Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
I think a lot depends on how likely it is that SF was causally responsible.
IME, that isn't how it works in environmental law, particularly when you get to what happens if an endangered species is found on your land (as was satirized by The Simpsons with the screamapillar.) I vaguely remember hearing about a case where a guy got caught in a Catch-22 because he had two endangered species on his land, one of which was preying upon the other (failure to protect the prey species was a punishable offense; any measures taken to protect the prey species were also a punishable offense, vis-à-vis the predator species).
that would be deeply unfair
What does fairness have to do with law?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Instead, civilization really detests murder, and is willing to spend extraordinary amounts to find murderers.
Then why is the clearance rate for murder cases in America around 50%?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Their duty is to try to convince the voters their ideas are right; and if the voters aren't convinced, they should vote for someone else who's selling a different set of ideals.
See, the thing is, I'm seeing people on the left actively rejecting this. As they see it, the party doesn't have a duty to convince voters, the voters have a duty to support them automatically — "Vote Blue no matter who" — and if the voters aren't convinced, then the voters are the problem, not them, and it's the voters who need to change, not them. Voters who "vote for someone else who's selling a different set of ideals" are failing in their duty to the Democratic party, and are either stupid — and thus need "educating" — or evil — and must be punished. (I recall one lefty YouTuber talking about the various demographics that moved rightward in 2024, noting that often the Democratic party has nothing to offer them… and then excoriating these groups, because it's their duty to vote Dem anyway, and voting for any other party is never okay…)
Again, all over Tumblr, the talk is of literal re-education camps for Trump voters — as the "humane" option — because they have to extend people the "charity" of assuming they're just not smart enough to understand Democratic party messaging, or have been led astray by the vast pipelines of far-right disinformation; and because the alternative is that they knowingly voted for "obvious Fascism," and thus must be either expelled from the country or simply killed.
They're all quite explicit about this: if an election doesn't go the way you want, don't blame the party, blame the voters.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Moving this here (rather late) on suggestion of the mods, with some added expansion:
Does anyone else see the way various people on the American left, particularly left leaning media, have been doubling down on "Trump is Hitler," "Harris ran a flawless campaign," "the voters are just sexist, racist, stupid, and evil," and so on, and that they shouldn't change policies to win over voters, except maybe by moving even further leftward (again, I'm on Tumblr, so I get plenty of this from ordinary D voters coming across my dash; there's also the Youtubers seen in this video for one) as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).
Sure, the idea that "the customer is always right" — even if you append the qualifier "…in matters of taste" — is one that the "creative industries" have always struggled with. The purity of one's artistic vision versus "selling out" in order to make a living is a perennial tension. And similarly with electoral politics. Parties abandoning all principles in naked pursuit of the median voter turns electoral politics into a modern spectator sport, with the parties reduced to different colored jerseys with different mascots, and all that matters is that "your" team win the next game. ("Who will win the trophy this year, Team Elephant, or Team Donkey?") But, on the other hand, if a party wants to actually accomplish things in line with those principles, they have to win elections. Movie studios need to have people pay to watch their movies, so they can afford to make more, or else they'll go out of business.
In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.
On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.
On this debate, I recently read this lengthy 2017 American Affairs article, which I found pretty good for firming up and supporting a number of my views on this issue, particularly "free trade" as perhaps the archetypal example of economists succumbing to "the Ricardian Vice."
The bit that was particularly new for me, and thus stood out, was the bit about The Atlas of Economic Complexity and diversity beating specialization due to development spreading via "proximity":
Thus, although they claim to be experts on the effects of trade policy and argue almost unerringly for liberalization over protection, economists have not yet even asked the questions that are crucial to the real-world impact of trade liberalization: what does it do to the level and distribution of output, income, and employment?
Given that economists have not even considered these issues, it is not surprising that other researchers who have done so have reached conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the biases of economists. By analyzing the enormous Standard International Trade Classification database of international trade flows, data scientists at Harvard University, working on what they have christened The Atlas of Economic Complexity,19 have found that diversity, rather than specialization, leads to national success in international trade.
Their methodology was to classify products on the basis of their “ubiquity,” which they defined as how many countries exported the product, and countries on the basis of “diversity,” which they defined as how many products a given country exported.
