Goodguy
2d ago
Mental illness is an extremely broad category. Therapy can help some kinds of it a lot and some other kinds of it likely not at all, as far as I can tell. People who both know a lot about therapy speak and also are predisposed to lie a lot obviously will often use therapy speak as part of their lying. However, that does not necessarily mean that therapy speak is in general a bad thing.
I see a similarity to business-speak ("corporate jargon", if you prefer). Business-speak can be a good thing, a jargon to quickly and effectively express complex specific ideas. But it can also be, and often is, used to lie. So often that the idea of bullshit business-speak is a widely recognized trope. Yet business-speak is not useless for honest communication, and indeed often is used in a helpful way.
Yes, the idea that the left-wing anti-Israel protests in the US are essentially motivated by antisemitism seems silly to me given that I feel like I actually have a decent amount of experience with the kind of people who go to these protests. Granted, I am removed from my experiences with these kinds of people by quite a few years at this point, but I doubt that college-aged left-wing protesters are very different nowadays from what they were like the last time I was commonly encountering them.
I say "in the US" because it might be different in Europe, I can't speak to that. Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.
I have no doubt that a decent fraction of the actual Arabs and Muslims who go to these protests in the US are anti-semitic, but I also think that that only a tiny fraction of the rest of the protesters are.
To me it seems that the typical naive young college student SJW leftist not only has not a single bone of anti-Jew sentiment in his or her body, they probably don't even think much about Jews as an ethnic group to begin with. This is true of most Americans. The majority of American gentiles barely even realize that, for example, white people with curly hair or names that end in -berg or -stein are likely to be Jewish. They just think of Jews as a flavor of white people, and they rarely think about them as an ethnic group to begin with. They know that the Holocaust targeted Jews, of course, but they rarely think about the Holocaust, or about any other historical event for that matter. In the US, discussing Jews as an ethnic group is something that is mainly done by three groups: Jews themselves, highly pro-Israel Christians, and highly online alt-rightists. Maybe also to some extent by black people, but I am not familiar enough with black attitudes towards Jews to weigh in on that.
The average young college protester freely mingles with Jewish people in personal life and enjoys Jewish artists without having the slightest bit of prejudice towards them. In many cases, the protester does not even realize that his/her friend, or that musician he/she listens to, is Jewish to begin with. In other cases he/she does realize it, but does not care about it any more than he/she would care about a friend having red hair, for example.
It is of course possible that my experience with college-aged protesters is simply out of date and I am stuck in the past. I wouldn't advise anyone to make decisions that could affect life or limb based on my recollections. But to me, the idea that college leftists have actually become antisemitic seems absurd. There would have been no precedent for it 10 or 20 years ago, even though college leftists hated Israel back then too.
I have debated the Holocaust many times with many deniers and have little interest in doing it yet again. Almost without exception, they have been devoutly committed to Holocaust denial and little short of a time machine would change their minds. In this, ironically, they are the simply the mirror image of the normies who learn about the Holocaust as kids and have been conditioned to react negatively to any doubts about it having happened.
I originally came into the whole topic a few years ago with an actually pretty open mind, and I was willing to be convinced by deniers. I didn't have any sort of ideological predisposition to need to believe that the Holocaust had happened, and my politics does not rest in any way on the Holocaust having happened. My attitude to Jews is neutral and my attitude to Israel is negative.
Yet after trying to engage many times in good faith with deniers' arguments, I came to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.
Deniers' arguments largely rest on a few different points.
First, deniers tend to absurdly whitewash Nazis' attitudes towards the Jews and for some reason refuse to countenance the idea that the Nazis would actually try to kill all of them. This despite the fact that there is really nothing special about the Holocaust. Large-scale genocides are common in human history. What would perhaps be weirder than the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews would be if the Nazis, despite their stated attitudes about the Jews and their glorification of political violence in general, didn't try to exterminate the Jews once they had every opportunity to do so. Keep in mind that the Holocaust as described by mainstream theories took only a very small fraction of the total German war effort in terms of manpower and raw materials, so the common denier argument of "why would the Germans have spent the resources on this in wartime?" makes no sense. Anyone can do the math themselves - the reality is that the total Holocaust effort was a drop in the bucket for the Germans and they got a lot of slave labor from it too.
