Goodguy
1d ago
I think this is cherry-picking. Revolutions against established Order have not, historically, been dominated by women more than by men. The rise of Islam and of Protestantism, as far as I know, were not mainly driven by women. There was nothing female-dominated about the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. The 1960s social revolution in the US was not female-dominated either.
Goodguy
11hr ago
I think that most of the men who admire brutal chariot-riding conquerors are not thinking strategically, they just valorize virile amoral masculine strength for emotional reasons, in many cases I would guess because they feel inadequate as men and feel disconnected from modernity and so they are attracted to an archetype of brutal masculinity that has the extra advantage of pissing off politically mainstream people.
Goodguy
1d ago
Did this functional social covenant between governments and people ever really exist to the extent that you think it did? Take America, for example. In 1776 and then again 1861, tens of thousands of people in America rebelled against the government because they thought that the social covenant was being violated. Then, the late 19th century and early 20th century was the heyday of communism in America, with a massive labor movement that viewed the government as being allied with their enemies. Government-citizen relations got a bit better with the New Deal and then post-war prosperity, but huge numbers of people still rejected the covenant and rebelled against the status quo, fighting against the Vietnam War draft for example.
Goodguy
4d ago
Maybe, but that isn't a good argument in the context of trying to write a critique of communism because by that standard, all American Revolution deaths are the fault of the revolutionaries, and so on. Which might be a valid argument, but my point is that it sheds no light on communism versus other political beliefs. All political movements that start revolutions can be blamed for all of the resulting deaths, by this standard, so it is not something that distinguishes communism from other ideologies.
lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the thrust of the argument
Yep, so I want to be clear, my interest in this matter is not to try to defend Soviet communism. It was a very brutal system, at least in its first few decades. I am just interested in historical accuracy.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
- Direct deliberate killing (guys from NKVD come to apartment, take guy away in car and kill him).
- Indirect killing (guys come to farm and take away all the grain, farmers die).
- Deaths through negligence or just because communism isn't a very good economic system.
For me, it makes sense to count #1 and #2, but not #3. Partly this is because it is extremely hard to accurately count #3.
And do you count military deaths in wars, or just civilian deaths as a result of political persecution?
When you say that mainstream scholarly estimates are about 25 million, how does that break down between the three categories above? 25 million doesn't make much sense to me just because: Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists. Estimates of the Holodomor death range from about 3-7 million. The Great Purge killed fewer than a million, and if you add all the other purges on top it probably adds another few hundred thousand as far as I know. Various ethnic resettlements killed maybe another million.
If you count every civilian killed as a result of Soviet military actions, that would add another 5 million or so, but that would not help a critique of communism much because the US and its allies also killed millions of civilians during WW2 and the Cold War, so killing large numbers of civilians in war time seems to be more a feature of large scale war, rather than of a country's political system.
Currently, I do think it's a nitpick to insist that "Russian" means "ethnically Russian", but I will check with my Russian friends and see what they think.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be. Only a minority of Lithuanians or Ukrainians would be ok with being called Russians, on the other hand there are probably plenty of Russians who, while not considering Lithuanians or Ukrainians to be ethnically Russian, would still be more or less ok with them being called Russian in a certain sense of the word Russian if they were re-incorporated into the Moscow-based empire.
But I didn't bring it up in order to nit-pick, it's actually important because I wasn't sure if you actually meant ethnic Russians, or you meant Soviets in general. I understand now that you meant Soviets in general, but I had no way of knowing that when I first read your post.
The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire and even modern Russia is also still a multi-ethnic empire despite not having as much territory as the Soviet Union had.
A lot of the bad blood from the Soviet times comes down to people arguing about whether:
Theory A: The Soviet Union was pro-Russian and oppressed other ethnicities. Ethnic non-Russian nationalists tend to agree with this, and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor. On the other hand, many of the Holodomor's architects were not ethnic Russians.
