Aapje58
4mo ago
No, they sent out 6,000–8,500 knights and mercenaries to suppress the peasants
Yet check out the comments under the latest army recruitment videos that stopped targeting liberals, but went back to targeting the traditional red regions. Many parents from military families state that don't want their children to join the army anymore.
The current elite is not Prussian. They don't see honor in soldiering and their culture rejects guns and law & order. They can't hire mercenaries anymore like in the olden days. So who is going to suppress the peasants, when police and the soldiers are peasants? Why would be elite be able to count on them when the peasants truly lose faith in the system?
Aapje58
5mo ago
then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion.
This would be a far stronger argument if a different religion would take its place, rather than atheism.
My theory for the demise of religion in the west is that we've succeeded too well at reigning in chaos and spreading knowledge for religion to be seen as valuable by most people. For a substantial part, that is because we have become so good at producing a good society to live in. If this is the goal of Christianity, then it made itself obsolete.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Nonsense, they only started to support Hamas after the deradicalized PLO was unable to offer meaningful improvement to their lives, which was in no small part due to Israel losing even a modest will to find a real solution after the killing of Rabin.
Aapje58
5mo ago
this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel
And that is exactly why this resonates. Here we have a person who ostensibly was responsible for an equitable peace between the Palestinians and Israel, but whose response clearly shows an extreme bias to one nation, more like being a citizen of that one nation.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The US could propose making Palestine a UN protectorate that will gradually democratize (taking many decades), similar to how Palestine was a League of Nations protectorate in the past or how Kosovo was a UN protectorate. Then poor in lots of money, open up the borders to Egypt, give them a sea harbor, etc.
Then the support for Hamas and other radicals should dry up as the Palestinians can then get (real) jobs and are mostly safe from IDF and colonist attacks.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Pushing a narrative is a problem, but they’re actually supposed to be writing articles along the lines of ‘experts say x about y’- it’s what we pay them to do.
How do they know who is a proper expert and who is a charlatan, without knowledge? They don't, so they take the safe and logical route: the 'experts' are those who follow the narrative.
Aapje58
5mo ago
When they lose trust in the US as a protector, while faced with a stronger and aggressive China, the willpower will be there.
Aapje58
5mo ago
'Good portion' is a vague word that doesn't mean plurality and it definitely doesn't mean large number (you cannot interpret a proportional claim as a claim of absolute size).
In my experience, mainstream publications who write about this stuff tend to not link to the crazy abusers on their own side that they paint as victims, but instead 'summarize' the situation, which are often actually lies. Which makes sense, because if you actually send people to the Twitter of the crazies, they can see that the person is quite crazy, which undermines the narrative. So low like counts are not necessarily inconsistent with being held up as a hero and having influence.
So you can have extremists who are followed by relatively few people, but journalists are among them and they turn them into martyrs for their side. The complaint is actually about the media and other signal boosters doing this. No one would care one bit about Nyberg or Alexander if they weren't held up as heroes in places with a decent amount of reach, while being anything but heroes.
Anyway, I did a quick google search and found that even the Washington Post lied about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/
The writer is the infamous Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist who was hired as part of the editorial board of the NYT, until the truth came out, which is itself evidence of how good that side of the aisle is at criticizing their own.
I also found the QZ article mentioned above. I didn't find any mainstream media articles telling the truth. So in my completely unscientific half-assed 'study,' I found that 100% of mainstream media sources had lied.
That said, Nyberg seems to be very obscure overall. But I do find it illustrative that the media can't even be honest when it costs them so little. Simply switching up the narrative to explain that this person is bad, but wasn't at all central to anti-GG would have cost them nothing but a loss of one opportunity to bash the other side.
Aapje58
5mo ago
I don't think the GG side was claiming to be evil and stupid?
There is a difference between believing you are good, but arguing that you have better policies and such, versus arguing that your side deserves to own a space because your side consists of a better kind of person. The anti-GG side went all in on arguing that the GG side consisted of horrible white male neckbeards who harass people and who should be kicked out of gaming for that reason, while they themselves were inclusive lovely people.
At the point where they argued that they were better than the GG people, it seems perfectly valid to point out when prominent members are, or defend abusers, pedophiles and other horrid people.
Aapje58
5mo ago
I think it is less that the accusations came from outsiders and more that those outsiders were just using the accusations to discredit her arguments via ad hominem.
