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6hr ago
Well, the Ukrainians get pretty close to that wrt Russia ("Muscovites onto the gallows" was a popular slogan even before the war). Does that mean that if Trump goes full rapprochement with Putin, pro-Ukrainians would be up for denaturalization?
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11d 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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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification
Does this narrative of cartoonish supervillainy, which so obviously maximises pushing Western buttons while having dubious practicality (for starters, the complete disinterest and dysfunctionality in the (post-)Soviet space as far as upbringing of orphans is concerned is a matter of lore), not trigger the slightest bit of skepticism?
As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do. Can you think of any example of a war of conquest (e.g. the Franco-German wars over Alsace-Lorraine) where the conqueror also surrendered orphaned children from territories it captured to the target country, and if not, would you consider those wars genocidal as well?
It's obvious that Ukraine's preference, if they must lose the territories, is to have all of the population transferred to the territories they control - that is, what they really want is for Russia to commit ethnic cleansing, and they are incentivised to frame any failure to do so as genocide. At some point, though, this framing just starts turning all these "war crimes" into a military necessity - if Russia per the implicit Ukrainian argument can't fulfill its war goal of removing Ukraine's ability to serve as a NATO outpost without either committing ethnic cleansing or genocide as defined by the Ukrainians, then how can they be persuaded to not choose at least one?
Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include (...) forced Russification of the inhabitants
Source? The search results I get with this claim usually link it with an intent to issue Russian passports to the inhabitants. Is making people of a conquered territory citizens of your country genocidal? This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides, such as the Franco-Prussian one or everything in the Yugoslavian wars including NATO's Kosovo (Ethnic Serbians on the territory of Kosovo were issued Kosovan passports), and also make Georgia's intent to assert its authority over South Ossetia and Abkhazia (which presumably involves issuing Georgian passports to all the people of other ethnicities who live there) look rather so. In fact, if this is the standard, Azerbaijan's capture of Nagorno-Karabakh is starting to look like the least genocidal of all the US-approved conquests, since they just expelled all of the inhabitants rather than villainously issuing them Azerbaijani citizenship.
(I am not even going to address the implicit assumption that all citizens/residents of Ukraine are of Ukrainian ethnicity, which presupposes that a genocide/assimilation happened there in the past)
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11d 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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20d 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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26d ago
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?
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13d ago
· Edited 11d 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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13d 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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21d ago
Unless you really do sign up to the deontological "the bad thing is people getting off to CP", I don't see how this even sketches a slippery slope that actually ends up somewhere bad. How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter? You have to contend with at least one great counterexample, which is that simultaneously with depictions of graphic violence (and even compelling simulations of engaging in it) becoming ever better and more widely available, actual violence is on the decline.
Gay marriage fell so fast because the underlying moral taboo (on gay sex) had collapsed many decades prior, following the collapse of either moral framework it could be derived from (Christianity, dominant masculinity). The condemnation of sex with children rests on a different framework (rejection of children's moral and contractual autonomy), which I don't see as declining at all - in fact, if anything, with rampant safetyism, trigger warnings and coddled college students, the principle that some are too young and innocent to manage their own affairs is ascendant.
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26d ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either, though of course there the disputed set is much smaller (consider the case of that Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. I do not believe in transitioning or self-id and do not consider any transwoman I am aware of an instance of the class "woman", but I would genuinely struggle to assign them to one of the categories based on what I have heard).
