4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4d ago
I hold any ethno-identity interest group that seeks control over a larger group I want to be a member of to this standard. If I sought to be part of a black community, I would apply the standard to BLM; if I sought to be Ukrainian, I would apply it to Ukrainian Nationalists (and indeed, part of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians trying to apply this standard to Ukrainian Nationalists is a nontrivial component of the civil war!); if I were or sought to be a citizen of Israel, I would apply the standard to Zionists, and so on.
I am generally pro-whataboutism, but in this particular case it's really silly to insinuate that being concerned with the exact definition of the WN ingroup and the ingroup of, say, Zionists are at all comparable. WNs want control of countries that I live in, or at least to split off parts of them. Of course it concerns me to know whether I, and other people I care about, will be inside their circle of concern, in a way that is orders of magnitude apart from what happens in some enclave across the world. I doubt that you do not understand that, so what exactly is it you are trying to say? Simply that WNs are under no obligation to answer the question because they will do what is in their own interest and that's their god-given right? Fine, but then I'm under no obligation to stop asking questions or concern-trolling in a way that will make WNs look bad to prospective allies either, because I find that to be in my own interest and then surely that's my god-given right too. Once you commit to that level of conflict theory, there is generally little point in hosting a debate at all anyway, unless you stand to benefit from seeing one of the sides humiliated and expect to be able to railroad the debate to make that happen.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
11mo ago
Sure there is, you can't tell other people what they find important.
Surely I can express an opinion on what it's reasonable for them to find important.
It's disingenuous to try to boil the debate down to these things.
I'm not trying to "boil down" the debate to those statements, but just using them as glosses for whatever the positions actually are (which probably gets lost at the soundbite level anyway). As far as I can see, the preferred narrative of the anti-trans camp here is that they seek to protect women's sports from trans incursion (are you disputing that?), and if one side says that we need to do a thing in order to right a historical injustice against a small minority that is subjected to suffering far in excess from that experienced by most people in our society, while the other says we need to not do that thing in order to have fairness in women's sports, then I figure that as a neutral and largely indifferent bystander I'd think that the former side has a pretty good case that they care about their cause because it's important but the other side should not care so much about theirs because it's unimportant. Why do you figure are the people against MtF in women's sports largely saying that they are doing it to protect women's sports? Are you saying we shouldn't take them by their word, and instead imagine that they are fighting for a cause equally as grandiose?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).
Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8mo ago
I'm not sure what this example is saying. Is this to say that you would you be okay with your perfectly vanilla heterosexual male relative changing your wife's, or a hypothetical 18 year old daughter's, underwear? Or, if not, do you think this is evidence that they should be jailed or removed from society in some other way, rather than just not letting them do that (resp. not letting your diaper fetishist relative change your infant's diaper)?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
If you had been caught, you would have been fined.
I'm aware. (Not sure about littering, where I lived.) It was a calculated risk I could take.
If a dumb and impulsive criminal is caught littering or fare jumping, they will be fined as well. If they have outstanding warrants, they will be arrested -- because they have just been caught for something other than littering or fare jumping as well.
The bottom line still is that they couldn't take what for me is a calculated and very bounded risk. Fast food can give me gastric distress, but sometimes still is the best option; fare dodging can give me a 40 euro fine, but sometimes likewise is the best option. If criminals were reliably arrested on sight in gastronomic establishments, would they think of it as "shucks, guess it was my bad for doing crime once" or as "fuck this society that has made it clear I can't live in it normally"?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
9d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
assassinate the wrong person by mistake sometimes
For what it's worth, I don't think it makes a huge difference whether they hit Dugin or his daughter, and Fomin was clearly the intended target (with the 42 other injuries being considered acceptable, considering the MO of bombing a public appearance in a closed room). You might argue that hitting anti-Ukrainian agitators and their audience does not imply willingness to hit random civilians, but few people would have been willing to make that distinction e.g. for the Charlie Hebdo attack (plus I heard diffuse statements that at least one of the concerts yesterday may also have been linked to some anti-Ukrainian agitation).