That's a pretty poor argument when the main argument by prominent anti-GG'ers was that gamers are smelly neckbeards that harass people, evidenced by cherry picked random tweets by unknowns or fabricated evidence. If they genuinely had a problem with ad hominems, then they had every opportunity to reign in that behavior from their own side, but they didn't.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Leigh Alexander was a key player, who wrote off existing gamers with her nasty "gamers are over" piece. This, together with the support this hateful piece got from the gaming and regular press, who dismissed criticism of her piece as sexism, really energized the GamerGate side. Leigh really was one of the most prominent people on the anti-side, so her support of Nyberg cannot be dismissed as being from a niche player.
Aapje58
5mo ago
In pre-Napoleonic militaries, mercenaries were often foreigners, in particularly the Swiss (poor region and neutral, so it was unlikely that they would stab you in the back). The US can just hire South Americans or such. Perhaps with citizenship as a reward.
Both Intifada's were long after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that happened during the Arab–Israeli Wars. You can't retroactively justify ethnic cleansing by arguing that revolt against that cleansing and the subsequent oppression, justified the ethnic cleansing and oppression.
I've never heard anyone argue that a person who fights back after getting sucker punched, retroactively deserved that sucker punch because they fought back. So I have a hard time believing that your argument reflects a principle you hold in general.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Because they have lost repeated wars over ownership of the land
This is just pure racism. The Palestinians didn't fight those wars, countries like Egypt did.
Aapje58
5mo ago
Yes, ignorance makes for easy retorts.
Fascism (like communism) was a movement primarily in response to the dissolution of states where power lay in the hands of a hereditary elite, who would maintain that power by doing things for the commoners that they thought the commoners needed, while extracting wealth and making the commoners do things for them. Downtown Abbey is a good example of a show that celebrates the old world order, with the hereditary rich living in mansions and being served on; taking their cut from the farmers, while justifying their position by arguing that they create jobs, help those in need and organize feasts (where they themselves expect to get applauded by the commoners). Saudi Arabia is pretty much like this, with their system of patronage depending on clan relationships.
The actual cause for the social changes that led to the rise of communism and fascism was the Second Agricultural Revolution, which pushed very many people out of the farming life, which in turn enabled the Industrial Revolution. These technical revolutions led to urbanization and capitalism, both of which were much more brutal than today, causing much unhappiness and therefor revolutionary spirit. The elites that ran these countries were seen as doing such a bad job that very many people wanted something different.
Communism in theory sought to abolish the elites, instead of replacing them, by means of radical democracy & shared property. Although in practice this could not work for various reasons and so communist regimes inevitably just descended into authoritarianism, based on power games rather than hereditary power. In that sense, the statement that 'true communism has never been tried' is true, although true communism can't actually be tried and inevitably seems to devolve into what it was intended to fight against.
Fascism sought to replace the hereditary elite with a technocratic elite that would seek to improve society by aligning people towards a societal improvement, rather than their selfish desires. Hence the bundle of sticks, the fasces. All people in the nation united for a common purpose. Unlike communism, it rejects the idea of radical equality, so it accepts wealth differences and differences in hierarchy, but only in so far as to help achieve the common goal. The fascist capital owner may own a big factory, but is not supposed to hoard wealth, have an excessive lifestyle or take advantage of others. Fascism rejects democracy, as it considers the common man to be stupid. It doesn't really answer the question of how the right goal and right leadership is selected. In practice, the autocratic nature of the leadership and lack of goals within the ideology itself, tends to lead to fascism being easily combined with other extremist ideologies, like Hitler's racial beliefs.
This lack of inherent goals within the fascist model tends to lead to a lot of confusion about what fascism actually is, which why it is so easy to claim that something is fascist, as there is no pure fascism. It's always fascism plus some other ideology or some other goal, that is not inherent to fascism itself.
That's a false dichotomy in my eyes. We can do both, and should do both.
But in my society we are not actually doing both. At least some of the issues are caused by choices that people are doubling down on, if anything. Loneliness is now only on the agenda because it is becoming such a huge issue, but no one is undoing the cultural and political changes that caused it, or coming up with any real, new solutions. Unless you count euthanasia as a solution.
What I see is a pathological unwillingness to even face facts and instead, everything gets viewed from extremely dogmatic viewpoints, like the idea that all problems will be solved if we achieve things like inclusivity, gender equality, racial equality, etc; despite a completely lack of a rational analysis of what we would actually need to achieve such things; let alone an honest analysis of the up- and downsides of the policies being implemented (politically, culturally, etc).
