As a Brit, and very much not a neo-nazi, my understanding is that the bombing of Dresden specifically was not particularly necessary for the war effort. The tide of war had already turned against the Germans, and Dresden was of little military significance. It was generally regarded as retaliation for the bombing of Coventry in England, although this article argues that it was done to help the Russian offensive. Either way, Churchill didn't approve:
“Churchill’s head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Harris, seemed to think German morale might still be broken by bombing, but Churchill rebuked him after Dresden, and again, just as strongly for bombing Potsdam shortly thereafter. His mind had already turned to how the Allies would govern and occupy Germany; the time for destroying it was passing.
While I agree with your sentiment that
There is no ethical principle other than "Whites bad" (or other general Who, Whom?) that condemns Israel while not condemning not just the Palestinians, but the vast majority of the Arab countries for their historic displacements and exterminations of Christians and Jews.
there seems to be a significant strand of pro-Israel support that doesn't condemn Israel at all and regards the killing of tens of thousands to be entirely justified. I don't think one has to be an anti-semite to feel discomfort at the scale of death for dubious gain.
Corvos
4hr ago
A big part of the pro-Israel case rests on the (asserted) status of the Jews as an ethnically-distinct group under constant persecution. Basically, the claim is that even though occupying Palestinian territory isn't great, Israel is the only place the Jews will ever be safe. Whereas the Palestinians are basically just standard Arabs who could fit in anywhere if they gave up their grudge.
I think this is a pretty self-serving argument, but it has a grain of truth and probably comes closest to the real belief of a lot of people (rather than being a justification).
Corvos
4hr ago
Legally you're correct, of course, but morally it makes America look cynical as hell, and seems to be part of a long-standing pattern where America demands that every other country submit to a rules-based international order whilst America does exactly as it likes.
America demands the right to extradite British citizens accused of crimes against US law, but refuses to extradite a diplomat's wife to face charges of running over a British teenager while driving on the wrong side of the road. It demands that banks in other countries release all financial information related to American citizens, but as far as I'm aware has never made an equivalent commitment. It talks constantly about free trade, but then tries to destroy the Russian and Chinese economies.
I'm all for not signing away your sovereignty, it's the hypocrisy that grates.
Corvos
8hr ago
Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t. The fact that America supports international governance when and only when it gets to be in charge makes it look cynical and prevents people cooperating with it.
Corvos
1d ago
Oh, I know. Believe me. But you said
when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward
And I’m trying to show how the current situation developed. It’s not (just) because young men are afraid of a polite no, it’s because we were told (and then shown) that asking without prior explicit interest was sexual harassment. People therefore moved to a platform that structurally required women to show interest before any interaction.
most women prefer some sexual harassment to no interest at all
I’m not sure this is true. I think most women explicitly prefer no interest to unwanted interest. If female-centric outlets started saying loudly, “don’t punish men for politely trying their luck” then the dynamics might change quickly.
I work in tech, but my employer explicitly forbids walk-ins and will throw out anyone who tries. Which did happen once.
As for the social consequences of getting rejected, it’s kind of circular. I was on the internet in 2010 and feminist websites did pretty much say on behalf of frustrated gamer girls everywhere, “asking out a girl without her explicit permission in advance is literally sexual harassment and me and my friends treat it as such”. In retrospect, that was a narrow subgroup of crazies but without experience, how is a young, naive man supposed to work that out? Then MeTop comes along and, yup, the wrong pass can destroy your career.
Is it any wonder that people got afraid to date except on an app where she’s explicitly expressed interest by swiping right?
There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
Corvos
2d ago
This is going too far the other way. If your food supply is limited, you could cut down more of the forest for farmland or you could just refrain from inviting the next tribe over for dinner!
To put it another way, I like my hometown the way it is, I like the countryside the way it is. Yes, we could concrete over ever more of my small country, or build more hideous skyscrapers. Or we could just stop inviting in hundreds of thousands of foreigners every year.