…
The message that comes through loud and clear in this empirically grounded analysis is that, for countries to succeed at both growth and trade, specialization is essential at the individual level, and diversity matters at the level of the nation-state:
…
The researchers used the measures of ubiquity and diversity to develop a composite index they called “complexity,” which quantified “the amount of productive knowledge” products and economies contain.23 This complexity metric correlated well with living standards—with countries like Japan and Switzerland at the head of the 2015 index (at 2.47 and 2.18 respectively) and Papua New Guinea and Nigeria at its tail (–1.81 and –2.18 respectively). But movements up the complexity scale also correlated strongly with improved growth performance:
An increase of one standard deviation in complexity, which is something that Thailand achieved between 1970 and 1985, is associated with a subsequent acceleration of a country’s long-term growth rate of 1.6 percent per year. This is over and above the growth that would have been expected from mineral wealth and global trends.24
The success of this index in predicting which countries are likely to outperform growth expectations in the future was related to the role of product diversity within a country, which enable new products to be invented. The authors of The Atlas found that a country was more likely to develop a new product if the country had other industries which were close to that product in a third metric they called “proximity.” Technically this was measured as the likelihood that a country exported one product given that it exported another; practically, it indicated that invention of new products required knowledge of existing, closely related products. A country with a diversified export profile (and by implication a diversified industrial base),25 rather than one with a specialized portfolio, is more likely to have the product proximity that allows new products to be invented and the economy to grow.
…
These empirical findings also cast a very different light on the populist revolts that are currently disturbing the pro-globalization consensus, which has dominated economic policy for the last thirty years. These revolts are not unthinking reactions against rationality, as mainstream economists like to believe, but reactions to the failure of the real world to conform to the irrational thinking of economists, and the damaging policies that have been imposed by politicians following their advice.
Thirty years of trade policies pursuing the false promise of specialization have meant that residents of the Rust Belt states of the United States, and the economically depressed regions of the United Kingdom, can now compare the promise of globalization with the reality. They voted against globalisation, not because they were too intellectually limited to perceive its benefits, but because experience gave them the lens through which to reject the Ricardian Myth of the advantages of national specialization.
Policymakers should too. The empirical research that underpins The Atlas of Economic Complexity—as opposed to the armchair speculation that has characterized the development of economic theory—provides strong guidance on how to achieve economic development. It starts from an understanding of where the increased prosperity of the last two centuries has come from. It has not come from specialization in the allocation of existing resources, but from acquiring and developing new knowledge over time:
During the past two centuries, the amount of productive knowledge we hold expanded dramatically. This was not, however, an individual phenomenon. It was a collective phenomenon. As individuals we are not much more capable than our ancestors, but as societies we have developed the ability to make all that we have mentioned—and much, much more.26
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
The same bizarre situation is going on in entire Western Europe. People talking about the need to decouple from the US, so we can defend Taiwan??
One of the British podcasters I listen to (I don't recall which off the top of my head — maybe Parvini?) characterized this as Starmer and European elites, in response to Trump trying to pull back the US from its global empire, trying to figure out how keep the GAE going without America.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
So yeah, when I think of “sovereignty over my land”, I don’t think about Kolomoisky taking over the resources of a country through murder, illegally extracting all the money he can, spending that money on a lavish 100 million dollar “Menorah Center” and services for his foreign tribe members, funneling the rest of the money through his tribe members to help his co-ethnics 5000 miles away, and then using this media control to boost the popularity of yet another tribe member by depicting him as the president in expensive TV series. When I think of sovereignty, I do not think of “the largest money laundering operation in history”.
If I were Ukrainian I would not want to be controlled by these guys.
And here I'm reminded of a friend-of-a-friend who matches that. Specifically, an old friend of mine, when we were talking one time, told me about another friend of his, a Neo-Nazi Ukrainian expat. Said expat's opinion (as relayed to me second-hand) was that of course the primary enemy of the Ukrainian people is Putin and his half-Tatar mongrel hordes, but the second biggest enemy is Zelenskyy, who was installed by International Jewry to punish the Ukrainian people in vengeance for the Khmelnytsky pogroms almost four centuries ago.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Looking for beta readers?
Not presently, but thanks for offering. And if I do, I'll keep you in mind.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Is Germany "a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide"?
Okay, more seriously (and less "bare link" phrased, Jeopardy-style, in the form of a question), does anyone else see things like this as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).
In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
I’m not much of a historian but still this doesn’t appear to hold water in my view. As far as I can tell, the era of European sectarian wars (mainly) between Catholics and Protestants wasn’t ended by classical liberalism but by monarchist absolutism i.e. a new order where sovereign authority is centralized and unrestrained, feudalism is gradually dismantled and the state supersedes the church in terms of power and influence. Local lords and religious leaders no longer had the means to start sectarian wars in the first place. There were no more peasant rebellions fueled by sectarian grievances (among other things).