IS claimed responsibility
There are plenty of historical examples of them claiming responsibility for things they didn't do (some parallel comment brought up the Las Vegas shooting). Not that they wouldn't have the motive and means, but the details here so far don't seem to line up - above all, I can't think of Islamic terrorist attacks consistent with the pattern of perpetrators running and, upon being caught, claiming they were anonymously hired to do it for money, while this is the general pattern for Slav-on-Slav terrorism in Russia including in particular the cases that have been attributed to Ukraine beyond doubt. If all we have in favour of the ISIS theory is "perps are vaguely Muslim", "ISIS claimed responsibility" and "main backer of an alternative suspect agreed with the ISIS claim", that is not particularly strong evidence.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
You seem to be painting a picture where the problem is basically that voters are too stupid (to see through lies and avoid repeatedly being fooled, or pay attention when the proponents of Brexit make it clear that they aren't actually against immigration) and helpless (to build their own institutions and political parties, or even "just" start a revolution) to get their preferences satisfied. At that point, it's hard to even invoke something like a social contract for why politicians should heed voter interests in this matter, since a contract implies a deal which implies some sort of mutual benefit and evidently there is no detriment to politicians from defecting; and all that you can appeal to is some sort of slave-morality pity or obligation towards their inferiors. Wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, etc.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
Not quite the same: not having custody isn't really "responsibility" that trying to get custody would amount to escaping from, and pretending to be the one gender/sex that is traditionally taken to be entitled to children does not show that the remaining 81 "neogenders" have anything at all to do with it.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4d ago
No, but I seek to/am part of states that WNs want to make into white ethnostates. (Ignoring the part that I no longer live in the US nor was ever a citizen) I don't think that BLM ever wanted to make the US into a black ethnostate, or split off a part to form one, either; and even if they did, I for sure would not meet the definition for inclusion, nor would anyone I know or have care for beyond of the level I have for the generic stranger (as I somehow managed to spend my $many years in the US completely insulated from the African-American community).
To the extent to which they do want to seize control of things that I or those in my circle of care currently have (possibly shared) access to to hand to those outside of my circle, BLM would be a straight-up enemy to me, but how they define their membership in detail is then not so relevant to me. Unlike in the case of WN, they would presumably not try to lure me or anyone in my circles with a dubious promise that they are fighting for our benefit; it would be beyond any doubt that it is not so.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4mo ago
I think that definition is awfully general, but then surely right-wing preoccupations such as privatised prisons, the military-industrial complex, anti-union laws, and generally every instance where the state collaborates with corporate interests against private individuals (such as the whole legal edifice of copyright and DRM, prosecution of whistleblowers, ...), which historically have been a right-wing domain under the umbrella of pro-business - and let's not start talking about all the military misadventures that the US continues engaging in allegedly in furtherance of the interests of oil companies - should at the very least suffice to make left-wingers' accusations that right-wingers are fascists a plausible thesis to be debated.
(It's true that many of the above have fundamentally become bipartisan ventures, but many lefties within the US and beyond would surely retort that this is just a sign of both US parties being right-wing except for a bunch of wedge issues.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6mo ago
Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
So the bribery part, right? If you have large classes of people locked out of consumption that's waved in their face, you eventually get scenarios like the London riots in 2011 unless you are willing to spend much more on policing (and even then long-term stability is not clear: Bill Gates also seems to indirectly benefit from other things that the lower and middle classes do that are not seething and plotting an overthrow).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
7mo ago
I don't know about that. If I try to think of particularly low-agreeableness/insubordinate peoples, the ones that come to mind are marginal ethnic groups like Chechens and Borderers, who historically tended to be brought to heel by adjacent empires with superior state capacity enabled by having access to a deep pool of soldiers and bureaucrats.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
You can argue (and I'm inclined to agree) that that particular instance is bad and calling it out is appropriate. What makes this a rhetorical superweapon is that it is effectively applied even in cases (such as, arguably, this one) where it is not.
So where do you envision this slope leading?
On that matter, I'm not sure that this idea that people should actually be encouraged to think (non-quantitatively) about outrage-provoking edge cases of a policy would at all work in favour of the right-wing agenda. Most right-wing causes (access to guns, religious freedom, restrictions on abortion...) have edge cases that the median grilling centrist will find far more outrage-inducing (school shootings! sadistic pastors running special Jesus camps in their basement! 10 year old pregnant rape victims!) than that some rapist got transferred to women's prison. (Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons)
I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful. In this particular case, if the prison can't be expected to prevent the rapist from assaulting other inmates, it seems to me that something is wrong with it that goes beyond admitting biologically male rapist inmates, and would only be hacked around by not doing that. Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?
The symmetry with bank robbery doesn't hold, because "jailing bank robbers is unjust" is a minority position, and opposition to any jailing at all is even more so. On the other hand, opposition to torture in general is (mercifully, in my eyes) still mainstream, as is the belief that extreme punishment for negligence is unjust. Argue for jailing bank robbers and most people will nod along and no norms will be changed. Argue for torturing scientists who oversaw major accidents, and you will only leave us with additional torture, because abstract principles like "no torture" are always softer than tribalism like "if we torture, it better be the outgroup". This will neither be torture that you want (because you and your people are in a minority (as weighted by power) disagreed with ~ despised by the majority) nor torture that I want (because I don't want there to be torture).
Well, I don't like people disagreeing with me on the internet, and I would assume you don't get a lot of opportunity to post from prison either...
(Quips aside, "I don't like it" really doesn't amount to much as an argument to remove "it" entirely in the general case. Have you thought through all the different contexts in which the same argument would lead to clearly nonsensical conclusions?)