Theory B: The Soviet Union was anti-Russian and actually helped non-Russian ethnicities to form their own nationalist movements. Ethnic Russian nationalists tend to agree with this. The idea that the Soviet Union was anti-Russian might seem strange, but the Russian ethnonationalists who argue for this point of view point out that the Soviet Union's leadership in its important years was not particularly ethnically Russian (Lenin was probably part Kalmyk, part Jewish... Trotsky was Jewish... Stalin was Georgian...) and that the Soviets had a policy of (Korenizatsiia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia]. On the other hand, given that the Soviet Union was about 50% ethnic Russian (in practice, you could probably say even more because back then, many people who in modern terms are non-ethnic Russians were maybe more likely to view themselves and be viewed as ethnic Russian than they are now), it's also clear that Russians were the dominant ethnicity by population size at least - no other single ethnicity had nearly such a fraction of the population.
Goodguy
3d ago
Reactionary politicians in the US rarely talk about housing. It's certainly not a big part of Trump's rhetoric. In the US, talking a lot about housing problems is more associated with the economic left, people like Bernie Sanders.
So even putting aside the fact that California Democrats tend to view Trump as being nearly Hitler-esque, and the fact that reactionary politicians are unlikely to actually do anything about these problems if elected (as you correctly point out elsewhere, this does not explain why people don't vote for them more), the fact of the matter is that addressing housing problems is just not something that US reactionary politicians emphasize. So it is not surprising that this is not a big factor in how many people vote for reactionary politicians in the US.
Soviet communism was very murderous, don't get me wrong, but that it killed 40 million Russian people is extremely unlikely. I don't even think that Soviet communism killed 40 million Soviet people or 40 million "people who were living in what used to be the Russian Empire". A figure of maybe about 10 million people who were living in what used to be the Russian Empire killed is more realistic, maybe 15 million at most.
Goodguy
4d ago
I don't know if you would get arrested as opposed to just fined, but there are countries with laws against denying certain Soviet atrocities.
Generally speaking, I don't know how likely one would actually be to face legal penalties, but I think that there are many places in the former Warsaw Pact where claiming in public that Soviet atrocities were exaggerated could lead to physical violence coming from ordinary citizens.
Sorry, "pick up" is slang for "to gain", "to acquire".
Yes, American football is essentially a hybrid turn-based/real-time game where each turn is a burst of real-time activity,.
In each turn, one team is on offense and starts with the ball. It is trying to either get the ball into the other team's endzone for 7 points or kick the ball through the other team's uprights for 3 points. The other team is on defense and is trying to stop that. If either the team on offense scores points or the team on defense manages to grab the ball away from the offense, the team on offense "loses possession" and then has to be the team on defense, and the other team that was on defense before becomes the team on offense.
A given team's offense and defense are usually made up of completely different players, but this is not enforced by the rules. It's just that in practice, no player is good enough at both offensive and defensive skills and has enough endurance to be worth playing both on offense and on defense.
The team on offense can throw the ball or run the ball as much as it wants, but with the extremely important caveat that it can only throw the ball forward once at most in any given turn ("down"). It can throw the ball backward as much as it wants, though teams almost never do this because statistically it is usually a bad idea.
When a team goes on offense, it generally starts at the part of the field where the other team lost possession when it was on offense. The team on offense then has four turns ("down"s) to move the ball, by throwing or running, at least ten yards closer to the other team's endzone than where it started. Each time it tries to move the ball, no matter what happens, then the next time it tries to move the ball, it starts at wherever the ball was stopped the last time it tried to move the ball. So let's say on the first down, the team on offense manages to move the ball 3 yards forward. Then on its second down, it starts 3 yards closer to that imaginary 10-yard line that it has to cross, the line that is 10 yards forward from where it first started the current set of 4 downs.
