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<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10mo ago
I'm trying to figure out on what proportions this actually describes your beliefs, amounts to an instance of trying a different belief on for size, and is an exercise in tricking the resident contrarians into vigorously defending the polar opposite viewpoint. Either way, the statement about fewer riots at least seems baseless - I actually happened to be in London in 2010?11? when the minorities were rioting, and it still looked more serious than the pictures we are seeing now.
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18d ago
· Edited 18d 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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3mo ago
Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
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18d 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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12d ago
"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.
You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?
(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)
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7mo ago
Since everything is looking like a Trump win now, what are your actual predictions for the trajectory of the Ukraine war?
As far as I'm concerned, the doomsaying consensus predicting something like an end to supplies, forced armistice followed by Russia rearming to strike later with accumulated force struck me as unfounded and downright strange. If we even accept the premise that Trump would in fact cut supplies and force a truce, it's not at all clear to me that this would be to Ukraine's disadvantage. If anything, UA currently seems to be the side that would greatly benefit from a pause, as they could actually train up their masses of conscripts (probably to a higher standard than is available to Russia, judging by performance of "elite" Ukrainian vs. "elite" Russian troops) rather than burning them as fast as they can be equipped and give their backers time to actually ramp up production of crucial high-tech equipment such as air defense platforms, where it's clear that in the limit the West's ability to produce would outstrip Russia's ability to attrite but they just happen to be stuck on the back foot. Meanwhile, it's not clear how well Russia's losses and departures and weird 8D economic sprezzatura would even hold up under a sudden few months of deafening silence if the guns were to rest, and they don't really have all that much slack left to ramp production up further.
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia, while conditional on everything continuing as before I would now expect Ukraine losing more and more until its will to fight is broken and it feels compelled to sign a much less advantageous treaty of its own accord. Why is the former scenario not even being treated as a possibility by respectable publications? Is it just that they all tried to convert some pro-Ukraine goodwill into anti-Trump sentiment?
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22d 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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3mo ago
MH17
That argument is as relevant to this topic as if I brought up Ukraine apologists doubting that Azov is led by neonazis as an argument against a Bucha massacre.
FUD
I'm pretty sure the term was around long after the average Mottizen (wasn't our average age in the mid-thirties last time anyone polled?) started using the internet.
Anyway, I actually reviewed the Wikipedia page before making my initial response, and from what I can tell, there is still no evidence of more than some tens of victims from any party that is not either directly controlled by pro-Ukrainian interests or citing their numbers. We used to have mechanisms to get neutral information in these situations (e.g. the Indian observers in the Korean war, who also uncovered a lot of BS that was and is sometimes still being treated as fact in US reporting - just compare the account of the Geoje uprising in "This Kind of War" to what has by now even made it into the Wikipedia article); if this case is so clear-cut, why is nobody inviting a neutral party to investigate here?
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3mo ago
Are you unable to make your case without insinuating that those who disagree must also hold some other beliefs (that you presumably find it easier to argue against)? Unfortunately for you, I am not an Ivermectin believer.
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4mo ago
Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves
This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?
Differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship
The counterexample that immediately comes to mind is Atenism which during its brief life went full iconoclasm on the normal Egyptian religion and afterwards got eradicated in turn. Occasional Chinese persecution of Buddhists also comes to mind. The Romans also had little respect for Celtic religion.
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6mo ago
I don't understand the point of this post, apart from venting about your outgroup. Sure, the omissions from the commutation list are notable for being obviously due to consideration for CW optics, but is there no explanation you can think of for being against the death penalty that is not being "pro-crime" or thinking that there is a possibility of punishing the wrong person? This is not the first time this topic has been discussed on this forum, or elsewhere, but you add no new arguments, dismiss the wealth of existing arguments for and against (seemingly out of conviction that tapping the "evil" sign about those you want to see executed should be all the argument one needs?), and do little to even encourage others to have a healthy discussion, by declaring your contempt and anger for those who disagree with you and throwing around colourful invectives like "demonic".
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9mo 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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5d ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
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4mo ago
The more important question, in my eyes, is whether "the Europeans", or the EU, are even a natural geopolitical unit if the US actually draws down its support. Its scale and structure have grown way beyond the initial undertaking of intertwining the three perpetual poles of conflict (France, Germany and the UK) economically and culturally so they would never go to war against each other again, and while I would see the France-Germany axis of that project as essentially successful and stable for the foreseeable future, it's hard to understand any of the eastward expansion as anything other than driven by a mixture of American geopolitical interests (which are now being withdrawn) and the Western European industry's interest in maintaining wage pressure on their own workers (which is increasingly irrelevant as Western European industry itself becomes irrelevant, Eastern European living standards have gone up, and Arabs/Africans have become an alternative source of undercutting labour) and supported by a well-oiled deputised propaganda machine of transatlanticist media and NGOs (which is getting weakened as American soft power is eating itself and the USAID money hose has been shut off, though it has a heavy flywheel).
