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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
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
So then why do you want to use the term so badly? You should have seen a lot of arguments against using it that are not "it's a conspiracy theory" by now. Can you be baited into doing something if the outgroup condemns you for doing it in sufficiently maddening terms? If the "right-wingers take Ivermectin against COVID because they are anti-science conspiracy theorists" needling had become obnoxious enough, would you have taken it just on those grounds? (If you do actually believe in Ivermectin, replace with drinking/injecting bleach)
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10mo ago
No, it's not so alike. Germans, Americans, Africans and Chinese would agree about classifying a typical black and a white guy, even as the others might find the US "one drop" boundary weird. Meanwhile, there are real differences between what people consider fairly central examples of left and right, to the point that I've seen German press refer to the BSW (new split-off "tankie" party with direct lineage from the GDR capital-P Party) as right-wing because they are against SJWs, immigrants and Ukraine.
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10mo ago
So what do you call a movement that seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly left-wing hierarchical social environments? Is it okay to also call them - presumably including you - "Cultural Marxists"? Is the entire Online Right, as represented on this forum, a Cultural Marxist movement, or is the term reserved for those who fight against a right-wing environment? That seems like it's pretty close to @Primaprimaprima's observation below that part of the motivation is simply to be able to say that opponents of right-wingers = Marxists.
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing? What do you tell to people like me whose political compass is rotated just enough that the SJW establishment looks like a right-wing movement with a new coat of paint, simply having gone through the usual evolution where a left-wing movement (ex. early Christianity) overthrows a right-wing establishment (ex. the pagan Roman aristocracy) and proceeds to become the new right-wing establishment (ex. the papacy) itself? Now you have to refine your definition to say "no, Marxists is the proper term for whatever instance of this general dynamic my tribe is fighting against", which looks increasingly contrived.
In general, I think it is right to be suspicious of people who insist on using a particular preexisting term for some politically significant notion at all costs, because this is the central element of a widely deployed manipulation strategy to redirect people's intuitions, heuristics and rules that were built up in response to one thing to be aimed towards another. This is what is going on when SJWs insist that you use their definition of "racism" (and relegate portions that were in the old extension but are excluded from the new to the semantic ghetto of "reverse racism"), instead of going the least-resistance path of coming up with a fresh word to capture the exact set of tendencies that they want to suppress, or "fascism", and why the content industry is adamant about referring to copyright violations as "theft" and "piracy", and I'm sure you could come up with many other examples. This is notwithstanding the other extreme, pointed out by @ArjinFerman, where one side is denied the use of any term for a politically significant notion at all - but the answer to a trap being laid in front of you isn't to defiantly turn around and walk into the trap laid behind you.
Of course, "Cultural Marxism" is an interesting example, because part of the intended transference seems to go the other way - the insistent advocate hopes that by being convinced that he is fighting against "Cultural Marxism", the anti-SJW will in the future also take up the torch of the fight against plain (economic) Marxism. I can't think of many good examples of this from other sides, since it requires a degree of having lost but still being around to plot a comeback; perhaps old-school economic lefties should pick up the strategy and push the idea that newspapers, Hollywood etc. are just "cultural Big Oil" that pulls the same tactic of using US foreign policy might to gain access to new markets.
The problem with this transference is not just that it is manipulative, but also that as soon as it is recognised, you lose a big part of your potential coalition, namely all the people (me included) who think that (economic) Marxism isn't particularly good, but the movements that fight against Marxism or think that we directionally need less Marxism are strictly worse. I would like to fight against SJWs, and in fact I consider it very important to do so, but I would be very reluctant to make common cause with a movement that wants to take some or all of my energy to do that and redirect it towards reducing taxes, abolish mandatory healthcare, or give more of a political voice to the wealthy.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Seems closely related to the old finding from the okcupid blog (here's gwern quoting it, can't find archives of the original right now) that the question "Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?" is a good predictor of liberal vs. conservative US politics, with "simple" being the conservative answer.
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10mo ago
Are you saying that you don't think states or peoples have moral rights beyond what the Americans grant them? I would be curious if most people (in the West? in the US?) actually see it that way. It seems to echo a sentiment that used to be featured in those sneering-at-fundamentalists collections that were popular in the 200Xes frequently, where Christians would assert that without God there are no moral principles or rights (and so Atheists are scary/probably only pretending to have morality and ready to rob and murder you whenever nobody is watching).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Whether Hezbollah is state or non-state seems fairly irrelevant to me, as they surely must enjoy broad popular support to function. (Something like 90% among Shiites, who are a majority in the parts adjacent to Israel) For all means and purposes, I think they can be modelled as a shadow government prosecuting a continuing low-key war against Israel on behalf of their people.
