Goodguy
1d ago
Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological. However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it is inaccurate. "Jews" did not cause things that you dislike to happen in Weimar Germany. Some specific Jews did.
Goodguy
13d ago
Weren't there centuries of sexually active Machiavellian politician popes back in the day? It's pretty likely that the papacy is actually more pure in terms of living up to people's ideas of its purity nowadays than it has been on average during its overall history.
Goodguy
18d ago
When, in your opinion, was the most recent time period in which progressives did not have an advantage?
And how did they gain the advantage despite not having already had an advantage?
Goodguy
18d ago
If the original long march succeeded despite having begun in the quite conservative time period of around WW2 and having faced obstacles like McCarthyism, legal segregation, and a fervently anti-communist CIA, then modern Republicans really have no excuse. What, are they just not as brave as leftists of 70-ish years ago were?
I do not know whether the election was rigged or not. Has someone thought through the mechanism by which the election could be rigged on a sufficiently large scale?
However, one way or another, I disagree that Trump would easily have won a fair election.
He barely won in 2016. In 2020, he was no longer fresh and exciting, he just mostly repeated his 2016 campaign rhetoric. Plus the Democrats had had 4 years to attack him in the media. Plus he had failed to deliver on many of his promises. And then COVID did a lot to hurt the boost he would otherwise have gotten from the good economy.
In any case, instead of constantly trying to squeeze out narrow victories, maybe the Republicans could figure out how to put together a platform that would appeal to a greater number of voters, while also at the same time doing more stuff like what Musk has been to take away some of Democrats' domination of the media?
If they cannot do that, then I cannot think of any viable option for them other than secession. A coup would be very unlikely to work. Republicans do not have enough country-wide public support for that and federal law enforcement and the federal military are unlikely to back a coup.
Goodguy
20d ago
I have never either downvoted or upvoted anything here, though I do feel pleasure when others upvote me, which might be hypocritical.
Goodguy
20d ago
135 would be, like, top 1% in the developed world. Motteizens are clearly smarter than the average person, but I think not top 1% on average. To me 125 seems more plausible.
To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
This is where your argument fails for me. In my experience, what you say is not true. Out of the various sublime and mystic experiences I have had, some were social, some were not, and neither type was greater than the other.
Also, your apology for Christianity is, to me, in contradiction with your argument about perfection. I can imagine a god more perfect than the Christian one, both morally and in the sense of how plausible the reality of the god seems to me.
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages.
Maybe in some ways, in other ways we are in by far the most moral society in human history. For example, slavery had been nearly eradicated in the West.
The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical.
Among some people, sure. Other people talk about and encourage virtue all the time, although perhaps without using that word.
It's not even always necessarily a beneficial thing. For example, SJWs are literally people who talk about and encourage virtue among peers.
Goodguy
21d ago
The theory that "in war, shit happens" does not explain why so many more civilians died in Eastern Europe than in, say, France during World War 2, even if you account for the relative durations that those territories were actively being fought over. It also does not explain why specifically Jews, and also Poles and Roma, died in such larger numbers relative to their population sizes compared to members of other ethnicities.
Sure, there has been "genocide" before, but the claims about millions of people being transported across a continent so they could be tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then gassed with Zyklon B, then buried, and then later unburied and cremated on open-air pyres within a few months, then reburied...
"across a continent" was usually just a few hundred kilometers and it's not like it would have been hard for a state that was supplying three million soldiers with food, ammunition, and replacement parts a thousand kilometers away from Berlin to move the Jews and the tiny amounts of stuff they were allowed to take with them even if it had been across a continent. "tricked into gas chambers" was actually "forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".
Whether they tricked Jews into gas chambers or not, the Nazis had good pragmatic reasons for putting at least some veil of secrecy on top of what they were doing to the Jews. The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.
The anti-German propaganda in WWI never accused them of anything even close to the scale of what the Holocaust is supposed to have been. It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.
Also, as far as I know, the Holocaust was not even a major element of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, that came later. So there is another difference which calls into question the supposed parallels.
A very plausible explanation for why the anti-German post-WW2 narrative has endured longer than the anti-German post-WW1 narrative is that simply put, the average person, whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.