Second, deniers poke holes in the mainstream narratives. For example, by calling into question the exact details of how many bodies could be burned in a given span of time, or pointing out absurdities in some supposed survivors' testimonies. What this ignores is that it is inevitably possible to poke holes in any comprehensive theory about any event of the scale of the Holocaust. Any event of such scale will involve things that are hard to explain, seeming contradictions, eyewitnesses who are either insane or lying, and so on. It is also possible to poke holes in all of the deniers' alternative theories. However, they generally do not present any specific comprehensive theories about what happened, instead just producing hand-wavy ideas about the Jews dying from diseases or starvation. Whenever they produce concrete, specific theories, it is just as easy or easier to poke holes in those theories as it is to poke holes in any of the mainstream theories. Deniers' theories do not explain why censuses show an enormous reduction of Europe's Jewish population between the immediate pre-war and immediate post-war periods. They also do not explain how it would have been possible for a hoax of the scale of the Holocaust to have been successfully carried out and kept secret by a combination of the US, its Cold War enemy the USSR, various European countries, and thousands of eyewitnesses.
Third, deniers claim that because Holocaust denial is legally forbidden in some places, it shows that the Holocaust did not happen. But this does not follow. Laws against Holocaust denial can be easily explained by a combination of European fear of far-right politics, Europe's un-American attitude towards free speech, German guilt, and Jews' disproportionate political power relative to their population size.
As a history buff, what bothers me about Holocaust denial isn't that I have any ideological commitment to the idea that the mainstream theories are right. I don't. On the contrary, it would excite me to find out that a historical theory that is so widely accepted is actually false. The idea of it stirs my rebellious blood and my love of intellectual upheaval!
What actually bothers me about Holocaust denial is that I have seriously tried to engage with many different deniers' arguments, and when I did so I saw that their thinking is mostly shoddy, their arguments are weak, and most of them are in reality closed-minded and firmly unwilling to alter their core beliefs about the Holocaust even when they act as if they are fearlessly open-minded seekers after truth.
I am sure that with some people, this actually is a moral principle. Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people". There are a number of other such right-leaning (by modern standards) intellectuals who seem to have genuinely been motivated by at least some altruism.
A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission. Think of those Nazi uniforms and the Nazi cult of the virile young man, and the adulation of Hitler as some sort of almost living god, for example. and in general, think of the whole Prussian style of life, with its stern fathers and hyper-focus on discipline, social rank, and obedience. Or think of Mishima, whose life speaks for itself. In the modern day, think of the Bronze Age Pervert / Greek statue Twitter style of aesthetic, with its emphasis on toned male bodies and the constant dancing around the fact that many of the actual ancient Greeks enjoyed having sex with men very much. Nothing wrong with some gay sex, but it is funny to see the sublimation in action. Even if they have never heard the word, such people long to be part of a Koryos - although, if in reality they actually did get to be a part of some such group, with its intense hazing and male bonding, they might wish to flee from it quite soon. They have their admiration of masculinity bound up with their psycho-sexual natures. While they might be horrified at the idea of being an older ancient Greek man's young companion who gets both mentored and dominated, maybe even fucked, they long for the softer version of something similar that can be found in Fight Club, or in movies about the tight bonds between soldiers. There is a strong psycho-sexual need for an older brother or a "daddy" of some sort. Now, we all could use a nice older brother or a loving father, but among some of the highly online right it is clear that these archetypes have become fetishized.
Such people often have a powerful obsession with the idea that modern society lacks transition rites to turn boys into men, that it is missing a Koryos of some sort. The modern highly online right has a high over-representation of people who for some reason feel like they need to become men by doing something. Now, normally this just happens as one goes through life. One meets challenges, faces them, sometimes gets defeated and learns something to come back to the fray, at other times conquers the challenge and advances to new heights. Over time, one gains a stronger and stronger sense of one's own power.
Men who, for whatever reason, get stunted in this power process, to borrow a term from an infamous writer, make up a large fraction of the people who get drawn to extremist politics with strong sexual connotations. This is perhaps the grain of truth behind the meme of "young anime-loving autist boy has two possible paths in life: either become a super-leftist transgender with pink-and-blue socks, or become a Nazi LARPer who hates women and posts online going by the name of GasTheKikes1488". In either case, these people seem to have a powerful feeling that something key is missing in their self-image.
The 10% of the right that is made up of actual humane intellectuals is simultaneously struggling with the weight of the 80% of the right who have about the intelligence level of a piece of wood, and with another 10% of the right that is made up of raging, messed-up edgelords.
