Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?
This overall topic is about who the democratically elected government chooses to spend money on. Even if you consider free speech dependent on federal subsidy, which would be wildly at odds with the premise of natural rights, there are always people not getting money. There have always been conditions for getting the money. These incudes the previous administration's insistence on DEI-support speech in applications and proposals, the reversal of which is the basis of the OP's quoted objection.
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
Sure. Appeals not to generally devolve into special pleading that are categorically rejected in other contexts.
Kolmogorov complicity is still complicity, and it was specifically complicity with, for, and for prestige within one of the worst authoritarian/totalitarian states of the 20th century. Kolmogorov is not morally absolved by being a stellar mathematician who advanced the field. He has the same sort of moral onus of gifted scientists of other totalitarian regimes, who are routinely condemned.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Not literally everyone in academia is your enemy.
And?
I try to avoid enemy/friend distinctions for many reasons. I am not adopting or revealing any preference here. This is a specific point about the metaphor.
But if you are going to adopt/concede an 'enemy institution' paradigm in the first place, there's no particular relevance of 'not literally everyone is your enemy' beyond the utility of those not-enemies to help target the enemies. If they aren't, or can't, then even if they better qualify as collateral rather than collaborators, neither category is enough to merit any principle against targeting the enemy institution. If their presence is used to claim the institution cannot be targeted because of the damage to the non-enemies, this is merely the use of human shields. Human shields are not protection of legitimate military targets. This is especially true if they are willing human shields, voluntary or paid or otherwise.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.
But sepoys for controlling east Africa weren't the reason for invading India either, which is the rather more important distinction for Britain's motives for going into India.
We've enough of the historical record recorded to have pretty unambiguous rationales for the East India Company's conquest of India, and 'to get forces to control east Africa' wasn't one of them. The British Empire might have cared about capturing markets for the sake of captive markets, and it absolutely engaged in slavery/don't-call-it-slavery in the process, but it just as definitively did not approach its empire building with the mindset of a Paradox strategy gamer prioritizing pop accumulation. No particular part of the empire was set up for maximizing population value from a government-utility advantage, which is one of the kinder things to say of the British Empire.
As with most imperialist states, hefty cultural chauvenism on the part of the conqueror broadly squandered potential population contributions from subjugated people, as opposed to any real policy of cultivating and extracting, well, high-value human capital.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
And the flip side of that is that the piece of paper does not drive a man/woman to choose their own ethnic group for favoritism. Which is to say, many people keep old passports out of convenience or utility, not ethnic identitarianism.
I've a similar feeling when the word 'must' appears in journalism.
In other fields, 'must' is an obligation, or a consequence of a previously established condition. An apple must fall when subject to the law of gravity. A spouse must maintain a certain level of relations lest they be divorced into an ex-spouse. A racer must move faster than the competition to win. A legal contract must be fulfilled to avoid the penalties of breaking the contract.
In journo-speak, 'must' is much more likely to mean 'something the writer wants the subject to do, but they don't actually have to do.' The politician must take a certain position. The government must take a certain policy. In such cases, though, the consequences of not abiding the 'must' are, well, that they clearly did not have to do what they must have done.
To me it's a red flag of advocacy journalism, outside of specifically technical/consequential framings of the earlier sense.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Of course, being aware of being in a dream is itself lucid dreaming. Which is fine, but when you start then trying to use that awareness to deliberately twist the dream in your preferred direction, it reaches the metaphor's awkward transition of dreaming being an individual person's thing to, well, something other people have a stake in.
Socially controversial social engineering that tries to leverage lucid-dreaming-like 'I know this is a dream, but others must still behave like a dream while I change their dream around them*' has some of the same experiences/connotations/implications of being stuck in a dream you don't control, but when then keeps changing for the worse. I.E., a nightmare of feeling impotent and trapped.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.
Or locking people into bad temper posting which runs afoul the rules, but which they might think better of after seeing it posted.
Quoting this because this was what was present and being responded to before your edit.
No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.
Heavens no. The Mission fucking Accomplished paradigm was established precisely to defend not banning recognized ban evaders who were noticed, but weren't breaking the rules on decorum to the degree to warrant another ban on those grounds. It was the returnees compliance with the decorum, not their ability to not be detected, which was the accomplishment. Were it the later, the defense of non-moderation wouldn't have had to be made in the first place.