Goodguy
21d ago
It is true that Soviets were to some extent anti-Jewish after Stalin purged many of the Jewish Old Bolsheviks. However, any argument that one can make for how the Soviets were anti-Jewish is true much more for the Nazis. However much anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, as far as I know there is no good evidence that he was anywhere close to having been as anti-Jewish as Hitler.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Soviets murdered a bunch of Jews during and right after World War 2, but given that the Nazis were like 10 times more anti-Jewish than the Soviets in their political rhetoric, it seems to me that if either of the two regimes killed millions of Jews, it is much more likely that the Nazis did than that the Soviets did.
I mean, for however anti-Jewish Stalin might have been, the fact is that his regime employed many Jews even after the purges. The same cannot be said, except maybe for a few isolated cases, about Hitler's regime.
I think that the debate over the historicity of the Holocaust is a good opportunity to discuss the fundamental nature of how we know what we know.
Holocaust deniers are right when they say that most people just accept the mainstream theories without thinking too much about them.
However, in my experience at least, Holocaust deniers are mostly wrong when they depict themselves as open-minded seekers of truth. Again, at least in my experience, most Holocaust deniers believe that it did not happen with just the same sort of religious ardor that they criticize in others.
Holocaust deniers are right that there are various questionable aspects about the mainstream narratives.
However, I am not convinced that they themselves present a more convincing theory. And this is important because, I think, in any major historical event that involved large numbers of people, it will always be possible to pick holes in any given theory.
After any event that involves thousands of people, there will probably be some people afterward who either lie about what happened for personal gain or are genuinely misremembering / hallucinating things because they have mental issues.
However, this does not mean that the event did not happen.
When trying to figure out the truth of something like the Holocaust, I think that we should realize that there is not and probably never will be, barring the invention of time travel, any near-perfect theory that covers all the evidence in a way that makes everyone satisfied.
Given that there is no near-perfect theory, and certainly no perfect theory, the question then is what theory seems to be the most plausible.
For me, what seems more plausible?
-
The Nazi regime, which openly hated Jews and praised political violence, and which was known for killing even their own former political comrades sometimes (the Night of the Long Knives), actually did wipe out much of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe during the time that they occupied those territories.
-
The Nazi regime did not. The US and USSR and various European governments cooperated to create a hoax and perpetuate it all through the Cold War, and the various supposed witnesses are largely lying.
To me, #1 seems more plausible.
A similar line of thought can be extended to, for example, the John Kennedy assassination and 9/11. With major modifications, though. For example, it would have taken a much smaller group of people to kill John Kennedy than to kill several million Jews.
I find it much much easier to believe that the "official" story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is wrong than that the Holocaust never happened.
However, the point stands that just because the "official" theory has holes in it does not necessarily mean that any other theory is more plausible. One can pick holes in the other theories too.
Much of the debate over these kinds of historical questions boils down to people picking holes in the other side's theory while ignoring the holes in their own theory.
And unlike at least some people who question the "official" story of John Kennedy's assassination, Holocaust deniers rarely even bother to present a comprehensive alternative theory.
People who think that Oswald did not act alone at least often present some kind of theory to explain what happened. The CIA did it, or the anti-Castro Cubans, or the mafia, or some combination. Most Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, just pick holes in the mainstream theories without actually presenting a comprehensive theory of what they think happened.
As a side note, from what I understand, it did not even really take that many people to kill several million Jews, unless you count all the soldiers whose efforts were necessary to extend Nazis control into Eastern Europe to begin with.
Once the Nazis controlled those territories, the actual effort it would have taken to kill millions of Jews was quite small. A few thousand Einsatzgruppen soldiers, a few thousand camp personnel, and some railroad workers.
Holocaust questioners often argue "why would the Nazis have devoted so much effort to killing all those Jews in the middle of a war". And, even putting aside the fact that wanting to dismantle Jewish power was a major Nazi political aim, that question still makes little sense because the actual effort it would have taken to kill those Jews according to the mainstream theories was quite small.
I have done the math before of looking into necessary use of railroads, material, and soldiers and I figured out that even at the height of the Holocaust, the extermination campaign would have been using maybe about 1-2% of the total German war effort just on the East Front alone.
I do not feel like finding and posting the math right now, but anyone can do it themselves if they want to. For example, look at numbers for how many railroad cars per day it took to supply the German armies on the East Front and then compare them to how many railroad cars per day moving Jews to the camps would have required.
It is not hard for an authoritarian regime to round up and kill huge numbers of mostly unarmed people.
Goodguy
26d ago
From Children of Dune. It's one of the chapter-leading quotes, this one labeled "Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by, The Princess Irulan".
Goodguy
26d ago
Is it really a definitive no, though? I'm not sure that just because a woman rejects a man based on his Tinder profile, it 100% means that she would reject him in real life. Maybe it's like 90% or something, but that still means it's not a definitive no.