Not sure where else to put this so I'll put this here as an addition to what I have already said about Holocaust deniers elsewhere in this thread.
Holocaust deniers present a real challenge to free speech loving forums and, on such forums, largely create their own problems by turning people against them.
The challenge, at least for US-hosted websites, is not that Holocaust denial will bring the "Eye of Sauron" on the forum or anything similar. The Motte, for example, is in no danger because it hosts Holocaust deniers. 4chan is still merrily chugging along even though Holocaust denial is almost the norm there.
The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.
The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.
Free speech forum participants usually have an eclectic range of interests. Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, are usually highly passionate about Holocaust denial, not very interested in other topics, and their beliefs are highly coherent with the beliefs of other deniers, so once enough of them have come to a site one's experience there becomes similar to fighting against an army of bots.
Some might laugh at this, but I remember that 4chan's /his/ at one point a few years ago was actually a relatively decent (by 4chan standards) place to discuss history. Most of it was typical stupid 4chan-tier discussion, but there was also a decent number of intelligent participants. But the board kept getting constantly shit up by wave upon wave of Holocaust deniers. So the typical state of the board would be a bunch of small threads about eclectic stuff, and then a few 100-200 reply threads full of repetitive arguing between Holocaust deniers and other people. Almost all of the deniers were firmly unwavering in their beliefs and I doubt many a mind was ever changed. I have a theory that over time, the board got significantly worse at least in part because a lot of the intelligent posters got bored/tired of the deniers and stopped engaging as much.
Imagine that you are running a history forum and you are firmly devoted to the cause of free speech and "no topic is off limits". But imagine also that it so happens that the Internet has a strongly motivated, passionate, and fairly large contingent of people who are convinced that Napoleon never existed and was actually just a hoax. You want to allow people to discuss whatever they want with no restrictions on their speech - however, then you notice that now 20% of your board is made up of people who claim that Napoleon was a hoax, have a poor understanding of history, are impossible to persuade, and constantly accuse those who disagree with them of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Personally I am not in favor of banning Holocaust denial. I am pretty staunchly in favor of free speech!
So why did I write all this? It is to explain why, to some of us who have been discussing history online for a long time, Holocaust deniers are just so utterly tiresome. We have debated with them a hundred times on a dozen different forums. That is why when they show up, our response isn't to think "Oh goody, what an interesting new take on this historical matter!". Our response is "Ah man, it's these people again... Here come the same repetitive, pointless debates that I've already seen so many times before."
Eliezer Yudkowsky has successfully held off the Skynet overlords and if you want this state of affairs to continue, you should send him more money.
Jokes aside, while I agree that so far the productivity increases are marginal, the technology is genuinely remarkable compared to what most people anticipated a few years ago. I can ask the LLM to tell me about how to do incredibly boring softwareshit and it usually tells me the right idea, saving me the effort of going to Stack Overflow and other sites and reading through it myself. And it actually writes code for me that works like 70% of the time which is great because it means that I can spend less time doing perhaps the most boring activity ever devised, writing business software for other people, and instead use the time to do something more interesting, such as pretty much anything else. All this might not seem like much, but this would actually have seemed like an utterly crazy leap of technology a few years ago. The AIs are also making good visual art and decent music left and right. I think that the economic changes are slowly creeping up, it might not seem obvious now what the current AI revolution has done, but it will be obvious in a few years.
Skynet doesn't seem to be right around the corner, but people who worry about it have a point in that, while the current AI stuff isn't Skynet, if one draws a line between AI capability 10 years ago and AI capability now, and extrapolates the same line 10 years forward... Of course extrapolating the line isn't good science, but there's no particular reason to think that the line's slope will decrease.
Personally, my attitude to all the AI risk stuff is the same as my attitude to climate change. I think the concerns about both are probably well-founded, I just don't really care much about either on the emotional level. I guess that's one of the nice things about not having kids.
I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.
Goodguy
8d ago
The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do.
I agree about the "they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do" part, but not about the "The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel" part. Where are you seeing this?
To me, it seems obvious that the anti-Israel left is sweeping Hamas' atrocities under the rug. However, I haven't seen any reason to think that the anti-Israel left, in general, is blaming all Jews for Israel's actions.
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning. In the case of census data about pre-war Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, we also know that this census data is corroborated by numerous literary sources, both fiction and non-fiction, which describe large Jewish populations in pre-war Eastern Europe.
Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, wrote:
Although Vienna then had about two hundred thousand Jews among its population of two millions, I did not notice them.
Consider what it means for the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, if Vienna alone had 200,000.
As for the details of the operation of the death camps, first let us be clear. You do not simply disbelieve that the death camps operated as mainstream Holocaust theories describe them operating. You disbelieve that there was ever any deliberate Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews at all. And you are using the argument of "if the mainstream theories get the operation of the camps wrong, it means that the mainstream theories are completely wrong and, in fact, there was no Holocaust at all".
But you have not advanced, at least not from what I have read of your posts, a comprehensive and specific alternative theory. You have the advantage of not presenting a comprehensive theory, but instead just criticizing the comprehensive theories of others. Much of your argumentation is on the hand-wavy level of "well, maybe the censuses were wrong".
But you have not presented a comprehensive theory that is more credible than the theory that the Nazis deliberately tried to exterminate the Jews.
The idea that the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax that the US, USSR, various European countries, and eyewitnesses all successfully collaborated on creating and perpetuating, even at the height of the Cold War when some of the participants in the alleged hoax were enemies, seems to me to be obviously even less probable than the idea that you can cremate a million people in a year at a small Polish camp or whatever.
The Nazis had means, motive, and opportunity. Given their ideology, why wouldn't they have tried to exterminate the Jews? The Holocaust is completely in alignment with Nazi ideology. This isn't a case of "the man who is being accused of murder is by all accounts a nice guy and it is debatable whether he was even in the vicinity when the victim died". This is a case of "the man who is being accused of murder openly told people numerous times that he hated the victim, he had a history of threatening the victim, he had a history of violence against both the victim and others, and he was there in the house with the victim on the day that the victim died".
This was to have been expected given how the Ukraine war has been going. Both sides in that war routinely get a large fraction of their attacking assets intercepted when they attack targets that have substantial air defense protecting them. And Russia has better technology than Iran does, plus does not have to fly their assets over non-friendly airspace first before even getting to the target country. And Israel is small, so relatively easy to cover by air defense, and it has put a lot of resources into air defense. Based on all this, I predicted earlier today, when the news that Iran was launching the attack broke, that about 95% of Iranian striking assets would be intercepted, and it looks like I was pretty correct.
Also, it was obvious almost as soon as the news broke earlier today that Iran had started the strike that they were going for a limited attack, not starting a full-scale war against Israel. Firstly, because Iran has no rational reason to start a full-scale war with Israel, especially not before they have created a nuclear deterrent. Of course, states do not always behave in rational ways. However, secondly, if Iran was launching a full-scale war they would have launched more assets and would have probably managed to get Hezbollah to simultaneously attack Israel.
I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black. However, I think that probably the much more significant factor is that Allen's accusers generally think of him as being the rapist of a child, whereas they think of Tyson as being "just" the rapist of an adult.
Michael Jackson was perhaps the most popular person on the planet for a few years, and black, yet the existence of credible child sex allegations against him has severely damaged his reputation. The only reason why he still has so many devoted fans is because he originally had such enormous charisma and musical talent, significantly surpassing Tyson's appeal at his peak. Jackson was perhaps the closest a musician has ever come to having a mass religious following, even more than Elvis, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift.
Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in tatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.
I doubt that the race of the victims has much to do with the reactions in these cases. I think that the majority of people who are aware of the accusations against Tyson and Cosby have no idea what race the alleged victims were. The allegations against Jackson are so prominent that probably many people are aware that he seemed to prefer white boys, but I doubt his reputation would be significantly better if it had been black boys. Likewise, I doubt Woody Allen's reputation would be significantly better if he was widely thought of as having raped a black girl instead of a white girl.
Edit: I should really have thought to add this originally, but also a big factor is that Tyson served time for the alleged rape, whereas Allen has not.
Goodguy
27d ago
"subspecies" is not a well-defined concept, so arguing about whether human races are subspecies or not is meaningless. If someone wants to score political points by either refusing to say that human races are different subspecies or by trying to convince people that human races are different subspecies, they're free to do so. But in either case, it's a political argument with no scientific basis.
As for people who argue that the concept of race is unscientific, in my experience they're usually either just ignorant of the topic and repeating opinions they have read elsewhere, or they misunderstand the relevant topics and for some reason believe that just because many frequently recognized human races are not cladistically monophyletic and all human beings are part of a genetic spectrum, it means that genetic variation between humans has no recognizable clusters.
