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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
10d 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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12d 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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29d ago
Atheists of a certain sort simply do not see humility in religion but the opposite so this point never lands with them. But it should raise an interesting question: Christians are tyrannical, know-it-all busybodies, how bad do the consequences of a lack of humility have to be that even their book warns against it?
Often, Christian emphasis on humility registers simply as a way to self-license to be as unhumble as one can be, as long as the arrogance can be rationalised as being in the service of Christianity (or more bluntly divorced from the meaning of words, something that amounts to "I am clearly more humble and therefore superior"). This pattern is by no means exclusive to it - consider the tropes associated with countries that have "Democratic" in their name, or the reactions of "tolerant" left-wingers when asked to tolerate something outside of the standard bag of things to be tolerated.
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19d 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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12d ago
· Edited 10d 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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15d ago
· Edited 15d 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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27d ago
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
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12d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d 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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21d 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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20d ago
· Edited 20d 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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21d ago
I would put these in the "edgy sacred values trolling" (see below) and/or "America" category, which for me makes sense given that I'm currently (back) in a country where the age of consent is 14.
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8d 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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12d 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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25d ago
Comparing those three to Jan 6th (or even seeing them as strictly worse, considering the clear murderous intent) seems fair to me. That doesn't mean the LA stuff is.
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17d 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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25d ago
Well, I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special just so you can equivocate is special pleading. If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often? Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off, and guarantee eyeballs in a way that torching some random police station in bumfuck nowhere won't.
Other countries also hold that legislatures are special: in Germany, for example, where there is otherwise a fairly strong right to public protest, there is a special cutout prohibiting assemblies in a certain radius around federal and state legislatures and the constitutional court. This has been in place since 1920.
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25d 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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21d ago
Well, with that one, I concur with the argument. Fight me?
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21d ago
I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
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15d 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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25d ago
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
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25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.
There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!
Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".
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25d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
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