JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Why would the US have suddenly given in because Vietnam went Red?
No, you approaching it with the wrong end. The US that would willingly give up Vietnam to the reds, without trying to do anything, would also give up without trying Poland, Afghanistan, and many other things that together brought the Cold War to victory. By itself, the loss of Vietnam obviously weren't fatal - obviously! - but becoming a type of country that doesn't even try to fight may be fatal for the chances to ultimate victory.
We can tell because US prestige declined after the defeat in Vietnam!
You are comparing it to the situation where US won in Vietnam. Compare to situation where it didn't even try.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
Churches are directly protected by the Constitution, so the government has to be kind of careful around them. Even if specific part of what the church does is not protected, a friendly judge can always spin it that way, and attacking a religious institution is an automatic PR problem for the government. Universities used to have same kind of deference, but their wokification lost them this stance on the right, and given that the left regularly sets their own university campuses on fire, if they claim "you don't respect The Sacred Institution enough!" nobody would really believe it by now. So right now they are much less protected than the churches.
Columbia University, the concept, can't be forced to do anything, except maybe close its doors.
I'm not sure what "the concept" here means, but the government can put Columbia in a world of hurt, causing them a lot of direct (fines, lost court cases) and indirect (limiting their access to things) trouble. Of course, technically this is not "forcing" to do them anything, the same way as "give me your wallet or be shot" is not forcing - you can choose to be shot, a lot of people survived being shot. But I don't think any sane board would be willing to fully explore how deep the rabbit hole goes. Because with Feds it can go very deep.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
If you're doing low weight exercises with bad form, it's probably not a huge deal since you'd just be training different muscle groups that you intended to, but I don't think it'll be much harm. If however you start to go heavy, and your form sucks, and you don't know it, the possibility of the injury raises significantly. So I'd say for personal trainer it's probably bad sign not to teach the proper form, but if I saw somebody who knows on their own what they are doing with a form that looks questionable to me, I'd think maybe they are just doing something I don't know about. That's like grammar - one should be taught proper grammar, but if you're e e cummings, go wild.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
So, the calls to murder are not literal, because no murders are happening. I mean, murders are definitely happening, but not all at once, just over the years. And it's a local tradition so nothing to be done about it. In general, murdering people there is very common, so murdering white people is nothing to worry about, and people who want to leave the place where murdering is very common have no legit reason to do so. Also, nobody is trying to take their property. I mean, millions of people try to take their property, but they are poor, so that's fine, and has nothing to do with politics, they just want to take their property. And it's not expropriation without payment, because even though their property got taken from them, and they received no payment, the government "tried to encourage" them to sell, so it doesn't count. And since the government did not explicitly command the takings by official decree, they have no responsibility for it, even though multiple members of the government promised to do exactly what happened. Ah yes, and also government made a thorough investigation and declared itself innocent of all charges, which makes the case settled completely.
One needs long, thorough years of brainwashing to be able to believe shit like this. Fortunately, this is exactly what we as the taxpayers are paying the US education system to do.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
I hate European censorship laws, but when once in a while somebody really worth stomping gets caught into it, and I wish the Metropolitan Police all the success in stomping on them. It's like the police beating up a known child predator - I am against police brutality, but I am not a saint, in some cases I will (hypocritically maybe) be willing to look the other way. I like living in a country where people like Kanye can do their shit without the police intervening, but I can't do anything about UK police, so I am at least glad in maybe 1% of the cases they get it right...
JarJarJedi
23d ago
the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything
It can force it to comply with Federal law. All of it. Including all those juicy parts about hostile workplace, discrimination, etc. which the ancestors of the current wokes worked so hard to institute. None of it is predicated on getting any federal funding. And then there's federally funded education loans. Check out how many students use those - is Columbia ready to develop its own loan system (and ensure Feds can't dismantle it for violating one of approximately 10 million banking regulations in existence)? And those juicy kuffye-wearing foreign students - guess who controls their visas? Federal Government is a monster - the Left worked for many decades, since the forefather of all, FDR - to ensure it can force anybody to do anything they want. So I have no sympathy for them if that monster turns on them now - but they would underestimate its power at their own peril. Their only hope is friendly federal judges would allow them to stretch things out, and Trump only has 4 years...
JarJarJedi
23d ago
The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said
Yes, but no. The protestors (not each of them personally, but in general the movement) was part of the reason why US lost this war. And if US didn't lose the war, Vietnam could be what South Korea is now. Which is better than what it is now. So is the lost war "worth it"? Probably not, that's why it's called a lost one. But if you approach every war with the premise that you may lose and therefore you can't fight, then you lose all the wars in advance. And one of the reasons that Vietnam is now quasi-capitalist is because the US did not lose some other wars, including winning the main one - the Cold War. Did Vietnam war make the world better? No, it did not, because the good guys lost. If they didn't, it would. That happened in other places where the good guys didn't lose.
compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference
In that counterfactual the US stops fighting the Cold War, USSR still exists now, owns major parts of the world, and half of the US is thinking when we stop being so stupid and join the societal model that is clearly winning, namely socialism. I don't think it's a good future to be in. Yes, losing a war sucks. But losing all wars in advance would suck much more.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
EU wouldn't be much of a problem. If they are in Harvard inventing cool shit, the profits from it sponsor the wokes in Harvard. The cool shit probably would make my life better, but the wokes would make it worse. If they move to EU and keep inventing the cool shit, I'd likely benefit from it no less - maybe I'd pay a bit more because tariffs or get it a little later, but on the bottom line it wouldn't make me substantially worse, as I don't get direct profit from Harvard owning cool shit and indirect profits are nearly the same. On the other hand, all the wokeness will be then concentrated in EU, and it hardly can be worse there already, so to be honest, I don't see much downside. Of course, it would be cool if I could get the benefits without the wokeness at all, but I'm not sure how to achieve that option.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
no university has a department of data fabrication.
You don't need a department of data fabrication to fabricate data, just as you don't need a "department of antisemitism" to be antisemitic. It happens naturally as a product of incentives and cultural trends. There's enough horrible studies, especially in woke "sciences" (though reality-based ones are in no way exempt also). I haven't tracked how Columbia specifically performs on this, but there's no reason why they in particular would be an outlier.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
Interestingly enough, in the movie they also felt the decision processes are not specified at all so they felt it's necessary to introduce a scene where Dr. Mensah essentially tells everybody what to do and then they stand in a circle, hold hands and hum (literally). Given that the show makers can be assumed to be extremely woke by default, it's interesting how they decided to present this. First, they obviously see the need to make decisions, and they go for the natural authoritarian approach (not even a vote!) but then they insert some kind of obscure ritual to woke-wash it and resolve the natural question of "how other people who have no decision power tolerate it?". Simply - they hum.
how amazing the feminist environmentalist communist etc. preservation alliance is
For me it looked very light on details on how exactly amazing it is - like, how their economy actually works? I get it, everything is free and there's no money, but how does it work? Is it just a huge hippie commune? BTW, how huge - how many people actually live there - it is 100 people, a thousand, a million? Never discussed. Who's in charge and what being in charge actually means? How the governance works - who decides what to do and where the external money - which they use - come from, and who decides how much of that money is spent on what? There are some officers - like chief of police - but who appoints them and how? Pretty much none of that is covered except as a third-hand mention in passing by Murderbot who barely understands what it means and really can't even contextualize it, so it just accepts it as "it's how it is with those weird humans but it's my humans so whatever they do must be a good thing". Again, this looks very much like indoctrination process of a college freshman who's not great in critical thinking because it has been successfully educated out of him. This vagueness is a double edged sword and the Murderbot is explicitly an extremely unreliable narrator in all matters human.
the author herself is openly very far left and has in interviews quite clearly talked about the anti-capitalist messages in the murderbot series
That's why I usually avoid authors' interviews (and same for actors, producers, etc.) as much as I can. Usually nothing good comes from it but spoiling a good work of art.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
Well, if you target the cultural elites, the narrative "racists tried to ethnically cleanse my people" gets you lots of sympathy, but the narrative "commies murdered 5 millions of my people while trying to establish the worker's paradise" gets you shrugs and "well, you can't build worker's paradise without breaking some eggs...". So it's hard to fault them for playing with the deck they've been dealt.
JarJarJedi
24d ago
"IDF" is not a good term here. While some of the people responsible are top of the IDF command, it's by no means ends there. Pretty much all Israeli establishment has been captured in the worldview that allowed it to happen, and sole dissenting voices have been dismissed as kooks. Israel military intelligence has a special "contrarian" unit whose sole task had been to produce scenarios challenging the established way of thinking and poking holes in established paradigms. Sort of advocatus diaboli. They weren't able to make a dent in the wall of denial that something like Oct 7 is possible even in theory. And it's hard to call it "incompetence" per se - many of the people involved were highly knowledgeable, smart and competent professionals - but within the limits of their world model. Escaping those confines is hard for any person, and it turned out that this particular world model, while very attractive - in fact, so attractive that many people still cling to it right now, unable to part with it even with the benefit of the hindsight - this model is spectacularly wrong. How to prevent it from happening again is a very hard question, I am not sure Israel will find an answer, though I sincerely hope they do.
On the other hand, Hamas spent 18 years meticulously organizing and preparing for this kind of attack and followup confrontation with the IDF. It's not random that IDF can not locate the hostages, or eliminate Hamas in one sweep, and not because they are a bunch of bumbling fools - they aren't. Hamas made a lot of preparations for this exact scenario, including developing a system of underground communications, storages and munitions, and associated warfare paradigm that still has no adequate answer from the IDF side. It's not to say Hamas is now stronger than the IDF, they are not, by far, but they came prepared and successfully exploited - and continue to exploit - the weaknesses in IDF's military approach, be it sensitivity to casualties from both sides, or unwillingness to stay on the ground for a prolonged period of time, or vulnerability to propaganda efforts targeted at the wokes in Europe and the US.