Without either the US stick of "we can bring you on the brink of civil war" or the US carrot of "we can ensure political stability, pay for your defense and insulate you from responsibility for any hard and unpopular decisions", it's not clear why countries like Germany or France would have any shared interests with countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Poland, which are all mooching off subsidies and still basically behaving like adversaries (between sabotaging infrastructure and demanding ever more reparations). The natural order of things in an America-free Europe may see Western Europe downsizing back to something like a Coal and Steel Plus community, which would maintain cordial relations with the great gas station in the far East, while the Baltics have to figure out for themselves how to shine the boots of the two greater powers on either side well enough that they do not just get partitioned up and invaded again. Interesting things would probably start happening along the Balkans-Greece-Turkey axis, but the rump EU parties might be able to muster enough of a peacekeeping and expeditionary force to keep the minnows down there from each other's throats (though it might be hard to save Greece from a thousand-cut death in the long run, similar to what is happening to Armenia).
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4mo ago
Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?
No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?
It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.
This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.
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6mo ago
If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.
In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).
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4mo ago
I don't think the point about Hitler's identity politics is as surprising as you make it out to be, given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret. In fact, this is what the difference in their assessment often openly stems from - Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil. If you wreak murder at an inconceivable scale in the service of evil goals, you are a particularly insidious (because effective) kind of evil; if you however wreak murder in your pursuit of good, you are seen as closer to something like a tragic or merely misguided, even antiheroic figure.
It's easy for resentful right-wingers to see this as a simple case of who/whom thinking being conveniently weaponised against them, but unless you specifically subscribe to (or want to no-enemies-on-the-right) Hitler's brand of identity politics, you are not actually the [antonym of beneficiary]. In the grand scheme of things, most murderous movements in history are actually tolerated, including ones that would unambiguously code conservative in the modern eye - nobody bats an eye at Genghis Khan branding, and even crusader chic is still on the menu (could you imagine a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings II, but modelling the political tug-of-war between Hitler's Gauleiters?) despite their portfolio including religiously motivated rape, murder and land grabs against people further down the progressive stack, use of child soldiers and much more.
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4mo ago
I don't understand why this would be a (materialistic) interest for Germany or anyone west of it. There is a spiritual interest, sure, but I contend that it was manufactured by transatlanticists. The Baltics seem to me to be a net negative, and even then Russia wasn't making any real moves against them since they joined NATO. I don't see the Russians having done anything that could be fairly interpreted as rejecting a German offer to be Germany's gas station, unless you understand such an offer to also include Russia admitting the US State Department up its rear (in Ukraine, Georgia, and domestic opposition), in which case Germany was making a bad and certainly not "generous" offer against its own interest. Germany should have considered slapping Ukraine itself after it started stealing gas meant for transit to Germany in the 2000s; instead it demurred as our Baltic "allies" did their utmost to sabotage any project to expand gas export routes that bypass it.
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4mo ago
I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?
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4mo ago
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
I do not understand why you consider keeping your reaction to yourself to be dishonest - a forum is not a YouTube reaction video where the point is to feel a simulacrum of human connection by empathising with the uploader's expressions. There are things that can only be done in the textual format precisely because I don't need to know how you feel about the issue, and you don't need to know how I feel about it, and so we can exchange thoughts that otherwise never would make it past the wall of irreconcilable feelings on the issue between us. If you do however think that putting your feelings out there is necessary for your posts to not be "hollow", or something that looks like a number of seething people talking to each other while pretending to be automatons is unpleasant to you, there are still ways you could have done it that would have made more allowance for a conversation that is not one-sided to proceed. Just say that you are angry, and are finding it hard to stay level-headed, and then move on; and if you think that the rest of your post would not have enough to fill the hollow if that anger were filleted out of it, then maybe the post does not need to be made.
You may not appreciate what it would be like to post in an environment where this level of emotional polemic is levelled against you. I think I could take a shot, just for the impression: "The way I see it, the pro-death-penalty crowd has more in common with the common murderer than their supposedly 'pro-crime' opposition. They both agree that some of their problems are best solved by killing, and only disagree about the right targets. What they have is essentially a coalition of the bloodthirsty (as seen by the correlation between the pro-war, the pro-death-penalty, and the pro-gun-rights who get giddy fantasizing about shooting a black kid running away with their TV) and the victims and their relatives. I have nothing but contempt for the former, who cynically seduced the latter at their morally weakest." Would you feel particularly encouraged to engage in a discussion with an opening post like this? What if it were upvoted at +30 and bathed in supportive responses?
most people would not be affronted by a poster referring to Bashar al Assad as evil, even if they disagree, for example.
If this forum had a sizeable contingent of Alawites who had part of their family slaughtered by Islamists and saw him as the rampart that stood firm for years saving the rest of them from the same fate, while the world community was hypocritically slandering him and heaping apologia upon the "democratic rebels", or people like my Telegram-addicted relatives who believe that the people in Assad's "torture chambers" are largely the burn-infidels-alive-in-cages types, perhaps they would be.
There is obviously some venting involved here. Even so, if someone's actual position is that it's good that Kaboni Savage has been pardoned, that Joseph Biden has demonstrated his wisdom and mercy, and that I'm mistaken about the evil being done, there seems like plenty of space to do so. I interpret the disinterest in doing so as less about my failings as a poster and more about how actually indefensible this executive action is.
