FaibleEstimeDeSoi
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User ID: 2072
I don't think that it's fair to describe the whole post as racism. There is more of general conservative vibe to it(the past was better and you should invest in your country). And also obviously Austrian school signs all over it.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
2mo ago
Actually compared to Eastern and Central European neighbors Russian Empire wasn't particularly bad, and there were a number of improvements, in no small part thanks to the some in the past that were similar to Navalny. Of course after First World War and revolutions everything went to shit for the next century.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
2mo ago
Navalny is dead.
IMHO it is stupid to seriously discuss the circumstances of his death, especially after Litvinenko, Nemtsov and Navalny himself in 2020. He was killed and many new details that are brought in every hour only prove this more. Prison conditions as a reason are not an excuse, especially when we can see yesterday's Alexei, looking unhealthy, but not at all near death. Prigozhin's fate only further confirms the presumption of guilt.
His death is the right choice for the regime. Navalny posed a much greater threat to them in prison than abroad, and no possible reaction is scary enough to keep him alive. The authorities hope that in the current conditions there will not be a new leader in the opposition who will be able to unite the disparate dissident branches. This is quite likely, especially considering that the deceased did not have a successor (official or informal).
The opposition has lost its head, and the FBK have lost the remnants of their legitimacy. This tragedy for many will be a time of opportunity for others. Surely the next leader is already here, although I hope we wouldn't need to wait too long. In his posthumous address that he recorded for the 2022 film, Alexey asks Russians not to give up and I am sure that no one is going to do this. As a Russian I can say that as long as Russia exists, there will always be people willing to risk their lives for freedom and truth.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
3mo ago
Is your point is that if "strong HBD" is right you can't be racist or that Sailer isn't negatively biased against black people? Because I seriously doubt the latter. And I don't see the former either, you can still be discriminatory against people with intellectual disabilities.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
3mo ago
Isn't this argument goes not only against open borders but even modern large countries with no internal barriers in them. How small should your PaCCPs be? And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
4mo ago
But if it's merely the case that we don't believe unicorns exist until we have proof they do, congratulations cause you just proved unicorns exist.
No, you are still vastly more likely to be suddenly hallucinating in comparison to meeting mythological creature that nobody had found any evidence for hundreds of years. The same can be said about attributing internal feelings to hypothetical unseen all-powerful being and not some mundane neurological reason.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
4mo ago
and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was.
Isn't it obvious that this is true because both sides ultimately lost? There were no large doctrinal changes, people just stopped caring about their religion that much.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
4mo ago
Why would high performance students need help from their parents? Especially if we talking about core math curriculum.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
5mo ago
Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.
I don't know how many people agree with me on this but I do believe that Sexual Revolution didn't go far enough, sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way. More over puritan factions won in both the right and the left in spite of proclaimed commitment to the principle of sexual freedom in the latter one. Technology did solve issues that come with unrestricted love-making, we just need to wait for the culture to catch up(just in time for some other tech to disrupt it again). Some niche cultures are already there and make polyamory work quite well.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
5mo ago
I was good at maths till 10th grade, but in the 11th, I began to struggle both because my ADHD made my eyes glaze over during calculus and trig, and in the case of the latter, I missed several introductory classes.
Basically had the same experience, thankfully did go to the best school available(in Russia there is an alternative way to get into, bypassing the SAT analogue), but picked up personal tutor gig as a side hustle and had to learn all of it anyway.
Offtopic question but how saturated is the personal tutor market in India? Here it is not all, almost any 95th percentile and higher can earn decent money from it, while working remotely, people most often just don't consider this an option.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6mo ago
I think you are conflating current popular views and ideology at the foundation of the US. It is written, of course, that all men are created equal, but this obviously meant something different then, because in America from 18 century up to 20th century there was explicit legal inequality between sexes, races and even economic classes. That was not because of some mistake or for the lack of alternative, but because of conscious policies that aimed to achieve outcomes that were deemed more important than the ideal of liberty.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6mo ago
You mean something similar to gwern's idea?
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6mo ago
Is it rational to care or even know about propaganda in otherwise good media?
Imagine a person who doesn't know anything about Soviet Union and the concept of communism that decides to watch some movies from there. In the process of watching soviet cinema he will encounter not only direct propaganda of communism and Soviet Union itself but something more subtle, small, background details that show when and where this film was made and that it passed the eye of always hard-working socialist censors.