The argument, AIUI, isn't that classical liberalism brought this about — as you note, that's ahistorical — but that it's the other way around: it was this that brought about classical liberalism later. Because, as you note, a new political order rose due to material, non-ideological reasons. Liberalism, the argument goes, was a later rationalization created post hoc to retroactively justify these, and other subsequent changes, ideologically.
Not to say I entirely buy that argument myself. But it's the one I see held forth most often. And if it's not post hoc rationalization of religious tolerance being argued as the source of liberalism, then the next most common position I see argued is that it was a post hoc rationalization for the rise of a mercantile/capitalist "bourgeoise" middle class ("middle" because they're somewhere between the traditional "noble" and "peasant" divisions) to increasing prominence.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
Trying to finish several of my half-written (or less) political/philosophical essays (like "Society Is Not a Van Der Waals Gas," "You Are Not Avalokiteśvara," and "Darwinism Is Not a Creation Myth"), which are increasingly looking to turn into potential chapters in a hypothetical book.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
I'm wondering why it got off the ground then.
The argument I usually see, including from some defenders of liberalism, is that it's due to the Thirty Years' War. Specifically, that the Peace of Westphalia was a pragmatic decision, rather than a principled one, motivated by the massive bloodshed and destruction producing only stalemate. Further, cuius regio, eius religio only ended the religious wars as external, interstate conflicts. There was still plenty of religious conflict within many states — albeit less bloody, due to smaller scale; and much shorter, due to the (increasingly centralized) state being on one side. These conflicts, in turn, became a problem due to the economic changes Europe was undergoing, with mercantilism evolving toward capitalism (intolerance of Catholic or Protestant minorities is bad for business).
When it comes to choosing or building ideologies, people tend to find ways to justify and rationalize the things they're already doing. Thus, the need to find an ideology that justified not invading your heretic neighbors to impose the true faith, not oppressing minority denominations too hard; as well as all the changes in the structure of government (driven in turn by changes in military technology — the end of castles was the end of feudalism proper, and states with labor-intensive militaries are generally more democratic than those with more capital-intensive ones) and economics. Liberalism provided just that. (Limited) religious tolerance went from an unprincipled, pragmatic accommodation with the realities on the ground to a clear application of moral and political principles.
(Of course, it then turns out that the kind of religious pluralism envisioned has ultimately proved unworkable in more than one way.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.
Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)
The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.
As an Alaskan, I have definite mixed feelings on this topic.
On the one hand, I like our wilderness, our "wild" character, the vast tracts of nature. My natural inclination is to say "no" and favor protection of undeveloped land.
On the other hand, the Feds own something like 2/3 of the land, and together with state parks it comes together to something like 90% of Alaska. And then, on top of that, you have further lands that are off-limits due to Federal regulations (like the Wetlands Act) written with the Lower 48's climate in mind, and which apply poorly to our very different climate.
Further, our economy has been in shambles for decades now, because the primary economic base* for our state has, historically, pretty much always been resource extraction (as is the case with the economies of the Scandinavian countries [I stand corrected]), which has been slowly strangled by environmental law and activism pretty much my entire life. So we really need some more mining and/or oil drilling opened up, or we're pretty screwed.
*note that "largest sector of the economy" ≠ "majority of the economy."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.
—Jill Filipovic, "Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger," Guardian, March 2017
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
I'm reminded of two things here. First is the discussions about the supposed "democratic backsliding" into "electoral authoritarianism" in Hungary. When I've asked people just what's so "authoritarian" about Orbán, beyond him just winning massive electoral majorities as an unacceptably right-wing candidate, and I get vague handwaving about the media and him having an "unfair" advantage. Whereupon I make comparison's to the Time magazine "election fortification" article and ask what the difference is, beyond that Orbán's actions aren't even so much that sort of "fortifying" as they are preventing left-leaning media from doing so in Hungary. Mostly, the answer ends up in angry sputtering that reduces to "it's different when we do it." The more coherent defenses end up being about how 2020 "fortification" was different because it was the media putting their thumbs on the metaphorical scale to influence election outcomes of their own accord, which is perfectly democratic, and thus it's interfering with their ability to do so that is "authoritarian." Because it's long been the media's job to determine a candidate's "electability" — to enforce the limits of which candidates and positions are "acceptable," and which are too far to the right. Because we've long ago accepted that "democracy" does not mean unfettered majority rule, therefore we can limit the voters' choices as much as we want, let an unelected bureaucracy decide the vast majority of political issues, put as many popular positions "off limits" as we want, so long as you have two candidates who aren't literal clones (a la Futurama), and you can vote between a corporate tax rate of 25% and 30%, it's still fully democratic. And we're a representative democracy… which means our politicians are supposed to "represent" us the way a parent or guardian represents a small child, or a person with power of attorney represents a demented elder or a schizophrenic mental patient: by doing what the expert consensus says is in the people's best interest, whether the people like it or not.