Lebanon and Palestine/Israel were separated by enemy action, and up until the colonization it is difficult to see the residents in the south of the French Mandate and the north of the British Mandate as separate peoples. Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands. This brings us back to the original question - why do Arabs not get accorded this right? I would be happy, in the sense of seeing a "master morality" system that is at least honest if not necessarily agreeable, if proponents of continued support for Israel simply argued that Israel is an ally, a superior civilisation and strong enough to deserve victory. However, its supporters can't seem to be able to stop to make their argument on the "slave morality" basis, saying that Israel deserves our support because they have been unfairly oppressed, undeservedly attacked and we owe them a moral debt (...to help them steal from and slaughter a third party?). I don't see how the latter can be done without trickery.
(...but all that being said, I now remember that we have basically opposite value systems and preferences regarding anything to do with international politics, and so it is probably not particularly productive for us to continue this discussion as we will both just get upset with no resulting shift in beliefs. Ceasefire?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
That's assuming the Germans don't seize Iceland (I think they had a plan to do so, which may only have been scrapped after things started to go south on the Eastern Front). A lot of things could have gone differently if the Germans had been under less pressure at that stage - consider also that in a "Nazi Poland" scenario, the British are denied crucial intelligence that probably was necessary for them to break the Enigma cipher.
MAD doesn't require the Germans to be able to destroy US industrial capacity - a simple "leave us alone in our European possessions or we ride a suicide U-boat with a nuke into Manhattan" may have been enough to give the Americans pause at least for a while. (The Germans did manage to land some guys on US soil unseen!) Consider also that the Pacific War is probably made more painful for the US, since a defeated Soviet Union means that the Nazis get an overland connection to the Japanese empire. If the Soviets could use that link to overrun Japan's continental possessions in two weeks, the Germans can use it to send them significant backup.
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10mo ago
What does "actively condemn" mean? Few people are going as far as saying that the US should bomb Israel. The condemnation is only relative to a baseline of close to unconditional material and political support. Not that I'm American (though I'm a citizen of another major IL supporter), but I don't see why I can't vote and advocate to withdraw all support and let the situation solve itself, or how I could do this without condemning the load-bearing parts of the overwhelming consensus to continue support.
Declaring the government structures of your enemy terrorists and therefore outside of normal conventions of acceptable wartime conduct is all fun and games until it is done to you and yours. Israel has performed targeted assassinations of scientists involved with the Iranian nuclear programme; I would like to see the reaction if Islamists killed some US academic involved in DARPA, or any Israeli scientist involved in defense projects. Ukraine has killed journalists and lobbed basically unguided ordnance at Russian cities; I doubt it would be framed as an acceptable wartime move if Russia pulled something like the pager trick on Ukraine's leadership or even merely on GRU/whoever is behind the assassinations on the Ukrainian side by any of its cheerleaders.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Being bombed surely counts as being under attack. Why does the case for Israel's cause always have to be made by way of gaslighting?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite without having an invasion army lined up to follow up, and a German victory in Russia surely would have put any Normandy plans at least a few years behind schedule - long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up, at which point there would just be MAD.
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10mo ago
I don't know, I thought that the whole Mossad/Krav Maga memeplex of Israeli hypercompetence had already persuaded those who would be attracted by strength regardless of the ends. Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position? If anything, there it was more realistic that there would have been converts, because Arabs were not known as legendarily competent while you can't swing a cat in memespace without hitting some form of hostile or friendly praise for Israeli skill.
There was the video of the pager exploding while being placed on the counter at a grocery store, which at least suggests that the owners do not always keep them on their body, and reports of injured hospital staff (who would plausibly be handed pagers if the de-facto rulers obtained a large stash of them) and children. I'm sure Israel and media allies will deny and cast doubt upon those as only reported by Hezbollah (as it's not like there's some other agency on the ground keeping track that could not be painted as biased), but my sense was that even in cuckold countries like Germany people have lately been dismissive towards the routine Israeli claims that only militants were hit as those appeared a little too automatic and unrealistic.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
They are mostly facts (except for the "cannon fodder" part, which by its standard definition also imputes a particular speculative motivation), but I don't understand how these facts are evidence either against the point you were addressing originally (that if all of Ukraine had capitulated immediately, they would have had peace) or the additional hypotheses that you added (which are no less of an intricate narrative) that Russia would have assaulted Poland or the Baltics because they supposedly really think that they can expand their borders up to the point where they receive a beating. That Georgia essentially capitulated to Russian demands, was not annexed even though an annexation would have been well within Russian capabilities, and is now at peace, and no Abkhazians or South Ossetians are being sent to fight against Georgia, is also a fact.