I think some already guessed where it goes. I was this person in relation to modern American progressive liberal views that are so common in Hollywood and general intelligentsia of United States. Without knowledge of internal us politics your mind just skips over all of the deliberately put messages in movies: specifically chosen race and sex of good characters and of evil ones, non spoken but painfully obvious and politically compliant moral of the story, slogans and signs hidden in plain sight. Many parts of it can be seen without the deep dive(the existence of same-sex relationships is the big one), in Russian, word "ΠΏΠΎΠ²Π΅ΡΡΠΊΠ°"(agenda in English) come to represent all of the most obnoxious signs of progressive propaganda(or again just the existence of gay characters, there are living strawmans and steelmans like in any other social group), but majority of local and subtle things go over the public heads.
Of course there is a big difference here - modern progressive censorship and propaganda is not(at least not directly state-based) it emerges from a self organizing space of intellectuals who are very close to each other ideologically, but this is not very important to me personally if the outcome in the media that we consume is the same. From society-level point of view I am very grateful that there is little to no threat of state censorship in the US and America became the global cultural hegemon, not China or USSR/BigAutoritarianRussia.
And after I started noticing propaganda I saw small signs of it in almost every high-budget product. I am not only talking about the cinema here. To the point that I started to asking myself this question: "Was I wrong in learning this new information about american coming and goings if this information is useless to me and at the same time genuinely negatively affected my ability to enjoy modern media?"(As an example I can bring up Spiderverse films). Is it better to just ignore other cultures' political context to peacefully enjoy their best fruits? Knowledge is valuable by itself but the question is how much?
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6mo ago
There is a world of difference between your strawman and real existing social democracy societies to which many younger people in the us aspire to. And you can easily have tens of thousands affordable 3+ bedroom apartments near the downtown. You just need to accept the glory of the commie block! Or at least, it's variation more palatable to the western tastes.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6mo ago
But it's obviously not just a pragmatic decision to reuse bronze that is contained in some old useless statue that nobody likes. People responsible didn't even try to pretend that it was, calling it"grim act of justice", "haunted spectacle" or "destruction of icon of hate" instead.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
7mo ago
But there is another solution - desacralization of sex and all the things that it entails. There was some movement in that direction with Sexual revolution but it stopped at current feminist puritanism. Without psychological significance given to it by ourselfs rape is no worse than being beaten up.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
7mo ago
Incentives can exist jn the world without copyright. People written books, created songs and plays before it after all. Internet allows for even more ways to fund your project while making final product free to download, Patreon and Kickstarter devs make a living this way already. You don't need to be a communist to be against intellectual property.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
7mo ago
don't feel like bothering with game piracy anymore either. My need to consoom just isn't that great.
Piracy nowadays in most cases easier and takes less time than buying something officially. For single player games there only disadvantages are non-availability of some modern games that aren't cracked yet and the absence of automatic updates(in some cases it can be a positive). Both of these do not relate to Fallout 4.
Russia intended to launch a war of national destruction. It didn't expect to have to fight to hard to do it, but the target lists for anyone thought to be pro-Western/anti-Russian were always part of the plan.
Ok, then where is there any evidence of some genocide that happened in Kherson that was controlled by Russian forces for almost a year and was generally pro-ukranian city with absolute majority of Ukranians? If you expect Russia to want kill any pro-Western person in Ukraine and see average as pro-western(so strike on soviet bloc is strike against the enemy) we should see tens of thousands of deaths in Kherson as it happened in history where one side of the war had national eradication as the goal.
Instead we see hundreds of cases and not of killings but detainment and torture - general brutality of the Russian state that it dishes out to it's citizens. In somewhat larger proportion because of vastly larger amount of potential violent dissidents but in the same category nonetheless. This piece for example tries to frame 320 victims in 9 months of occupation of a large as an evidence of genocide but it's quite poor if you can count. βThe pattern that we are observing is consistent with a cynical and calculated plan to humiliate and terrorise millions of Ukrainian citizens in order to subjugate them to the diktat of the Kremlin.β says Wayne Jordash, managing partner and co-founder of Global Rights Compliance. On average Russia humiliated/terrorized 1.185 Kherson denizen a day, deciding to adopt this as baseline(as does the article) and correcting for the population, if on 24 February somehow Russians occupied all of Ukraine we would see 160.8 Ukrainians brutalized every day on average. If we accept that millions means at least two millions, to reach this number with rate Russia would need approximately 34 years. Not even mentioning the difference between war and peace time or that you expect to see the rate lowering with time because number of dangerous dissidents is quite limited, this is not looking like a genocide to me, more old and boring authoritarian state thing.
In this I agree with Macron - words do have meaning.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
8mo ago
Thanks for the correction. Don't know what came over me when I wrote this, in my head I was mainly talking about amount of resources that you need to relocate to engage in this doctrine. Edited.
