Sure, that would be sufficient (though the first half of your statement has to be extended to cover groups that want to seize a role that I expect to speak in my name and/or fight for my interests, such as the government of a country I live in). Having that black on white would make it easy, since then there would be no debate that I can treat them as enemies with all that entails. "Either you owe me some clarity regarding whether I'm in your circle of care and to what extent, or you can direct further inquiries to the business end of the police/military representing me" is a binary choice I'm happy to offer.
You might want to protest that BLM-like groups also want to govern, but there the uncertainty that matters for me is fundamentally different. They would presumably claim that they want a government for all, and only intend to stop unfairness that black people currently experience. There is no sense in which fluctuations in their definition of black could become relevant for me; I would only doubt that the "government for all" part would be executed in earnest. On the other hand, the WNs leave no doubt that they do not want "government for all", but the exact boundaries of the set of "whites" for whom they intend to govern would have a great deal of impact on me and things I care about.
To be very concrete, I believe that WNs understand that most whites are against them, but think that given sufficient power and time they could brainwash most of them to support the WN agenda, and kick the remaining ones out as race traitors. The real definition of the "whites" they fight for is therefore "Caucasian + will be persuaded by our propaganda". This is not a very good pitch to those in this set who have not yet been persuaded by the propaganda, and therefore they want to remain coy about it.
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1d 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.
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1d 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.
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2d ago
Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.
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2d ago
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
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2d ago
I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.
If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.
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6d 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.
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6d ago
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
What do you think was the reason, then?
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
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6d ago
What's the evidence that absolute poverty is what matters, rather than inequality? Many uprisings happened in societies where the 5th-percentile poorest person was better off than the 5th-percentile richest person in some historical society that remained stable. It seems to be a common belief in many circles that humans are mostly motivated by relative status.
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6d ago
For the same reason as why you want to cut the top off your power economy by having rule of law and a constitution, presumably.
More pragmatically, historical precedent shows that if you don't the plebs eventually rebel and you have to spend a lot more resources on suppressing them, or actually just wind up being hung from the lampposts.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
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6d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
Medvedev
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries?
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
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7d ago
Eh, my sense is that we have maybe one-digit number of hardline American jingoist posters who overwhelm any remotely Ukraine-related thread by participation and effort, and many more people who just generally lower the sanity waterline by seeing it as yet another metaphorical battleground for the US culture war where the only thing that matters is Hunter Biden and which side is more (fake and) gay. This seems to be about what to expect for a topic that attracts agenda posters but lies outside of the specialisation of anyone producing the sort of deep dives that tend to cause productive discussion around here.
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8d ago
Has it? Americans understand Japanese culture far less than any European one, and conventional wisdom says that by V-J day the cold war was already going full steam ahead, so the Americans largely decided to leave the system that at least was manifestly not communist alone, rather than trying to impose some sweeping changes, fat-fingering them and risking another North Korea or China.
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12d ago
hack the US
What does that even mean? I don't think Manning hacked anything, let alone "the US".
I have also heard the part where Assange helped Manning with the commands to run to exfiltrate the data, but I wouldn't be so confident that to ban this would define a test that normal journalists would generally pass. Have none of them provided their sources with some kind of technical support, like "here's how you use this camera you asked us to lend you"? What about interviewers that help their interviewees tweak the formulation of a statement that winds up becoming the linchpin of the latter's violation of some confidentiality law, like "S: So what I'm saying is the US r... rev... - J: reverse engineered? - S: ... reverse engineered alien technology, right."?
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13d ago
My point is that it's unsurprising for people who are perfectly capable of watching gore/scat/gross video to still be viscerally disgusted by racist language, and therefore to want to terminate consumption for reasons that are not the gore/scat/gross content fundamentally shaking their worldview (any more than the people who were shocked by me intonation-matching their "poggers" with its ni- counterpart were so because the single word made them realise some truth they were suppressing).
Also, I've seen American flyover country content that is more viscerally disgusting to me. I can't say that rats bother me much, but I'd say a hot dog lost inside the folds of some trailer blob's gut for a few months before being rediscovered by EMTs is strictly worse than feces.