What principle is fairly argued in a hostile frame like this? This is as much of a concession of space for disagreement as it would be if someone posting an anti-gun-rights diatribe, based on several instances of contemptible people being sold guns after some pro-gun decision (and perhaps some people disliked by the pro-gun group still not being sold one, too), invited people to argue for the wisdom and civic-mindedness of selling a gun to the most repulsive instance of a gun owner.
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8mo ago
Unfortunately, knowledge of Gell-Mann amnesia as a meme/antimeme is not nearly strong enough to overcome the temptation of a powerful institution's offer of ammo to defend your ingroup's membership-defining beliefs. Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?
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10mo ago
Have they, or anyone, done it before on the soil of a country that is friendly to the leader and has sufficient state capacity of its own that there isn't some sort of "we're just doing policing for you that you would be doing yourself if your country functioned" narrative that lets everyone save some measure of face? Israel assassinated some Iranian scientists before, but that seemed like a lower-ranked target than the leader of an allied military (and anyway was shut down by US pressure about a decade ago). This seems akin to if Russia went from having that Chechen militiaman shot in Berlin to blowing up Zelenskiy (or at least Syrskiy?) during one of his visits to the West, which surely would be seen as an escalation - or Ukraine going from merely blowing up Russian milbloggers to setting a bomb in Russia for Kim Jong Un.
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17d ago
· Edited 17d ago
Well, I'd peg Iran as a good case of "bad guys who are in the right". I don't have much love left for the Islamic theocracy they are running and think there are many ways in which they deny human flourishing for no good reason at all, but also it seems clear to me that they have more of a popular mandate to run the country than anyone else does, and in particular they came to power as a sort of last-resort response to all sorts of alternative attempts of running Iran were tried and turned out to be more unjust.
As for Israel Bad, let me present an abbreviated case that Israel is in fact Bad. Really, in my estimation and value system, it is hard to think of a state entity that is more unambiguously evil: they stole land to build a murderous ethnostate (the last part already being bad in itself, if you subscribe to a certain brand of humanism); take, take and take from even their so-called friends while repaying the friendship with perfidy and treason, and use their extensive influence network to gaslight the friends into not even being able to coherently respond to said perfidy; and, worst of all, they come to be among the worst purveyors of hypocrisy and double standards anywhere to cover up for their actions, which I see as an attack on the idea of standards and rules, and civilisation built upon it, itself. If an Arab kills one random Israeli, they tell us, this is an atrocity of the highest order, retroactively justifying every abuse that not only this Arab but the grandfather of his cousin thrice removed was subjected to; if an Israeli kills a hundred random Arabs, this is maybe a little excessive and you really wish they would exercise restraint but of course their right to defend themselves should not be questioned? Those hundred probably included a lot of people who felt vaguely positively about the Arab who killed one Israeli before? Even their very founding myth does this - their target demographic suffered the great injustice of being murdered and expelled for the sake of someone else's ethnostate, so they will gloriously murder and expel an entirely unrelated people to get their ethnostate. The median Israeli, furthermore, seems about as complicit in this as any citizen can be complicit in the actions of their country - few other countries are as affluent, polyglot and well-connected, and I figure any Israeli who wanted to leave would be welcomed with open arms in most of the Western world. Certainly, if I were Israeli, I hope I would have the integrity to either leave or else accept any retribution that comes my way with the serenity of a repentant murderer on death row.
I think having the worst version of their standards applied to themselves is the most appropriate punishment for purveyors of double standards. Israel contends that 55k dead Palestinians (80% civilians) is a just response to 1.2k dead Israelis (68% civilians) (Wikipedia figures). If against all odds Iran came through and successfully applied the same ratio to them, I would not think the world became a better* place, but it would be hard to shake the feeling that it became a more just one, in the ruat caelum way.
*I do not reject the argument that net suffering even for Arabs in Israel (let alone net disutility for its Imperial Citizens) is lower than net suffering for Arabs in self-governed countries, but find it irrelevant. I wish for people to have the right to be governed by their own choice and consent, including the right to be governed badly.
The whole Bucha story still stinks to high heaven. I don't think nothing happened, but it seems like the number of killings of civilians that are actually backed by solid evidence can be counted in the tens, and is more in the class of wanton violence by undisciplined military units that both parties in this conflict have been engaging in whenever they were in an area with a hostile civilian population than anything resembling the systematic massacre the pro-UA press wants it to be. The initial messaging about it was chaotic, too - I still remember the strangely arranged shots of "streets full of corpses" that were circulated in the earliest days of the narrative, with the bodies wearing something resembling military fatigues with white armbands (before the Western press had realised that white armbands were and continue being used as friend identification by Russian units - Ukrainians use blue).
There is really no reason to assume that a few civilians killed by trashy soldiers shooting at everything that moves, in a chaotic situation where an expected victory was turning into a rout, would have translated into many more in a setting where the victory proceeded as expected. Of course it's plausible that there would have been a French-style resistance, which attracted many more participants who would die in their subsequent armed struggle - but resistance fighters are not hapless civilians.
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