So there is one thing about both sides' media coverage of Russian-Ukranian war that bugged me for the last two years - accusations of deliberate targeting of civilian buildings, specifically non-military hospitals, schools, malls and houses. Am I wrong in thinking that regardless of evidence in specific cases probability of this happening is so low that we should expect to see almost zero cases of it?
I specifically talking about deliberate strikes because there are many alternative explanations revolving around mistakes, negligence, and faulty weapons. Of course all blame for this still lays on the initiator of the war but I think claims of deliberate hits are generally explained by these reasons.
Specific targeting of civilians is not new to wars, it was done quite often for loot and plunder in the old times and with mass proliferation of planes and missiles it, and Douhet's doctrine were at its height in WW2. Strategic bombing(e.g. targeting general use infrastructure and in some case industry somewhat related to the war) never went out of fashion and was used in almost all wars where the participants had a large enough air fleet since. But terror bombing(e.g. striking civilian targets for the purpose of lowering the enemy morale) is generally not used because time and time again it was proved ineffective and even damaging to its goal. I can't recall any country that engaged in the open terror bombing campaigns from, again, WW2, and if you decide to go this route you should be open about it. Main effect is on morale, it should be supported by propaganda and fiery speeches of inevitable death in case of continued defiance. I was quite obviously wrong about this(Thanks @ymeskhout for the correction). There is a modern tendency of doing things almost in the open and then fervently denying that you did them, that Russia follows often(recently with Prigozhin's untimely demise). What I wanted to communicate is that terror bombing needs to be open, or almost open because this doctrine by necessity requires large parts or even majority of your air force to have a desired effect.
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I'm interested in the process that happens before such strike as imagined by people who disagree with me. Does Russian/Ukrainian command has a secret policy of terror bombings but to keep it secret limits it to some fraction of its forces? What do they or some random rogue commander hope to gain from it? How do they justify wasting precious ammunition on targets that aren't relevant to the war effort?
I don't think that on any side of the barricades there exist some human-hating berserks that can answer "blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne!" to all of these questions and even if they did exist we would expect them to not have any power from the evidence we see.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
8mo ago
I generally label all my ideas so banal that any smart person could have come up with them, as it happens often. Nothing is original after 100 billion people lived and died.
Prigozhin's death was quite an expected event, it is rather surprising that it happened now, two whole months after the failed coup. But I suspect his story is not over yet. Ignoring Yevgeny's personal qualities, he was not a stupid person, and therefore, even if he believed in the secret agreements that was made on June 24, Prigozhin necessarily kept or created an additional reason not to kill him, and soon we will find out about it. The reason may be some compromising material, military secrets, or, if he had confidence in the loyalty of his people, the threat of a second "march of justice" from the Wagner PMCs. The latter scenario is unlikely, further complicated by the death of Dmitry Utkin, but according to the rule of "interesting events" in Russia it may very well happen.
It is also interesting how exactly the "plane crash" occurred. Stories about bad pilots or incredibly successful Ukrainian terrorists may of course appear in the Russian media, but it is obvious to everyone who is responsible for the elimination of the mercenaries leader. From the point of view of constructing plausible deniability it would be much more correct to kill Prigozhin during his stay in Africa, recent one or in the future. There you can find hundreds of different convenient culprits with motivation and weapons: from the French to the Islamists. Instead, his plane "crashed" in the middle of European part of Russia, not so far from Moscow.
Plausible deniability is bad in one case - when you want to convey a message by your action. This is what the kremlins most likely planned. As many said at the end of the deflated coup: "if it turns out that you can occupy one city, march in columns on Moscow, and then if you fail you will not suffer any consequences, then there may be many who will want to try to do this themselves. No harm if you failed in the end." The message from the ruling clan concerns the second part - the consequences will be much more severe than mere exile to Belarus. The official version will still find a way to declare Prigozhin's death a "fatal accident", but the real message, barely fitting between the lines will be visible to everyone.
Will the death of the former chef become a last note in his life story or just the beginning of the third act? - we'll find out soon.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
8mo ago
Huxley's dystopia has many more problems apart from artificial wombs. Caste system and pacification of population by drugs do not necessarily stem from destruction of traditional family structure. But generally to me, this theme of "terrible utopian technology destroying traditional way of life" and "loss of authenticity/connection to nature" repeated ad nauseum by dystopia authors such as Huxley or author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is disgusting in its denial of how much better our lives are compared to our ancestors because of technologies and how their imagined societies are often better compared to us in the same way and for the same reasons.
Are Japanese-Americans much fatter than their mainland brothers? From what I see not by much(23 VS 24, but it's including all Asians).
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