could count Israel starting from Zionist migration to Ottoman Palestine, and that started late 19th century. By standards of beefs going back to centuries, Israel/Palestine has been around long enough.
...yes, and Germany has basically only lost territory nonconsensually since its creation. In terms of lands it controls that were not German in even semi-recent history, at most you could make an argument about a narrow strip it took from Denmark in the very north, and there there was a corresponding longer history of mutual wronging between Denmark and various particular states that were later absorbed into the German fold.
Israel and Palestine are still around, and basically every piece of real estate Israel owns was stolen from ancestors of modern-day Palestinians. In this particular case, it is really hard to buy into the "it was out of their hand for so long, they should get over it already" argument - especially since Israel still continues expropriating and settling more Palestinian land, in brazen defiance of admonitions even from its "friends".
It's also not super clear Israelis are "working on it", no matter is "it" ethnostate or South Africa. Israel seems content with 20% Israeli Arab population with civil rights.
With some civil rights. I have actually been to Israel, and it's impossible to ignore how obviously the Palestinian population is being treated differently - there are villages fenced in by Berlin-style prefab concrete walls everywhere across the countryside, random checkpoints with separate, overflowing queues for them, parts of cities randomly locked off on the basis of some or another Jewish festivity with police filtration points that keep them out completely, etc.; I searched a bit and Amnesty has a much longer list including things that I would not have noticed during my fairly short stay.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
30d ago
· Edited 30d ago
It's probably not something I should make a habit of, but I feel compelled to give some support to Israel here. Israel didn't steal any land any more than anyone else won or lost land before and after World War II
The difference is that WWII land loss mostly affected belligerents, who had legitimate beefs going back centuries. Israel was built at the expense of Arab villagers who didn't really do anything to anybody. If you get injured in a mass brawl, you can't just go on to maul a random bystander and excuse yourself by saying that everyone in the mass brawl you just came out of suffered injuries.
If Israel is an ethnostate (it probably is), it's not a very good one. Do you think that Nazi Germany would accept having a populace composed of 20% Jews?
I mean, they are clearly working on it. South Africa, generally recognised as pretty evil, always was minority-European.
Even forcibly moving every Gazan out of the area probably would not fix the problem, because they are extremely intent on getting their territory back, and distance does not stop the likes of the Houthis and the Iranians either.
Would it fix the problem on the Israeli side? They have already also grabbed parts of Lebanon (more, recently); how do we figure there would be a real limit to their quest for Lebensraum?
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30d ago
I would care significantly less what they did if I weren't forced to be complicit in it, by way of taxes if nothing else (which also forces me to in fact be okay with some amount of being blown up by Arab terrorists in revenge, because per my own morality I do deserve it); but yes, I do in fact think that a 1:100 valuation, especially from a capable state, is an unacceptable defection against peaceful modernity as I envision it. In my ideal world, every state brazenly implementing such a value function in favour of its own citizens ought to be ganged up on by everyone else, until only countries that assign reasonable value even to foreigners remain. ((1) I'm not sure what sort of ratio I'm okay with; (2) I'm happy if all of Israel's enemies are next, should they prove that they still have such a preference function after Israel has been obliterated. Israel at least has provided circumstantial evidence that their relative valuation is not confined to a handful of countries.) Think of Russia/Ukraine as the usual comparison case - in the case of those two countries, neither actually dares to "treat their enemies as enemies" in the Israeli fashion, because they know full well that being the first to do so would invite massive Western retribution (if Russia does it) or at least a nearly as fatal downturn in Western support (if Ukraine does).
As for (1), it's not just the US. (I'm not American! The USS Liberty episode was just the starkest display of cuckoldry I could think of, and probably more compelling to our American majority.)
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
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