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13d ago
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation. If you've actually spent any amount of time on the internet as a rubbernecker motivated by something other than confirmation of your biases, you will know that most of the material India is being singled out for is hardly unique to it; in fact a 4chan white supremacist might be somewhat dismayed to find out that many a European has formed a mental image of their beloved all-white Middle America that is only somewhat more flattering than this movie's depiction of Indians. (A while ago I binged police bodycam videos that involved a barely verbal middle aged guy in sweatpants being questioned outside of a wooden shack over the apparent presence of his mother's week-old corpse in the bedroom; druggies reenacting the 2001 monolith scene over one of their count being arrested, someone with the build of Jabba the Hutt being dragged out of a trailer, etc.; all of the aforementioned being white) Admitting only a bit more diversity, there is good video material like this.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them. I have American friends who are perfectly enthusiastic to discuss all sorts of edgy voldemortean propositions but get physically uncomfortable if a hard-r "nigger" is enunciated in their presence (I learned that this is a good way to dissuade real-life usage of various twitchspeak inflections of "pog(ger)").
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16d ago
This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism. If we use the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism as a baseline,
Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism.[1]
Political repression of opposition is present in all (Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey), though I'd broadly say the degree is Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China. In Ukraine this got much worse since the war; while before it they only banned the communist parties and engaged in soft repression of others, after the war started they went after more or less the whole opposition. Meanwhile, while Russia did visibly crack down on some of the most promising opposition parties (ex. Navalny's, Nadezhdin's), some manifestly oppositional parties like Yabloko are still operational and occupy positions of power, and the biggest one (the Communist Party) could be called cozy with Putin's but not exactly aligned either.
None of them have a real cult of personality around the leader, though China is the only one to come up with a construct like "Xi Jinping thought" so it gets close; I don't think any of them have controlled wages and prices; in terms of official censorship once again China is way in front of everyone (being the only one with a Great Firewall and actual proactive censorship regime), but my sense is that there Ukraine currently is actually ahead of Russia since they are thinking out loud about even banning Telegram; China is the only one with mass-surveillance policing of public places; for state terrorism none of them score particularly highly but Russia might win with the occasional false flags associated with Putin's rule.
This really does not seem to track with the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism I'm familiar with. Would you call the PRC totalitarian? Ukraine? Turkey? Ukraine is broadly similar to Russia on every relevant metric now, PRC has much more political control and state meddling in private life (which I'd consider the definitional core of totalitarianism), and Turkey seems only slightly better (and their crackdown on Kurds and Gülenists still exceeds anything Russia did so far in scope, though you might pin this on those groups being more determined than any opposition in Russia).
It does strike me as a push against the frame of the gaslighting Overton window that Western media continues to present Grozev/Bellingcat as an independent journalistic outfit rather than the intelligence agency mouthpiece that it obviously is. It would be one thing if they acknowledged the suspicions but argued against it, but there seems to be a universal consensus that to treat them as anything other than brave and resourceful citizen journalists, who happen to have a particular knack for uncovering dastardly schemes by America's geopolitical opponents using Google search and tea leaves, would just be giving air to enemy conspiracy theories.
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16d ago
Tangentially, I've seen the story being rounded to "Marsalek is an Orthodox priest" as you do a lot, but when the story broke there was nothing indicating that he actually has taken on the role, but just that he assumed the identity of some Orthodox priest, who probably knew and may or may not have had a choice in the matter, for the purpose of crossing borders (with some interesting implication that there is a larger scheme of rural clergy donating their personae to Russian intelligence for such ends). Village priest is not a role that a random foreign business bro can just slip into, for reasons ranging from the linguistic to the Russian Orthodox church being socially quite tight-knit.
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19d ago
What's the attractivity metric here? If we define it in terms of absolute attractivity to the other sex, in the below-40 bracket most women are more attractive than the median guy (see also those OkCupid blog men-rating-women/women-rating-men charts). I'm not so sure that the "swiping on women more attractive than they are" thing is true if the rating is on the curve for their respective sex.
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20d ago
Everyone I talk to in real life regularly goes to the toilet, but that doesn't mean I want them to drop their pants and do their business as I talk to them.
It seems manifestly the case that the majority of whites most everywhere are against WN and reject their ideas, including ones that I imagine you include in the "truthful" category. Is the campaign of persuasion and reeducation that WNs would have to run to overcome this not adequately described as "brainwashing", in the original, unironic sense of the term (like, removing the taint of dirty ideas)? And hey, famously the Third Reich had a "ministry for propaganda" with no negative connotations intended; I think it is very fair game to let modern WNs inherit that tradition whether they want it not, seeing how any modern negative connotations are largely creditable to their non-disowned ancestors.
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