Second, there's what someone on Tumblr pointed out about recent media articles, about how the USAID freeze is threatening various "independent media" organizations, because they "rely on" said funding to remain viable. As the Tumblrite noted, quite early in the thesaurus entry for synonyms to "rely" is "depend." And if you depend on USAID funding to keep operating, how are you "independent"? Which, of course, undermines the whole bit above about how 'it's different when the "independent media" does it,' and makes it very much more 'it's "democracy" when the left does it and "authoritarianism" when the right does it.' While I wouldn't go as far as Neema Parvini does in declaring he was "90% right" and Yarvin "100% wrong" on their respective models of the system, recent events do make the media institutions look less like they're purely ideologically captured, and more like they're downstream from various deep pockets. (Much like how I've seen academics argue that much of academia's political slant is driven by pursuit of grant money.) That this is less the leaderless, incentive-driven emergent behavior "prospiracy" that some would have it, and more a matter of old-fashioned top-down political coordination via patronage networks; which is a lot harder to defend, except by "we're the good guys, it's good when we do it" tribalist appeals.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
Based on my experience on Tumblr, they tend to be very unhappy about it, since it very much did what it's name said, and was about keeping fascists out, not East Germans in, because who would ever want to leave the socialist paradise of East Germany? Fascists resisting de-Nazification, that's who! Which is why, while some people did sneak out of East Berlin across the wall, we can thus know, with absolute logical certainty, that every single one of them was a Nazi.
Again, I've seen people literally argue this, and then proceed to call people's relatives Nazis (in that distinctly condescending "sorry to break it to you, sweetie" manner) when presented with counter-examples.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
The Male Feminist as a man seeking absolution: If all or most men behave poorly, then the male feminist's past behaviour is not particularly noteworthy. By subscribing to the most deranged feminist assumptions, the male feminist can morph from a "bad man" to just "a man", or even a "good man", because at least they're willing to fight their deplorable male instincts.
This is the one that tends to match what I've seen, though I'd split it into a few subtypes. First, for quite a few, it seems to me to be less about "absolution" than typical-minding: 'I know men are all sex pests because I'm a man and a sex pest; surely they're all at least as much of a scumbag as me.'
Next are those who line up with your final clause: 'Yes, feminism is right, because all men are scum. But I am one of those rare few who have mightily struggled to become better than my base male nature, so everybody praise me for this heroic feat.' And then there's the sort who come closest to your first bullet point, with an attitude of 'I, as a male feminist, am one of the few good ones, so however badly I treat you, any other guy you'll encounter will be even worse; I'm as good a man as you'll ever get, so you might as well settle for putting up with me.'
(Most of the remaining mail feminists, IME, tend to fall into three categories: the first is 'feminism as "duckspeak"' — they repeat all the feminist slogans, and will say they "believe" them if asked, but they never actually think all that much about them or apply them personally. The second are autistic sorts who grew up in the same environment, but actually take all the slogans and messages deadly seriously, much like the young Scott Aaronson. [There's one left-winger who comes across my Tumblr dash sometimes, who falls squarely in the second category, and has repeatedly ranted about guys in the first category, tending to blame them for his lack of dating success.] And then there's the "if I repeat these slogans loudly and self-flagellate enough, will you all stop being mean to me?" guys.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?
The one I've seen mentioned occasionally is the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid 17th century.
The accounts of contemporary Jewish chroniclers of the events tended to emphasize large casualty figures, but since the end of the 20th century they have been re-evaluated downwards. Early 20th-century estimates of Jewish deaths were based on the accounts of the Jewish chroniclers of the time, and tended to be high, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 or more; in 1916 Simon Dubnow stated:
The losses inflicted on the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade 1648–1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers, the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, even exceeding the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks ... the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of Ukraine as well as those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one tenth of the Jewish population survived.[35]
From the 1960s to the 1980s historians still considered 100,000 a reasonable estimate of the Jews killed and, according to Edward Flannery, many considered it "a minimum".[36] Max Dimont in Jews, God, and History, first published in 1962, writes "Perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews perished in the decade of this revolution."[37] Edward Flannery, writing in The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, first published in 1965, also gives figures of 100,000 to 500,000, stating "Many historians consider the second figure exaggerated and the first a minimum."[36] Martin Gilbert in his Jewish History Atlas published in 1976 states, "Over 100,000 Jews were killed; many more were tortured or ill-treated, others fled ...."[38] Many other sources of the time give similar figures.[39]
Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000[40] or more,[41] others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000,[42] and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower. Modern historiographic methods, particularly from the realm of historical demography, became more widely adopted and tended to result in lower fatality numbers.[25] Newer studies of the Jewish population of the affected areas of Ukraine in that period estimate it to be 50,000.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
It's like for the first time in my lifetime people said 'no, we don't do that anymore.' And our leaders now share values sufficiently enough that they didn't ignore the sentiment or just listen and commiserate, they actually...obeyed. Pretty much instantly.