To steelman the original case against cultural appropriation, you really have to understand the context in which it appeared. Think back a couple of decades to when America was maximally hegemonic and arrogant. When I was growing up, it was accepted wisdom in Hollywood that any film that adapted British source material had to be set in America with American children, and the source was often mutilated to make that work: see The Seeker (an adaptation of my favourite childhood book) for a particularly egregious example, but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
It's not fun to see your culture stolen or made into a theme park version of itself because Hollywood execs didn't believe that their audiences could tolerate anything too exotic. And it's worse knowing that, because American soft power outmatches yours by an order of magnitude, your children will grow up with the American version of your culture as the default while the original dies a slow death. In the same vein, Hallowe'en is now a much bigger deal than Nov 4th in the UK, and spell-check + Grammarly is slowly killing British English. I can imagine it's even worse for smaller, weaker countries and cultures.
Of course, the anti-cultural-appropriation movement overreached, mostly by refusing to see any difference between genuine appreciation and chauvinistic snatching. But in an age of increased migration and greater communication between cultures (via the internet) it's more likely that, say, Arabs will get upset about American girls using their national costume to slut it up.
(Obviously I'm simplifying and cherry-picking, see for example the chinese dress brouhaha where actual Chinese people didn't give a damn. I'm trying to give a sympathetic explanation of one reason why people started pushing back against cultural appropriation. I enjoy dressing up myself.)
Corvos
2d ago
I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.
Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.
My explanation for the modern southerners being the intended target:
Most modern southerners are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. They live in the same places, have the same names, sing the same songs and sometimes wave the same flags. Like most people, they generally prefer to venerate their ancestor's impressive deeds whilst downplaying or forgetting the ones they disagree with.
Taking their statues, deliberately mutilating them, and then melting them down can be seen as, and was seen as, an attack on those people. It's saying, "This is what I think of your history, this is what I think of your pride," and it's also saying, "you can't stop me from destroying things that matter to you".
You may think that southerners shouldn't have taken it personally, but they did. And on observing this fact, the Left did not go, "Shit, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't realise this stuff mattered to you." They went, "Ha! Suck it, racists." Which to my mind tells you who they were aiming at.
In other words, it's 1.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
Yup, that's a big factor for sure. I have seen exaggerated Italian accents coded as racist, or at least very insensitive. Nobody cares about us Brits :(
Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
Absolutely, it's the old chauvinism in a new form, with no excuses this time. For all its flaws, old Hollywood was just trying to make films that sold well at home, and the cultural appropriation was an unfortunate consequence. The woke should know better.
To oversimplify, I think that real complaints about cultural appropriation like mine or the Australian Aboriginals (which by definition come from cultures lacking soft power) got filtered through woke Americans who did have soft power, and were redirected by those people for their own ends. Often unconsciously.
Technically this does have points 1, 2 and 3. I get why the mods aim to have an effort filter for top posts but this isn't spicy and seems to have stimulated discussion effectively enough.
Corvos
2d ago
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action.
Yeah, I'd say getting modded is rare whereas having proof people aren't really interested in what you have to say is much more intimidating.
I take your point. I was going by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/cities/united-kingdom which records London as 7.5m and Manchester as 400k but I accept that different boundaries can produce very different numbers.
That said, I was trying to get across that the UK isn't like, say, Germany, where AFAIK you can choose from a number of roughly equivalent top-tier cities depending on personal preference. You either make it to London and reap the rewards (and all the crap that goes with them) or you don't. And it's been that way since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population is the best I can do, I am assuming the link between population and prosperity).
Corvos
2d ago
It's interesting how many different types we have here. As a contrast, being a non-American I find the legal discussion to be almost entirely insular and irrelevant, whereas the discussion of social and economic dynamics is universal.
Corvos
2d ago
I do sometimes get the impression London is full of monkeys...