It is a good illustration of how utterly committed the US foreign policy establishment is to its current very forward-deployed posture in the world that a man who is as hawkish on China as Vivek is still considered some kind of insane, maverick isolationist.
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power.
-Frank Herbert
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
Goodguy
27d ago
I don't want to have a right to give a woman a celebratory kiss at our mutual moment of world triumph, I want women to want me to kiss them at our mutual moment of world triumph but I also want people to not try to destroy me if I fuck up and read the room wrong.
I agree that his life shouldn't be destroyed or anything, but imagine the following (assuming that you're a straight man):
Right after you win the World Cup, a famous and powerful gay guy whom you're kind of acquainted with, who is physically stronger than you, puts his hands on both sides of your head and kisses you on the mouth on international television.
His motives may have been pure, maybe even not sexual at all (although Hermoso is cute, so I doubt any straight man would really have zero sexual feelings about her even in such a moment). But I can imagine that having the world see this video could make her feel humiliated, on top of whatever unpleasantness she may or may not have felt in the moment of the kiss. There is no need to reach for a narrative of woke persecution to explain her sequence of reactions.
Funnily though, this is an example of the strange subtleties of gender politics. I guess that straight men sometimes kiss each on the mouth in some cultures in moments of elation, and it is not generally interpreted as sexual. So it is possible that Rubiales had no sexual motives whatsoever (although again I doubt it, given what she looks like). But if, let us say somehow if he didn't, then this would be an example of a man being treated as doing something wrong for just treating a woman the same way that he would treat a man.
But again, I doubt that he has no sexual interest in her.
Goodguy
27d ago
Sure, but OP is implying that men are routinely getting called immoral just for being economically successful while at the same time socially unsuccessful.
I'm not saying that it's good that guys get called immoral just for criticizing women online, I'm saying that I'm not sure OP is actually right that what he claims tends to happen actually happens often.
Goodguy
27d ago
Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting.
I have seen this written online several times before but have seen zero evidence of it. I have, on the other hand, seen men be friends with women who seem to have zero or little sexual interest in them. Why would the women be friends with them if they found them actively revolting?
Goodguy
27d ago
I have seen men get accused of being immoral for complaining about and criticizing women online, but I do not think that I ever have seen a man get accused of being immoral just for not doing well with women.
What makes you think that economically successful but sexually unsuccessful men are being routinely suspected of lacking in moral virtue?
Goodguy
29d ago
Yep, I was doing decently well with women back when I was making essentially poverty wages for the city I was living in doing part time work and my living situation was such that I had almost no place to bring a girl back to.
What I did have a lot of back then was free time! Time to go out and try to meet women, time to think about improving my skills with women.
If you have a great job but it means you only have enough energy left over to spend maybe just a few hours a week trying to meet women, well you might not get good success unless maybe you get really focused on apps or match-making services or something. Although I don't know, I haven't tried much on those.
I should probably qualify this post, though, by saying that it's not unlikely that women would find, say, a 35 year old man who is almost broke and does not have his own place to be less attractive than a 25 year old man with the same characteristics. But I don't really know, I am only speculating there.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died a few months after the German revolution when they led the weak and quickly crushed Spartacist uprising, so I'm not sure why anyone would think they contributed much to so-called Weimar "degeneracy".
I also find the notion of "Weimar degeneracy" to be pretty silly because people who use that term generally ignore the much worse degeneracy of the Kaiser's government, which allowed Germany to get pulled into the worst war in human history up to that point and then failed to win it, and many of the supporters of which then blamed others besides Germany's political-military ruling class for the catastrophe. Note that I am not blaming Germany for starting the war or claiming that the communists would have been better had they taken power in Germany, but I am claiming that the Kaiser's government were a bunch of incompetents who caused much worse things to happen to Germany than anything that Jews or leftists did to it during the Weimar periiod.
The specific notion of "Weimar degeneracy" already implies that the person who uses the term only cares about what certain groups of people did to Germany, but does not care about others. So, for example, to them all the leftist attempts to take power are automatically branded as bad things, but they will go and excuse the Kapp Putsch and Hitler's later takeover as being good things even though there is no good reason to believe so given that Kapp probably would have returned some version of an incompetent monarchist autocracy into power and we know that Hitler in fact made even stupider geopolitical decisions than the Kaiser's government had, and got Germany even more destroyed than the Kaiser's government had.
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