There were two comments elsewhere on this topic that I found particularly insightful. The first noted that when this sort of scandal hits someone on the Left, they frequently aren't fired straight away, but are instead "suspended" or "put on leave" pending "further determinations." Then, after a month or two, if the story has died down in the press, those "further determinations" are quietly bringing them back to work. The commenter argued that the right should have taken a page from the left and handled this in a similar manner, rather than openly and fully firing then rehiring.
But the second provided a counter-argument as to why the open rehiring — as opposed to quietly returning from a not-quite-fired status — serves an important purpose. While many people (including on here) have debated just how racist some of the "problem" tweets from Elez were, the vast majority appear to agree that the "normalize Indian hate" one qualifies. And yet, who is one of the key figures, in the timeline above, calling for forgiving and rehiring Elez?
Vice President Vance, whose wife, I remind you, is Indian. Whose children are half-Indian. And yet, he stands on the position that personal tweets, whatever he might think of them, should not cost Elez his job.
What the second commenter pointed out is that this makes this event a clear stand on the part of the Trump administration — with, as you note, plenty of popular support — against cancel culture. A statement in support of that old free speech line (usually misattributed to Voltaire) about how "I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.
And here I'm reminded of Andrea Nye's Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, written after that sort of bad experience with that sort of logic course, and arguing that "logic" as a whole is a tool of patriarchy, privileging the male way of reasoning over alternative, female ways of thinking. (Noretta Koertge's paper here discusses the book and Nye's arguments in it starting on page 3.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
Read the Road To Serfdom
I have, though it was a decade ago. And there's a difference between pointing out how modern authoritarian states can — and do — mess up science, and claiming that science and technological development are entirely, 100%, the downstream product of "Enlightenment" political views — which is something I've seen too many people argue. (Up to and including a person who kept arguing, pre-Dobbs, that if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, every piece of technology invented and scientific discovery made after 1973 would completely vanish from the world and from human memory, because the very existence of any piece of scientific or technological knowledge is entirely "downstream" from and dependent upon every single piece of social and political "progress" up until the moment of discovery/invention.)
If nothing else, the timeline doesn't line up. The beginnings of the scientific method go back to Bacon, and science became a high-status endeavor in Restoration England, when the Invisible College became the Royal Society thanks to the official approval of Charles II. Being a fully "enlightened" liberal democracy is not an absolute precondition for doing science or inventing new technologies.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
I don't see why we should skew our common-sense political terminology just to leave a whole quadrant permanently unoccupied.
And I don't see why we should shift our political terminology with the times, as opposed to maintaining a fixed position, even if that means portions are left mostly empty due to centuries of drift in one direction (see my reply to /u/hydroxyacetylene above). I'm fine with saying there's no "far right" in America, or even much of a right wing — America is a fundamentally left-wing country, because the Founding Fathers were a bunch of left-wingers who inscribed their (18th century) leftism into the country's founding documents.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4mo ago
you know this is a different thing from nrx, right?
Absolutely; there's a reason I break with most of the NRX guys when they go from diagnosis to providing solutions (because Yarvin's CEO "king" is absolutely nothing of the sort, and as a "De Maistre–ian," you should understand why).
If even on the motte you can only find one of us then there are not enough to occupy a meaningful part of the political spectrum.
Yes and? Just because a space is (presently) mostly unoccupied, doesn't mean it's not part of the political spectrum, particularly when you stop focusing on the present moment, and consider larger history. Why should our divisions of the political spectrum be constantly moving (this being an instantiation of left-wing ideas of "progress"), rather than fixed to long-term historical standards (in keeping with the right's focus on eternal verities and principles handed down from time immemorial)?
Why? When it comes to the capacity of modern states for mass deportations, I like to point to the example of the post-War "flight and expulsion" of Germans:
So it looks to me that the real question is one of will.
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