In the face of such irrationality, 'solving' issues by getting rid of the evidence as much as possible by killing the victims of modern culture and modern policies, seems like a logical outcome that will lessen the pressure to recognize or fix the pathologies of modernity.
All associated with severe unhappiness and poor life outcomes and for good reason. Being poor, "urban" and single against your wishes sucks. If you have a means of turning such people into rich, rural and married individuals, then I'm willing to hear it, but I doubt anyone does short of waiting for the world to get much wealthier.
And yet people of modest means seemed to have an easier time in the past of actually getting the main things that most people want, a house, a partner, children and a decent level of respect (which may have just been 'successful while knowing your place,' but that is a lot better than just a bare 'loser'). And they were poorer than today, so this idea that wealth can fix a broken society seems false, as things have become increasingly broken despite increased wealth.
In my country even the progressives have woken up to the reality that people increasingly see lower education as a path to failure. Of course, their solution is foolish, to rename it to 'practical education,' due to their post-modern belief that words create, rather than reflect reality.
And rural living is itself failing as well. Rural women get convinced that they need to find a leftist yuppie and be part of city life, so they leave for the city, leaving a large gender imbalance, forcing men to leave as well and to become yuppies, but those men often fail, since the official messaging is sabotaging. So many boys don't see this as a path to success. Again, the progressives seem to have finally woken up to this too, but of course their answer is to vilify and censor people like Andrew Tate, rather than fix their own messaging or even just giving a shit about boys/men.
And it is not just sabotaging for men, but also for women, many of whom now seek out parasocial, dysfunctional substitutes for real friends and a real partner, for instance by streaming (although men do that too).
And of course, globalist culture stimulates breaking physical bonds with family and the friends you grow up with.
I could go on, but I think you get the point that I disagree very strongly with sentiments like 'of course the poors/urbans be sad' or with ignoring that society has a big influence on how successful people are at finding and maintaining relationships (romantic, but also friendships and family relationships). I see your beliefs as part of the pathological culture that refuses to learn from the cultures of the past and pretends that its dysfunctions and problems are inevitable.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The point is that they are a threat to French-language education while they are there.
Aapje58
5mo ago
I personally support the right of anyone to commit suicide for just about any reason, though I think they should be restrained if it's because of an acute mental or physical illness where we can reasonably expect their future self to desist and be thankful we saved them.
The problem is that very, very many people are flaky and short-sighted. Death is a one way trip, with no ability to undo a mistake. Euthanasia always gets sold based on this ideal image of a well-thought out, persistent desire. In reality, the advocates seem to slippery slope themselves into supporting euthanasia for cases that are light years from the ideal.
For example, an increasingly common scenario in The Netherlands is that someone with dementia in the family writes a euthanasia declaration where they state that they want euthanasia when they get dementia. The problem with dementia is that usually, people don't yet want to die as long as they are still reasonably rational. So euthanasia only becomes an option once they are so demented that they are effectively unable to make rational statements. The horror show that family members experience and which results them into making a euthanasia declaration beforehand, is also not necessarily what the patients feel themselves, once the time comes. We have about as much sense of whether a person with severe dementia experiences enough happy moments to want to keep living, as we do for a cat. People with dementia appear to lose the ability to form a long term happiness level anyway and experience emotions much more in the moment. How can we then judge if the good outweighs the bad?
What happens in practice is that the doctor tries to extract some proof for a persistent death wish, from a person with no ability to reason rationally. In the absence of solid evidence, the risk is enormous that the doctor will interpret their own feelings, or the feelings of the family, as being the feeling of the patient, intentionally or unknowingly.
For example, in one case, a patient would declare that it was too early for euthanasia on some days, but would say that she didn't want to live a moment longer on other days. In the face of this lack of clarity, the euthanasia doctor based her decision on statements by the family and the GP of the patient. Then the patient was killed by secretly putting a sedative in her coffee, followed by a lethal injection while she was sleeping. At no point was the patient even told that she would be killed, so there was no ability for her to object.