If the team on offense manages to move the ball past 10 yards from where it started on offense in those 4 turns ("down"s) it has, it then gets another 4 turns to move the ball 10 yards further from wherever the ball was last stopped. And if in those next chances it moves the ball more than 10 yards, then it gets yet another 4 turns... and so on... as long as the team on offense keeps managing to get at least 10 yards in 4 turns, it always gets 4 more turns, and in this way it can "march down the field" as they say and eventually get in the defending team's endzone. But if at any point the team on offense uses up 4 turns and fails to move the ball 10 yards forward in total between all the 4 turns, it gives us possession to the other team and then the other team goes on offense starting from where the offensive team had the ball.
At any point in a 4-turn cycle, the team on offense has the option of kicking the ball far towards the other team's endzone, hoping to run in the direction of the other team's endzone and stop whoever on the defending team catches the ball. Once the other team catches the ball, they become the team on offense. So the only reason for the team on offense to do this is if they feel that there is very little chance that they would be able to get 4 more downs by moving the ball past 10 yards and so it would be better to make sure that the team on defense gets the ball (and thus becomes the team on offense) close to their own endzone rather than at the place where the two teams are currently facing each other.
This is a lot of words but it can all start to make sense pretty quickly once one watches a game.
Goodguy
15d ago
Harrison Smith of Infowars, in appropriately conspiratorial fashion, said that policies of “infinite immigration forever” are meant to make opposition to technocratic power impossible. He suggested, for example, that one reason no one tries to impose “refugees” or antipollution measures on China — the world’s biggest polluter — is that the Chinese are already under effective control and threaten neither their own regime nor the ambitions of the World Economic Forum.
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.
Goodguy
9d ago
If Trump was at any real risk of being assassinated by the kind of people who are rational enough to care about the VP who would become President as a result, then why has he not already been assassinated, at some point between 2015 and now?
American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it.
I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points TD / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.
I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.
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.
Goodguy
15d 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.
The people on that subreddit lean towards "race realism is bullshit and people who believe it are caught in misunderstandings, but they should not be automatically canceled as evil Nazis, they are just cringeworthy, stupid, and lame". With also a rather small subset of people who think that race realism is accurate.
Generally speaking that sub tends to be at least somewhat sympathetic towards anything that mainstream liberals hate.
They are basically economic leftists who think that the culture war is a distraction from economic issues.
They disagree with social conservatism on basically everything except that they have a shared belief with social conservatives that modern leftist attitudes towards sexuality have gone a bit too far in encouraging mental issues and exploitative porn. However, they are strongly pro-LGBT and so on, they just don't think that being LGBT should distract from the fight against billionaires.
They don't think that the far right is strong enough to be worth worrying about, so they are fine with treating the far right jocularly, instead of having the sort of extreme SJW attitude of "even joking about the far-right is platforming them, anything short of calling for a crusade against the far-right is tantamount to platforming them".
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.
Goodguy
7d ago
There are some similarities, but unlike /r/redscarepod rDrama is not left-wing on economics or heavily anti-Israel.
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
20d 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.
Goodguy
20d 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
20d 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
24d ago
I don't know the answer, but I think the first step would be to try to quantify smell and taste as precisely as sight and sound can be quantified.
Sight and sound are relatively easy to quantify. You can quantify sight as a function that maps (x, y, time) tuples to (r, g, b) color value tuples for example. You can quantify sound as a function that maps (time) tuples to (amplitude) tuples.*
As far as I know, no-one has managed to quantify smell and taste in such a way. However, I could be wrong about that.
*(time) and (amplitude) are tuples with only one item each in them, but I am calling them tuples for the sake of consistency. In mathematical parlance, it's still a tuple even if it has 0 or 1 items.
Goodguy
21d ago
I think that for the most part, I came to these conclusions independently, being a big history buff. The intense psycho-sexual atmosphere of the typical authoritarian childhood upbringing and the homoerotic, fetishistic quality of fascism and Nazism are so obvious that it doesn't really require any profound insight to notice them.
To be fair to the far right, leftist totalitarianism also has this homoerotic, fetishistic quality to some degree.
I'm not sure this makes sense. Many men admire murderous, rapey barbarians too. Right-wing Twitter is full of odes to romanticized Indo-European chariot riders replacing the original populations of Europe and India.
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