For example, it is certainly true that "sub-Saharan Africans" is not a monophyletic group and its meaningfulness as a well-defined concept on the level of genetics is very questionable. But that does not mean that human genetic diversity is an undifferentiated distribution where every single individual is equally distant from every other individual. In reality there are recognizable patterns of various kinds in the distribution. It's just that the real patterns don't necessarily map well onto the typical racist's notion of what races are.
Goodguy
26d ago
There was an official version at Nuremberg, but there is no official version these days. There isn't even a consistent set of laws about Holocaust denial, as you know. Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.
You sarcastically called @BahRamYou's post "Holocaust denial" in order to make mainstream Holocaust theories seem ludicrous.
But this makes no sense. In my opinion, BahRamYou's post deviates from mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways. According to mainstream theories, which I happen to agree with on these points, death camps actually started in around 1942 and they likely weren't a desperation move in response to losing the war, they were created because they were a natural consequence of Nazi ideology.
However, despite the fact that BahRamYou's post disagrees with mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways, very few people would consider it to actually be Holocaust denial, and I find it hard to believe that any country in the world would legally prosecute him for it.
Goodguy
26d ago
No mainstream Holocaust theory holds that the death camps killed 6 million people. Mainstream Holocaust theories hold that death camps killed a certain fraction of the 6 million, but the rest were killed in various other ways such as by Einsatzgruppen and other kinds of roving military units that carried out massacres, or by forced labor and poor conditions in labor camps, etc.
It's a pretty common rdrama.net term. In my experience usually people who use it on rDrama are just as happy to call people on the other side "rightoids", so even if it doesn't necessarily meet this site's rules, it's generally not a partisan statement.
On rDrama "leftoid" and "rightoid" are certainly terms of mockery, but generally the "-oid" suffix is specifically meant to single out leftists and right-wingers who are are perceived as following their ideologies in rigid, conformist, and/or unintelligent ways. They're not necessarily terms that are used to refer to all left-leaning or all right-leaning people. Although sometimes they are.
Thanks for reading my bit of cultural ambassadorship. Come to rDrama, we have fun over there.
Goodguy
26d ago
Yes, but I can't think of any reason why pre-war governments in Eastern Europe would have wanted to invent millions of Jews out of thin air for their censuses.
Goodguy
8d ago
I fully understand that it would be nearly impossible for humans to control a superintelligent AI. I just don't care much about it. I don't have any children. If humanity was destroyed by superintelligent AI, my attitude to it would, aside from the obvious terror, also probably include some mirth. The lords of the known world, those who conquered all those other species, now destroyed by the same cold Darwinian logic of reality.
My point is that, while the Skynet scenario is definitely possible, the altruistic AI that loves humans scenario is also possible. There's no particular reason to think that a hyperintelligent AI would have the sort of incredibly hardwired "kill all opposition" motivation that we as humans have as a result of having evolved through billions of years of eat-or-be-eaten fighting. Of course AI, just like everything else in reality, is subject to natural selection, but there is no reason to think that AI would be subject to natural selection in a way that makes it violent in the ways that us humans are violent.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Europe in general was very violent until very recently despite, demographically speaking, having been a "trad" right-winger's wet dream back then. You can barely walk a mile on that continent without walking over the site of some historical battle.
Goodguy
8d ago
There's a difference between ignoring the historical roots of your current ideology, on the one hand, and allying with people you currently consider to be despicable evil Nazis, on the other.
Goodguy
26d ago
As far as I know various mainstream Holocaust theories disagree on the degree to which the Holocaust was planned as a total extermination ahead of time as opposed to it just organically evolving over time, becoming more and more murderous. The idea that at one point there was a genuine Nazi plan to mass resettle the Jews is not outside of the mainstream Overton window. What is outside of the mainstream Overton window is the idea that the Nazis never at any point actually shifted into deliberate genocide mode.
Derivatives of Indian culture in the form of Western Buddhism and other enlightenment-oriented philosophies are actually quite popular in the West, so I don't know where you are getting this idea that Westerners think of India as being spiritually polluted. Maybe in the 19th century the majority of Westerners did, but that has not been the case for a long time now. Likewise, the average Westerner who has any awareness of Indian art generally does not consider it to be spiritually polluted. I mean, the most popular and influential rock band in history was made up of Indophiles.