And it's also worth noting that you did not ban TequilaMockingbird for past posts, or even any rule breaking aspect of this post.
It's fine if we have abandoned the 'Mission fucking Accomplished' paradigm on this site, as long as we're clear of the change of paradigm.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
It was, however, permanently shamed, and to a degree that if Darwin ever tried to reuse the GuessWho account, they'd be constantly challenged to pick up the topic they flopped out on. It'd be like if Tracing came back and wanted to pretend that their flounce and denunciation of the Motte never happened- they'd regularly be hounded for it.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I don't recall his sense of humor ever being to refer to himself as a "Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker" either, but that's what the TequuilaMockingbird profile says.
I mean, if anything that's more my joke.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
Too late- Amadan banned him on suspicion of being Hlynka and thus ban evasion. Not this post, just ban evasion.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I'd add 'and Democrat-aligned elites' to that as well. As the quip went, they were for it before they were against it, and Saddam was a long-running sore that Clinton bombed as well. Had he not been taken out, we'd probably be debating how incompetent / missed opportunities the US had to pre-empt the basis for the Iranian nuclear program, and Saddam's inevitable response to that becoming public knowledge.
When he says "if you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region... and I think that people sitting right next door, young people, and many others, will say 'the times of such regimes, such despots, is gone'...", to you it sounds like "don't invade Iraq, and if you're going to do it, hit Iran first (or at least do both)"?
Do you live in a world where politicians say the same things in public as in private, particularly if they have reason to believe a party is already committed to a course of action?
Even if you do, would you consider Netanyahu's remarks and advocacy evidence of instigating?
If there was no difference, why did they not discuss it in public to begin with?
Are you asking why private diplomatic conversations are not immediately publicized? Simple- because private conversations occur, and keep occurring, on the premise of confidentiality.
Hence why the revelations came out as the tail end of the Bush administration via US diplomats writing end-of-term tell-alls, and not from the Israeli side of the relationship.
That's like blaming people for being familiar with front page headline news, but not the correction notice on page 19, stuck between obituaries and classifieds.
I would absolutely blame people for taking strong positions solely off of front page headline news lines at the time. It is a terrible practice, both because emergent news is often wrong and because media also lies with enough regularity that you should regularly be looking for correction notices.
I would also blame people who for ignoring rather relevant and available information sources on their claimed subjects of interest. People with strong interests or claims on how the US government works can be expected to be familiar with notable examples of the genre of government tell-alls of departing / former government staffers, particularly for exceptionally analyzed / researched historical examples like the Bush administration's Iraq War processes.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.
Disagree. If it was true, it would matter quite a bit.
If deBoer was right- both in his conclusion and his reasoning as to why- it would be really relevant. It would mean, among other things, that deBoer had an actually, insightful, accurate, and predictive model of notoriously difficult fields of technology and human pyschology that can all be used to know results in advance. It would not only bolster his credibility on many other topics, but could help refine public policies, discourse, and even technological evolution itself, because here would be a man who can see what is coming before it happens. It would be a demonstration of the quality of his conceptions vis-a-vis would-be public luminaries like, well, Scott. DeBoer would demonstratably be a man who not only knows Scott's interests better than Scott, but also knows Scott better than Scott to a degree that he can accurately predict where Scott will be wrong, and why, before Scott does.
But it's only useful / relevant if it's a prediction made in advance of it being realized. There's no particular value in accurate psychoanalysis with the benefit of hindsight, except when/if it helps with the next future prediction. There's no particular economic/technological understanding why something failed after it already did so, except to help with a future effort. It'd be like be proud about how you totally knew a war would be won or lost after it was resolved- the value of knowing which way the war will result is to affect it before it is a matter of history, so that you can change the future.
But this, in turn, requires being right. deBoer isn't useless here because being right is irrelevant- deBoer is useless because he isn't, and he spends far too many words being useless.
This seems like cope.
I am not surprised it seems like cope to an account created specifically to defend this OP's premise.