A Dutch political party is pushing for euthanasia with no medical grounds (either mental or physical illness is currently necessary) for those that have a 'completed life,' which I consider to be a manipulative propaganda word, which implicitly writes off people who do not contribute a lot to society, as it implies that once you get to a certain stage in life, there is nothing left for you to live for (after all, your life is completed). Research into a desire for euthanasia by the Dutch elderly with a death wish found that:
- 72% of respondents have inconsistent feelings on the matter, wanting to die at some times and wanting to live at other times
- 19% of all respondents and 28% of those that want euthanasia (rather than those that have a more passive wish to die, which was a pretty large group) have had a death wish for their entire lives, yet apparently never acted on it, even when they were young and able
- Factors that the respondents who want euthanasia named as having an influence on their desire to die were:
- Worrying (81%)
- Mental or physical deterioration (61%)
- Loneliness (56%)
- Lack of control over their lives (50%)
- Disease (47%)
- The feeling of being a burden to others (42%)
- Financial problems (36%)
- People with a desire to die were disproportionally poor, urban and single
I personally see a lot of red flags in the data, in particular the extent to which the desire to die is flaky and often seems rather weak. Do we really want to kill people who are edge cases and who may just be going through a bad period? Also, a lot of factors that people name as reasons for wanting to die seem like they could potentially be fixed. Excessive worrying might be improved through mental health care or altering people's news diet. Loneliness seems highly influenced by how we organize modern society and was much less in the past. Shouldn't we try to fix society instead of killing the people who are unhappy because of societal pathologies? Similarly, a feeling of being a burden to others seems heavily influenced by modern beliefs, where people are valued on what they can do, versus beliefs of the past where the idea of inherent human value was more important. That the group with a desire to die is disproportionally poor, urban and single, suggests a strong societal component is at play.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).
I don't see the contradiction. In my country the natives are now forced to study in English, at least in part because the universities want the money from foreign students, resulting in them changing to English for most fields. This is even true for those studying the native language.
As a result, the graduated students have difficulty applying their learnings in the native language.
Aapje58
5mo ago
As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own.
There is no reasoning on our own when it comes to the meaning of words, as the meaning is inherently dictated by how people perceive it. If I start using a word differently from how others use it, that creates a problem, because then I'm no longer using the same words as others and thus have my own language. This undermines the value of languages as a tool of communication.
There is absolutely no hypocrisy or bad logic in changing the way you use words, when others use it differently as well.
Aapje58
5mo ago
That is merely a defense of the reporter in question, but not at all a defense of the media source. If they let their employees systemically tell falsehoods, then that media source systemically tells falsehoods.
The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.
That doesn't seem to hold them back from substituting the actual claims in the article with their own beliefs, always in the same politically correct direction. That goes beyond incompetence.
Aapje58
5mo ago
The scientific method, as commonly understood, should preclude the creation and maintenance of entirely fictitious fields of study.
There is actually no common understanding of the scientific method. What Judith Butler does is not comparable in any meaningful way to the work of Ferenc Krausz (and his team). Yet they both claim to do science, even though the work of one of them is not falsifiable.
Part of the charade that allows these nonsensical fields and subfields to exist is the claim that all the professors who work at universities do proper science, even when they do no such thing.
And the ideal scientific method is just aspirational anyway. In reality we cannot achieve that perfection even for physics. When it comes to fields that do not provide the preconditions that allow us to apply something a bit close to the ideal scientific method, people simply use less rigorous methods. Until you get to Judith Butler where claims just get conjured up with bad logic, misrepresentations of what others actually proved, etc.
And like gattsuru says, there is a disturbing lack of interest by institutions (and voters) in even figuring out how well those who call themselves scientists actually do their jobs. Researchers with good morals who do look into it, invariably find highly disturbing results.
Aapje58
5mo ago
You're missing the point. We are told to "trust the experts" when they make their predictions. However, when the predictions are at best guesses that need to be validated in practice, then we objectively cannot "trust the experts."
If the media and politicians would honestly tell us that these opinions are imperfect and cannot just be assumed to work, I would have no problem with that. But of course they don't say that, because they use the 'expert opinion' as a way to win debates and project power.
Arguing that some experts can be trusted more than others just proves my point that the generic implicit or explicit demand to "trust the experts" is wrong*. In fact, it allowed the fraudsters to hide behind those that do better. In debates, if you question how experts are presented to us, the defenders will invariably point to the better experts, rather than adopt a nuanced position where some experts are better than others.
After all, the nuanced position is not compatible with the power games being played.
* For example, I almost never see a justification being given for why a certain expert is any good.
I think that the progressive stack is not so much about who wins, but how strong certain arguments are considered to be and in what situations they can be used. For example, a black person can use "I'm being discriminated against" even in some situations where they themselves messed up and are simply held accountable, while a white person who is actually being discriminated against, can't use that same argument unless the discrimination is very extreme indeed.
In social combat between woke people, you can expect them to use arguments that work for their identity in the situation. But that still doesn't mean that a black person can always just defeat a white person in social combat. The former just has more options.
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