Your idea that Indian religious iconography is characterized by lack of taste and disgust does not resonate with me whatsoever. Sure, there is much in it that strikes most Westerners as weird, such as the elephant God. But it just seems weird to me, it does not seem to me like it lacks taste and it certainly does not arouse any disgust in me. And, not that this has any bearing on your argument about what the typical Westerner believes, but to me personally, when I think about it objectively, the crucified Jesus seems at least as bizarre as anything I've seen in Indian iconography. It is only familiarity that makes the crucified Jesus seem un-weird. And as for European paganism, with its various sacrifice rituals and stories about divine rape, I wouldn't say that it is objectively any less strange than Indian paganism.
If anything, it is the guru-learner relationship which is common in Indian religion that arouses some disgust in me, because of its authoritarian style, not Indian religious iconography.
I think some people here are so stuck in a doomer mindset that their minds refuse to accept wins for their own side. It's like they are committed to a world-view in which they are eternally oppressed. Much like the wokes are.
From where I sit, wokism looks much less dominant than it did 4 or so years ago.
For example, Musk buying Twitter has been a huge win for anti-wokes. With that act, he pulled a bunch of previously taboo and semi-taboo discussions right into the mainstream. If he had instead tried to start a Twitter competitor, network effects would probably have meant that it would never take off. But because he bought Twitter, network effects are instead working in his favor, making it so that even many of the people who dislike the changes he has made still stay on the site.
Another interesting recent event is the civil war inside the Democratic coalition over the issue of Israel. That divide has been there for a long time, of course, but I do not recall it ever having been as intense as it is now.
Yet another interesting event is the increasing European shift against immigration from MENA countries. Reddit's /r/europe is practically indistinguishable from here now when it comes to stances on MENA immigration, with the one exception that they do not usually discuss genetics quite as much.
I think it's not so much that there aren't interesting things happening, it might be more that this is a pretty small community with not a lot of fresh blood and a lot of fixation on a small set of topics (HBD, trans, Jews, etc...), and so if you've been here for a while, you've already seen the same 20 or so people rehash the same 5 or so topics over and over again in pretty much the same ways. People's takes are often good, but it gets repetitive.
unlike Snowden Assange didn’t flee to an enemy state
Even today, Russia is not an enemy of the US by the strict definition of "has war been declared?". That might seem like semantics, but it has consequences. For example, I think that it would be almost impossible in the US to convict someone of treason for helping Russia, since at the very minimum (and even then it would be hard) I think the US would have to have declared war for the "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" part of the US Constitution to apply. But I could be wrong, maybe someone more legally versed can weigh in.
In 2013, when Snowden went to Russia, I don't see how Russia could have been considered an enemy of the US through any other than a very belligerent geopolitical worldview on the part of the US. A geopolitical rival? Sure. But not a full-blown enemy. Those were still the days of close economic ties and small, limited wars like the ones in Serbia and Georgia.
Goodguy
26d ago
But there is a rule against single issue posting. Which is not to say that SecureSignals necessarily got banned only and precisely because he broke that rule, but there is a rule against it.
The problem with ignoring identity in making mod decisions is that it would leave the site open to people just repeatedly posting minor variations on the same exact thing whether or not it withstood rational analysis, since if mods ignored identity they would be forced to respond to each new iteration as if it was the first ever.
Goodguy
26d ago
There is a "Post on multiple subjects" rule in the sidebar.
I think they would look much more ridiculous if they banned him for being a "wrongthinker", given the stated goals of this site, as opposed if they banned him for violating some listed rule(s). But in this case there actually is a listed rule. And in any case, mods have given themselves the option of using the "metarule".
So the question then is, did SecureSignals just get banned because he is a Holocaust denier? I don't think so. I've been around here for a long time and I haven't seen anything to make me think that Holocaust denial, in itself, gets people banned.
Simpler and less conspiratorial explanation: "infinite immigration forever" is in place because a large fraction of white people genuinely feel bad for third-worlders and/or want to make up for colonialism and/or simply don't grasp the possible negative consequences of immigration and/or want to use third-worlders for cheap labor. People don't try to impose pro-refugee measures on China because the Chinese would laugh at it and ignore it. People don't try to impose anti-pollution measures on China because the main reason China pollutes a lot is that it makes a lot of the rest of the world' stuff, so trying to push anti-pollution measures there has a real cost for the world economy, whereas pushing anti-pollution measures in the developed world is relatively cheap.
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