Welcome to the Motte, by the way. I look forward to your unique and diverse posting interests going forward.
No, it is about Israel because nobody is getting deported over DEI. Top federal officials aren't devoting their full attention to girls yelling at guys wearing USA shirts. Not a single person has had the book thrown at them for "anti-white racism".
I believe what the Trump Admin does, not what it says.
'Believing what the Trump Admin does' would entail recognizing that no one is getting deported over FEMA funds at all, which is what this is about, whereas this exact event is proposing non-joo-related basis to throw the book at people.
These may not be the doings that the OP and/or you wish to acknowledge, but that is the sort of thing the OP is typically inclined to obfuscate.
Of course, Trump also is pitting the interests of his Jewish donors against the interests of "America First" voters who didn't sign up for endless glazing of a foreign country. The Democrats didn't need any help to provoke a civil war, Joe Biden did that all on its own. By wading in he's provoking an avoidable Republican civil war instead.
There is no Republican civil war about using Democratic Party shibboleths as a potential legal action trigger against members of the Democratic Party.
There has been plenty of wishful thinking by would-be leaders of the right that [their special interest] would be the straw that broke the Trump coalition's back since theirs was the Truly Popular position, but such as it has long been and so it will be going forward.
On the contrary, it looks like Trump is himself being baited into an untenable position by his donors/blackmailers. Unconditional support for Israel to the point of punishing American citizens is taking the 20 on a 80-20 issue.
'Trump is being bribed / blackmailed into unamerican activities to the disgust all true Americans' has been a political attack line longer than his time in office. It remains as credible as ever.
And this particular condition is not characteristic of the whole law either, and as such characterizing the broader law in terms of this particular condition is wilfully misrepresenting the broader law.
Or, to put in other terms, it is missing the forest for a tree. It can indeed be a joo-tree in the forest, but it is not a joo-tree forest. Talking about how the forest is the result of malign joo influence is willfully misrepresenting the forest.
Not least because, and part of that broader context being obfuscated, the joo-tree is coincidentally planted in a specific grove beside the anti-DEI-tree, and the anti-illegal-immigration (ALL) tree, all at the direction of the hated forest-lord. This grove is now being publicized to audiences with people who would like to cut down joo-trees, anti-DEI-trees, and ALL-trees even before their hatred of the forest-lord is considered.
That's bait, and SS fell for it as much or more than the intended targets.
Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.
'Don't do [course of action] unless you're going to do it the right way' may be dismissed as quibbling over priorities, but it is still a caution against, and are not even indirectly instigating the [course of action] either.
On a material-level, if you are going to invade both countries as the neocons intended, then your second sentence is objectively true. It would be far easier for the US to launch from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into Iraq than into Iran (you could drive), and then from Iraq into Iran (you could drive), than to launch an amphibious invasion of Iran.
Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.
When the result of private discussions are later publicized, and have been public for nearly two decades now, it is a distinction without a difference. Someone can claim the later public revelations were lies, or self-serving after-the-fact deflections, but absent that we can absolutely blame people for not knowing a historical record exists.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course,
A bit of an understatement: the Israelis advocated against it, on the grounds that if any regime changing was to happen, it should prioritize Iran.
The American response was allegedly that Iran would be next. Which actually makes a fair bit of sense if you are planning to take down both, since it's easier to drive from Kuwait and Saudi into Iraq than do a cross-Hormuz amphibious invasion, but no one exactly remembers them of being good planners.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?
An end to semi-regular wars along the Suez Canal and degrading the arms-supplier influence nexus to Egypt from major American geopolitical rivals?
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
You have re-cited one of three distinct conditionals that would enable the Trump administration to lawfully act against its political opponents breaking the law, as a response to a post arguing that any of the three conditionals would meet the probable intent of seeking to lawfully act against political opponents breaking the law.
You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.
The government was already- as in, for decades pre-Trump- using Title IX against universities for what individuals were doing. This has repeatedly withstood the scrutiny of courts, bipartisan elected official review, and even the approval of academics like Terence Tao. Your own citation concedes that 'Real discrimination deserves a real response,' it merely quibbles what [real discrimination] should be bounded at, while presenting a false dilemma that has already come to pass.
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