I am honestly a bit baffled by the reasoning in your post. Abstracting over the identities of the participants, it seems to amount to something like: A is fighting against B and C over something, and tells B and C that if they just stop resisting, they will no longer have to fight. B joins A, so now it's A and B against C. You come along and observe that B is still fighting (with A against C). Therefore, you conclude that A's initial claim that if B and C both capitulated there would be no fight is false. After all, B capitulated and is still fighting, and perhaps even if C capitulated D would have come along and have had a fight against A, B and C together.
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10mo ago
Russian tanks were in Gori, 25km from the capital, for several days, and if I remember correctly the Georgian resistance was reduced to the level of shootouts with civilian police units. There's little doubt that they could have pushed into the capital and simply installed a puppet government for a tiny fraction of the losses they have taken in Ukraine, which would have allowed them far more influence on Georgian internal politics, if they were actually interested in conquest/expansion beyond not losing what they already had (Abkhazia and South Ossetia).
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10mo ago
On one hand, it's impressive that they actually could pull off such a scheme that seems like it's straight out of the movies; on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage, and I can't help but think that my feeling of being impressed is very similar to how I felt about the 9/11 attacks. I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get. Is this a sign that they do want to accelerate the timeline towards a big showdown, perhaps thinking that delaying it for longer would only make their enemies stronger (Iran getting the bomb?) and their allies weaker/more distracted (derivative of public support in the West negative anyway, plus US/EU might get occupied by Russia and eventually China)?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Either of the parties routing around them seems like an unrealistic prospect considering their location. In hindsight, the strategy that would probably have preserved the most Polish lives (if perhaps not other things that the Poles valued) would have been to immediately and enthusiastically join one of the two warring parties, preferably the Nazis as they had the initial momentum behind them. The extra ~30m population and industrial base would have probably made enough of a difference to turn the Battle of Moscow into an Axis victory, rapidly putting us in an alternative history timeline where it does not seem so likely that Poland is turned into a primary battleground again anytime soon.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
As far as I can tell, observations so far are inconsistent with that model of reality. Why did Russia not attempt to absorb (at least some part of) Georgia when it was lying flat and defeated in 2008, and could have been easily cut off any prospective allied supplies? Why did they wait until 2022 to attack the rest of Ukraine, giving them time to sort out their political turmoil and overhaul their army? There is little there to suggest that they have the cupidity or ambition to pay the blood toll to make their geopolitical situation better; even the war we are seeing now only suggests that they are paying just barely enough to not let it become much worse (as starting a war only to lose it would inevitably do), that is, they are driven by fear/desperation. (No mobilization, no assassination of leadership, barely even any escalation apart from the power plant bombing that they only did briefly during their "darkest hour")
The leadership of the Baltics asserting that they are afraid of being attacked by Russia is not even a signal of them actually believing this (let alone of it actually being likely), because it would be advantageous for them to claim that and fan the Ukraine war even if they were privately assured that it would never happen. Before 2022 the general dynamics of EU politics was such that the smaller countries of the Eastern periphery were constantly being shoved around by Germany on account of its economic might, which as we now have found out was hanging by the thread of cheap Russian hydrocarbons. Being Ukraine's main supporters and playing up the threat to themselves put them at the top of the list for receiving American military aid (or at least newer gear from countries further west in "ring exchange" schemes). It also no doubt plays well with their populations, many of whom still embrace revenge fantasies against Russia for 45 years of communism (not to mention the leaders themselves, who often are old men who were already politics-adjacent back then and thus personally faced the business end of the red boot).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails, unless you don't actually want to contribute to understanding whether or not it has merit. You seem to primarily just want to ridicule the Russian position ("same old gripe", implication of not being "respectable", the "learned and wise" snark), which could either be a knee-jerk response (in which case, please don't) or because you think you have a moral imperative to help lower the enemy's status. But in the latter case, does doing that on a niche forum with bounded readership really help your cause? There are few normies here that could be converted or made to pick up subtle status signals, while the ability to maintain niche forums with nuanced discussion is actually one of the bigger status advantages that the West has over Russia, which has been organically and artificially stamping out its nuanced voices. Thus you might just be giving ammo to fence-sitters to point at you and say "see, both sides are exactly the same". (On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.)
