JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
11mo ago
Far from it. But "never" is a long way from "always".
We've all had a reason to fight. But not everyone is willing to put everything on the line and seek a decision. Too risky. They might lose an internship, or an eye.
It's a matter ultimately of values. If you value money, career, house, a clean criminal record and the good opinion of other people who value those things, physical risk is crazy.
I find all that utterly worthless. The good opinion of people incapable of risking anything real is meaningless. Money is paper. Careers are bullshit.
I think sacrifice produces value. Things are worth what we gave up to get them. By those lights, I made out like a bandit.
JTarrou
6mo ago
It's not. It controls Gaza, Fatah controls the West Bank.
Yes, this is part of what I'm talking about
Secondly, they froze elections after they came to power.
After they won an election, which is more legitimacy than many real governments can manage.
Can we start bombing them for not actively fighting the government?
Not in my opinion, but we can start bombing military targets without worrying too much about civilian casualties. At Hiroshima, we bombed a military base. The rest of the town was just in the blast radius. Not, perhaps a hugely practical distinction, but one with real bite in the theory of just war. As ever, there's a discussion to be had about proportionality and whether such actions make further conflict more or less likely.
JTarrou
8mo ago
From the subatomic to the international.
Everything is conflict.
Dillard says that death is spinning the globe, but she shaded it. She read Heisenberg. She turned back at the pass.
Math is spinning the globe, and death is just part of it. All values resolve to zero eventually.
JTarrou
4d ago
Not a Nietzschean, but his basic description of mass religion tracks just fine. Not just abrahamic, I would argue every large religion is a religion of submission, of slavery. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc. all count. All are functionally about convincing the ruled to keep to their place.
Non-slave religions cannot spread beyond a tiny martial minority, nor survive social progress or the achievement of wealth and comfort. The slaves outnumber the free a thousand to one. Religion must take its adherents where they are.
JTarrou
23d ago
IQ is a proxy of a proxy. At the top end of the scoring distribution, the proxy stops working, because the sort of people so totally maxed-out on one ability are incapable of living normal lives or talking productively to normal people.
Sort of how height is predictive of NBA ability, but the tallest people can't play sports.
JTarrou
1mo ago
I'd settle for a humanity with the ability to tie shoes and sit on a toilet properly. But like God before me, I am doomed to disappointment.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Abbot's fight for vouchers has had the side effect of starving urban school districts, who are unable to raise funding because the state takes the majority of their property tax revenue through the "robin hood" program (and no longer even uses it for education -- now it just goes into the state general fund. It's purely kleptocratic now in a way that I don't believe it always was). My school district is getting rid of librarians and counselors as they can no longer afford them, cutting gifted and talented programs (very much done to piss off the rich -- it's not saving much money but it generates lots of ire), and generally laying off teachers and increasing class sizes.
That sounds awesome. Cutting government funds to religious schools is something I support wholesale.
JTarrou
5mo ago
You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.
Never heard of her.
JTarrou
6mo ago
I don't think any of those are likely to get you to the point of the test, regardless of feasibility.
My (peacetime) military officer father told me that the infantry liked people that came from poor backgrounds because they were more aware of their surroundings and accustomed to discomfort and privation - and that middle class guys were too "soft" to make good infantrymen, at least initially.
The line I heard from more senior NCOs was about age rather than SES, but it was that you could teach an older man to be a soldier, but you'd never teach him to like it. Could work for SES to a degree.
Personally, I doubt that the military has a "type" for infantry, they just take whoever signs up. It's selection effects from the groups that sign up, guys who are willing to undergo the privation to gain the status. If the girls back home don't think your service makes you more attractive than something else you might have reasonably done, not many guys are signing up for that. Within a very narrow stretch of society, having been the "real deal" is a major status boost.
JTarrou
6mo ago
If there were a reliable test for aggression in combat, the country that had it would be unstoppable militarily. The fact that no one on earth administers such a test implies that it is difficult if not impossible with current science. They all rely on a mix of private violence, training and hazing to try to weed out the squeamish, with imperfect results.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Not at all. I think it very much does. There's a stereotype about soldiers and nurses for a reason. We both have a bone-deep understanding of life and death, and an urge to blow off the steam that the repression necessary to operate with that knowledge produces. We have perspective on the rest of our lives that most do not.
It's not exactly the same, but it is parallel.
I think you miss the point?