Either way, this should not be relevant - transwomen are in general not saying something that amounts to "there is a fuzzy boundary between men and women, I understand I am somewhere near it, but I contend that on the balance of evidence I should fall on the 'woman' side", but rather "whatever the boundary between men and women is, I am a reasonably central example of the category 'woman'". OP essentially has to contend that the latter is something that is transparently false to his camp and ambiguous to progressives, i.e. whatever notion of women they have is so weak a separator that it can't even refute what to conservatives is a claim that a central example of a man is actually a central example of a woman. OP proposes that the test that evidences this is that they cannot provide a verbal definition of "woman". However, I would argue that the reason people fail to do this is the real or imagined fuzzy boundary of the category - progressives would also have no trouble identifying what they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women". The same situation holds for the category "black" for either side, where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it, and yet neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
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9d ago
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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15d 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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22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
The Motte is in fact the first rat-adjacent space in which I have noticed how much seething hatred she seems to inspire in certain quarters. It seems... hard to determine why it's so extreme, but at the same time totally unsurprising that it is there? After all, she has consciously and openly built her social status by entering a community of nerds starved for female attention and selectively dangling hers before them, making a show of being simultaneously promiscuous and picky to come across as the stereotypical "slut who will sleep with everyone but you" to almost everyone simultaneously, with echoes of the circle crusher trope as well. On top of that, her audience includes a large number on the alt-right~trad larper spectrum (see this very forum), whose role compels them to reach for the KJV vocabulary when facing people in her line of work, as well as redpillers who seem to take particular offense at the "rational camgirling" of her oeuvre that is essentially gender-flipped redpill advice (under the men extract sex = women extract resources homomorphism), and few people enjoy having the UNO reverse card pulled on them.
For the record, though, I've actually always enjoyed her posts, and would be sad if there are no more. I always kind of assumed she knew what she was doing and was just okay with the rock-bottom agreeableness lifestyle, so did anything actually change (The ranks of the white knight guard thinned too much? The haters became more numerous or determined than before?) or should I read this as her having somehow managed to remain in denial about the reaction until now?
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
Why is whatever this boils down to as a notion of attraction less legitimate than the "in isolation" notion, though? People choose partners on complex criteria, which tend to include some reflexive components like "can I convince myself that the other person in fact desires me" and "how will society judge us as a pair". This is not just a strategic cope to make up for an organic preference that can not be realised - as I see it, for most people, the realisation where you see a happy future for yourself with another is attraction, butterflies and everything! (No judgement intended about respectability - the happy-future fantasy could be anything from "we'll fuck like rabbits in a public toilet" to "we will grow old discussing philosophy until one of us closes their eyes, never to complete their final thought")
I don't see why attraction based on this compound metric should be written off as less legitimate than attraction based on what the man might choose to beat his meat to while completely derealised at the tail end of a gooning all-nighter, or the woman's equally derealised fantasies after drifting off to trashy romance novel la-la land. In fact there seems to be a certain kind of essentialism that bitter people in all sorts of domains converge upon, where some very specific and often even irrelevant metric is elevated to Ground Biological Truth and everything else is ultimately seen as fakery and pretense - "he might say he likes me but Science says that he ultimately would prefer someone with balloon tits and a hourglass figure. We don't make the rules", or "she might claim to like nice guys but Science says that women only really get off on rape and dominance, she may deny it but I'm sure it will come out eventually", or "I might seemingly be performing about as well as everyone else, but Science says that people of my sex/ethnicity are not good at my research area". Every such belief conveniently has the nature of those delusional parasite infections which compel the patient to scratch at them until they actually bleed and get infected.
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8d ago
Why can't you accept that people might find the excel spreadsheet posting interesting even if they are uninterested in her Onlyfans presence/career choices? The wider community has plenty of $.02-a-word substackers who maintain an audience peddling more boring theories backed by less data on more boring and commonplace topics, and those don't seem to inspire this sort of permanent rent-free mental residency that compels people to start raging about her in a thread about someone else whose only commonalities are blogging and being on Onlyfans. This is as if dozens of people complained about Jake from Putanumonit under every discussing of an article about dating by someone in fintech.
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8d ago
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
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22d ago
Ah. Well, apart from the obvious dimension that it is edgy sacred-values trolling, in her case it really doesn't sound so much like particular sympathy for pedos as like a sex worker's spin on the usual lesswronger affectation of "I am still resentful about my childhood and think everyone like me should have been allowed to fast-forward to my adult life as a kid"? The standard version is everyone from Pope Scott I to >half of this forum arguing for abolition of mandatory schooling.
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13d 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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22d ago
"Should have" to what end?
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19d ago
· Edited 19d 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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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.
To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.
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9d 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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11d 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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13d 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?
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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