Thanks, I didn't know that term.
the sharpness of this phenomenon is proxied by how status-conscious a place is
I think you're probably right. Bit of a feedback loop, too: the more absolute the hierarchy, the more people care about their place on it.
Corvos
2d ago
Off the top of my head, I suspect that Ukraine will break eventually, Putin will take over some or all of the country but be unable to enforce particularly high levels of order or get his industrial base high enough for further invasions. Ukraine will be remembered as a pointless tragedy / failure of western will / pyrrhic victory depending on factional allegiance.
Corvos
2d ago
This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow.
All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.
Bear in mind the language problem. In America, everyone speaks the same language everywhere (more or less). In Europe, lots of people speak English but realistically only about 10% have more than a few phrases they remember from school, so moving is hard. In Asia there's basically no overlap at all.
I take your point, but on the other hand, think of it this way: the American Revolution, the French Revolution(s) and the Russian Revolution were all radical overhauls of society that required tens of thousands of people to die for the movement to succeed. That seems like valuable information that shouldn't necessarily be discarded in a general analysis unless you are performing a specific comparison of one armed revolutionary movement* against another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://www.history.com/news/revolutionary-war-deaths
*The question of how far you can hold an ideology responsible for the movements that it produces is vexed, obviously, but if there's a strongish link between a given ideology and violent rebellion I think you have to take that into account to some degree.
Corvos
2d ago
Right, that's also a big thing. Seems less prevalent lately: I wonder if it's to prevent accusations of cultural appropriation? Or simply because youtube means that people can watch (and become fans of) the original before the remake is available on television.
It's especially weird that it didn't happen with anime because anime art is actually directly American in origin. Maybe that's why.
Corvos
1d ago
Thanks for the serious reply.
The country is England, just for the sake of clarity. I might be wrong, but Somerville looks like a pretty standard suburb to me, I think we’re already building in at least that level of density in most areas. Here is a randomly chosen town street. It is nice, though :)
We seriously lack accessible green space anywhere near the big cities, which are constantly expanding. And big chunks of land are rock moorland and difficult to build on (including most of Scotland).
I appreciate the detailed writeup. I will freely concede the following points: your analysis is probably correct, and the ICC's verdict is probably tendentious and politically motivated.
I am, I'm afraid, arguing vibes. The USA's pitch to the world over last half-century of so has been something along the lines of:
"We're here to help. Previously, empires were allowed to bully and exploit smaller countries, but we're different. We intend to put in place a world order that will allow (and require) countries to cooperate and trade with each other on equal terms. We intend to police the world if necessary, but not to rule it."
Given that, for America to exempt itself and its vassals from the international court with jurisdiction over
and to explicitly threaten employees of the court is a very bad look. It makes people start to wonder why America feels that laws around genocide and war crimes are "inapplicable or inappropriate" when applied to America. It brings back memories of the invasion of Iraq. It also brings back memories of things like the unequal extradition treaty between America and the UK. It's as though Bill Gates declared that he was too important to be bound by laws against murder, or at the very least demanded the right to determine whether those laws were being correctly applied to him and his friends on a case-by-case basis.
Precisely as immoral as it is to force people to be governed by laws they didn't sign.
In short, does America sincerely believe that it is too important and powerful to answer to anyone else? America's behaviour suggests that the answer is yes, and any intimations otherwise is 'who, whom' propaganda. The more America resorts to economic and diplomatic coercion, the less interested everyone else is in helping to maintain the system and America's place in it.
Having said all of that, I think that international law is an extremely flawed concept. The idea that one government can enter into an agreement that is considered binding on subsequent governments decades later seems ludicrous and anti-democratic. As with most law, it's ultimately a fudge for applying coercive power in a manner that is mostly accepted and results in minimal fuss. I wouldn't bear America any ill will for saying, "our voters are pro-Israel and we feel the need to act accordingly, regardless of international law" provided that they extended the same courtesy to everybody else.
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