We are assuming that an ethnicity is a grouping of people along some criteria that can legitimately claim land as a group. That has moral authority to resist being moved from that land, that has the right as a group to prevent other groups from coming in, violently if necessary. Yes? I share this assumption, but I think we might differ on the criteria.
The middle east is ridden with groups of various genetic descents, political traditions and religious faiths. Mostly everyone's pretty mixed up on all three axes. So who exactly are the "ethnicities" that have a right to claim land, kick others off it and form political nations? Should the Lebanese Shia have their own country? The bedouin or Kurds? The Druze, the Sufis, the Maronites, the Egyptian Copts? Do they all have the moral right to start murdering civilians if they don't get their own state? Where do we draw the line? Texas?
I say for the purposes of the laws of war, we set it at the nation-state. Where do you think it should be set?
JTarrou
6mo ago
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
JTarrou
8mo ago
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
JTarrou
8mo ago
The American voting system results in two blocks and this fact so mesmerizes people of the systematizing personality that they can't resist fitting a pet theory that must compactly represent the shared symbolic content of these two sides.
Hilariously, you seem to have almost perfectly misunderstood. There is no shared symbolic content for political groups, that's the whole point. All sides have all the binaries, in infinitely complex combinations. Society, the world, international politics is so fiendishly complex because of these interactions, because every binary contains a million different binaries. Countries, corporations, cities, parties, people are not one thing. "I tried to draw the line, but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time".
But in other societies it's more clear that there can be many different factions and the split isn't between two eternal sides.
Yes and no. Yes there are many factions, and in part this whole little shitpost is about how infinite and varied those factions can be. But I think there are always two sides, made up of those many, many interest groups with their own specific combination of beliefs and interests in constantly shifting coalitions with only two real sides. Roman politics had millions of shifts, reversals, revolutions and coups, but the optimates and the populares, the greens and blues. There is a binary there.
Conflict does not end, it only moves, because the tension is fundamental. When one side of a binary that became political or social "wins", what happens? Where does that tension go? Do all the constituent interests, powers, parties and people just evaporate? Impossible. The conflict just moves. After war, conflict moves into politics, war being the continuation of politics by violent means, and peace being the continuation of war by nonviolent means. Germany won a hegemony over continental Europe in peace much more effectively than they ever did in war.
The various interest groups split into constituent parts and vie for power within that binary before reconstituting with other groups in a new political reality. If one group "wins" at something, they usually split into a new binary and one side will ally with the losers from the previous conflict. So the pre-civil war national binary was slave/free, north/south, east/west. When the south seceded, the national binary was then pro-war Republicans and pro-peace Democrats. When the south lost and was reintegrated, the losing faction from the war years re-allied with the south.
Political coalitions are inherently unstable and given to shedding marginal members. The more one side wins, the more the important contest is internal. Think one-party elections where the nomination is the real contest. The more power one side of a political binary gains, the more important their internal divisions are. If one political group destabilizes the interparty binary, they will be split by the resulting tension, new coalitions will emerge and the two-party binary will return in full effect.
This can be expressed in multiple parties, or only within one party. But there will always be a fundamental division within every group.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
JTarrou
8mo ago
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, I'm talking about human nature and you're talking about technology. The fundamental tensions I'm talking about map onto these technological, social and political issues and innovations in unpredictable ways.
Politics may have defeated Christianity, but that wasn't a fundamental tension, politics and religion coexisted for millenia before, and will again. The tension there would be between the moralistic and materialistic human urges. So politics defeats a religion, but it becomes a religion in the process, thereby maintaining the duality. Even atheists need a god and a heaven, even if god is the president and heaven is "gay luxury space communism". This is the tension that destroys materialistic politics, it's why communism never worked and became a cult. It just couldn't get over the god-shaped hole. Politically, this tension gets generalized as "church and state", and it is generally understood today that separating the two is better for both. Render unto the one pole the things that are Caesar's and to the other, the things that are God's.
At sufficient levels of abstraction, some good advice.
which at our scale occurs in thousands of different rough patterns
Many more than this, I think. My point, somewhat garbled perhaps, is not that any group has some eternal essence, much the opposite. We all have the same conflicts within us, these are so numerous and interact in such complex ways that there's no predicting how they'll map onto the future. But if one digs into an issue long enough and defines the terms carefully enough, the basic tensions usually present themselves quickly.
Fixed.
There are no well-meaning people, only cynics, liars and the self-deluded. Altruism is the first lie.
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