If we are making facile derogatory comparisons, this is also a commonality between free-market capitalists and cannibals, who both exaggerate the individual's capacity to enter contracts in their own interest.
You could even go a bit further and talk about the aspect common to pedophiles (of the subset that does not particularly care for consent) and anti-trans activists, who both believe in the parents' absolute authority to make decisions about the child's sexual development. Statistics are circulating that something like a third of child sexual abuse cases are perpetrated by parents or close relatives, and I'd imagine that the vast majority of the Eastern European suggestive underage model pictures that flooded the *chans back in the days were created with the support of the parents. Surely only someone who is anti-family would presume to interfere with the parents' judgement there!
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1yr ago
I don't understand the usage of "corollary" (a straightforward consequence of a previous nontrivial statement) here. Is that the word you were meaning to use?
The FDA tweeted the following over a year ago. Is it normal for the FDA to mock drugs like this?
No, but on culture war it is. This was already after Red cultural authorities had thrown their clout behind Ivermectin, no? The FDA, too, is a Blue technocratic institution; of course it would be tempted to put out communication that lowers the status of the Reds, and in this particular case there was the additional motivation for it that the Ivermectin push was a direct attack on the FDA's authority. One would therefore expect the FDA to attack it independently of whether it works, and so the FDA attacking it is not a signal for or against it working.
I thought it was unnecessary to rehash the backstory, but maybe not. My understanding was that it was associated with culture warring almost from the start: the Blue team occupied the "COVID is scary and untreatable, therefore we need lockdowns, mask-wearing and more powers for our technocrats" position. The Red team found the suggested conclusion unbearable, and tried to respond by attacking every point of the premise. One such push was against the "untreatable" part, and took the shape of asserting that a series of widely available remedies that ranged from completely implausible (bleach) to the merely seemingly random (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin) worked against it (with the implication that if it did, the power grab by Blue authorities would be proven unjustifiable). Therefore, on the balance, up to this point the situation is still as I described: Reds would push Ivermectin regardless of whether it works, and the FDA would pan it regardless of whether it works, so neither observation tells us anything about it. The prior still is that a random drug with no evident mechanism of action on COVID would not work on it.
The "cheap old generic drugs suppressed for profit" argument is a better one, though (there, you would actually suspect more effort to suppress effective ones, as if someone takes a cheap old ineffective drug, they don't get cured and are still on the market for the more expensive one afterwards).
But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1mo ago
Russia blaming Ukraine indeed adds little information, but I don't see how you arrive at the conclusion that them making a break for the UA border doesn't mean much. We have plenty of non-ISIS cases where terrorism was committed by Muslim-aligned peoples and where ISIS claimed responsibility, and while the constellation of details is too rare for concrete precedent of "true perp backers claimed ISIS", surely it's a common pattern for more general crimes. On the other hand, do we have precedent of non-UA-backed terrorists running to UA?
Also, what do you rest your claim that it is "much more IS's MO" on?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
In practice I think a group dedicated to harassment and social shunning would probably be very effective without the need for violence.
How is that working out for similar groups in the context of anti-abortion in the US, which I imagine attracts a lot more passive and active support than opposition to something as niche and insular as GoF research could? The theory that COVID was due to slick and eloquent scientists (as opposed to something like unmasked overweight deplorables heavily panting in others' faces at the strip mall) is already thoroughly coded "icky right".
I stand by not wanting to relitigate the issue. This is not only because I don't think any opinions will be shifted, but also because I don't have time (for very pragmatic real life reasons involving an upcoming conference deadline), especially if you are going to argue by way of walls of text full of tangential points bordering on a Gish gallop, rather than a targeted refutation of the points you claim to refute.
I didn't think it's unconventional to assign continuous identity to governments based on consensual transition between key personnel.
That also seems like a tortured qualification of the definition, which the first dictionary entry I can find simply gives as "an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed." As I see it, if obstructive action leads to a transition in government that was not approved within the framework of that government's own declared principles, this is a revolution. The Ukrainians themselves also call it a revolution.
The rest of your post seems to simply be telling a story trying to illustrate how crooked Yanukovych was and how virtuous the protesters were, along with apparent attempts ("That negotiation period towards a unity government was the context of the leaked US diplomat phone call that is regularly raised as proof of a US coup") to substitute my claim with a stronger and therefore easier to refute one. Virtuousness does not make a revolution less of one, and you are not addressing the part where the government that emerged from this revolution then used military force to assert its power over a set of people who never in any meaningful way consented to being ruled over by this new government and were actively resisting it, unless you want to postulate some clause in the Ukrainian constitution that said that as an alternative to elections you can also have revolutions if enough people near the capital (and perhaps in Washington) think that the elected government is sufficiently evil.
I think the Atlantic Council as a source is only distinguished from RT by having better writers.
More options
Context Copy link