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10mo ago
I've been noticing Russell conjugation of "enemy fights for (leadership) / ally fights for (country)" quite frequently lately - notably, the Ukraine war has people fighting for Putin vs. ones fighting for Ukraine in Western media, and people fighting for Russia vs. ones fighting for Zelenskiy in Russian media. Has this always been a thing?
Also, while pro-Palestinians will certainly say they are fighting for Palestine rather than Hamas, they don't seem to say that Israelis are fighting for Likud/Netanyahu. Is this just because the vanguard of Israeli anti-Palestine action is too obviously pluricentric?
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10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
I don't mean to argue that the attitude I impute to those people is healthy for themselves or society at large - just that it does not have to be dishonest, nor even made from stuff that is unusual for humans. The less colourful example of a similar sentiment from your ingroup is plain xenophobia (in the traditional, literal sense), like how a British gentleman in the 1850s may have felt queasy about living in a street full of Orientals. This is not to defend being so estranged from internal political opposition that it becomes an unfathomable other to you, but that jug of milk has already been spilt.
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10mo ago
I think there may well be a thought process along the lines of "This person is known to unapologetically violate some societal taboos of the highest order. How do I know he won't violate the taboo against suddenly punching his interlocutor in the face? You claim there is a big difference and he for sure won't violate that one, but is it my duty to understand the details of the principles of people with insane evil morality?". There is such a thing as being afraid of something you can't predict - imagine being trapped with a bear (and the claim that this bear is strictly vegetarian at this time of the year) or a member of one of those uncontacted tribes that sometimes shoot outsiders on sight (but sometimes are happy to trade in shells and trinkets).
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10mo ago
My impression was that alcohol is much less reliable in inducing that soma-like state of sedation and contentedness that people take weed for, and the margin between when alcohol makes you a happy zombie and when it makes you feel violently sick it quite narrow in comparison. This puts weed closer to the wireheading attractor (sacrifice qualities that give humans moral value in their own eyes to maximise feeling of pleasure).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
Nothing in the author's writing implies that they are in the group of people thinking of what is being aborted as a "baby". Both sides regularly fail theory of mind over this - blues can't imagine someone actually thinking that an abortion is anything like killing a human (and therefore conclude that pro-life must be mental gymnastics for wanting to punish women who have sex for fun), and reds can't imagine someone not thinking that fetuses are human (and therefore think pro-choice is mental gymnastics for cynical murderism).
If there's any implied argument, it's just something like "you can't commit to ruining the life of some dumbasses just to make concessions to the outgroup" - like most people, the author has sympathy and there-but-for-the-grace attitude for way more dumbasses than outgroup members. Forced motherhood = ruined life incidentally is yet another blue outlook that reds often don't believe is real.
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10mo ago
Surely it's not a sacrifice if it's fun, any more than "giving up doing the chores for Lent" would be an act of devotion.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
I understand your frustration here, but it seems manifestly true (from my perspective as an academic, albeit not in the humanities) that the academic priesthood of the SJ establishment has appropriated Marxist vocabulary as well as a fair amount of concepts (whether they use them correctly or not) and generally sees itself as the rightful inheritor to labels including "Marxist", "leftist", "socialist" et cetera, and they only disavow them as part of a slippery routine when their opposition tries to put a name on them (see relevant Freddie DeBoer post). At some point it just seems impractical to not go along with the self-identification of the overwhelming victors - almost as if you insisted that no major modern branch of Christianity were actually Christian, though of course it's not a perfect analogy since we are not in a setting where Christians protest whenever members of other religions pejoratively call them Christian, even as they happily identify with the label among themselves.
Well, this is (almost) a motte I'm happy to concede - the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism". I have seen evidence of existence of communities that used that term for themselves, but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?). If you want to claim that those groups, however small they are, begot the "woke" that we see today to a sufficient degree that "resulted" is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.), this is pretty close to the textbook definition of a conspiracy (events are secretly steered by a small group). Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.
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