So it was both. Hamas did their homework, for 18 years, and Israel didn't and completely ignored what Hamas has been doing, because it didn't fit their worldview. The result was the catastrophe of October 7.
JarJarJedi
25d ago
Israel policy on it is a bit schizophrenic. Officially, there are two goals - destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages. Unfortunately, the IDF seems to be unable to find the hostages by itself, at least within the boundaries that are set now by the government. And Hamas does not want to make any agreement that does not involve, basically, restoring the situation to pre-October 7, with Hamas in power in Gaza, IDF fully outside Gaza, and basically resetting the board to the situation where Hamas can recover and resume what they were doing and prepare for the next round to come soon.
Obviously, this is not acceptable to Israel. On the other hand, Israel does not want to administer Gaza - day to day control over Gaza means persistent deployment of armed forces into densely populated hostile areas, which will inevitably lead to great increase of casualties on both sides, and is usually horrible for morale. On yet other hand, there's no viable alternative which is acceptable to Israel - all the ideas of "somebody" taking over from Hamas are crushed by the facts that a) nobody wants to do it and b) Hamas is still alive so "somebody" will have to fight them and really nobody wants to do it. I mean, the offer is to fight a guerilla war against motivated, well supplied and entrenched opponent, with broad support among local population, and the prize is a control of one of the shittiest places on earth with no noticeable resources, warlike population and no possibility of making any profit from it ever. Who'd buy that? And with Hamas in control, October 7 will inevitably repeat as soon as the IDF is out.
So, what Israel is doing is increasing its control over Gaza territory, while specifically not declaring the full takeover. The goal of it is twofold: a) more control over the territory means more chance to eliminate Hamas resources and somehow get lucky in the hostage area, though absent a miracle the chances of that are small, but we're talking about Jews here, miracles happen all the time; and b) more pressure on Hamas means more place for piecemeal agreements where at least some hostages could be released in exchange for temporary relieving the pressure. The pressure of course includes control over resources - the last ceasefire let enough resources to come in Gaza to physically last several months, maybe more, but who controls those resources and how is much more complicated. A lot of them are controlled by Hamas, but people of Gaza, even with their deep hatred for Israel, know that too and know Hamas has much more than it gives out. So that is another way to put pressure on Hamas and force them to both dole out some of their hoards and erode their stance with the local population. Of course, Hamas aren't stupid either, and the less hostages they have, the more reluctant they are to part with them. Currently, 23 hostages are believed to be alive, and Hamas does not want to give up more without some permanent gains.
Obviously, this situation is not sustainable, however Israel currently doesn't seem to have a solution that is both feasible and acceptable. So the strategy is to continue pressuring Hamas as much as the local and international politics allows, in hope either of softening them enough to amend their negotiation position (by either convincing some people or killing enough of them that somebody more reasonable comes to lead) or something external happening that improves the situation. Maybe US signing up to population evacuation plan, maybe some Arab sheiks going crazy and agreeing to take responsibility for Gaza, maybe Hamas making some spectacular blunder that would temporarily shut up the wokes in Europe and allow Israel to drastically increase the pressure, or there's a revolution in Iran and Hamas is left without a sponsor. Who knows. Or maybe Israeli government suddenly finds its cojones and declares that it's ready to take over Gaza now, at which point we're back to 2005. It could also be resolved the other way - the right-leaning government is toppled, the left comes to power in the next election, and agrees to Hamas deal described above, at which point we're back to October 6.
So the near term goal is to erode and weaken Hamas as an organization. Official long-term goals are described above, but they are more of an aspirational nature, as nobody knows how it's possible to actually achieve them in reality, at least in the near term.
IMO it wasn't really about ethnicities. Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one. Sure, there was a dimension to suppress the nationalist movement, but the main idea was to exterminate the class of independent farmers who were completely incompatible with the collectivist centralized agenda of the new power. Holodomor wasn't engineered to destroy Ukrainian nationalists (though by exterminating their base, it was a side benefit), it had been engineered to destroy Kulaks and the concept of independent self-sufficient agricultural production. I'm sure you can play with the definition of "genocide" to place it one way or another, but in my book a concerted social engineering effort to destroy a wide group of people is something that is horrible, and happens often enough that we need a term to call it. If you don't want to call it "genocide", you'd have to invent a new term with exactly the same semantic connotations, by which point there's not really any reason not to just use "genocide".
JarJarJedi
26d ago
the murderous hatred will vanish once the oppression is lifted
That had already been proven wrong, it's not a theoretical question, Israel gave up all power in Gaza and actively tried to not intervene there as much as possible for 20 years. What we have now is the outcome of that policy. Israel has its own left, and it operated exactly based on that concept - in fact, it was the dominating concept over the majority of the establishment, however they color themselves on other issues - that the hate will recede once Israel administration is gone, and the residual hard core of haters is going to be easy to contain since it would be small and isolated. That went catastrophically wrong of course.
It's like somebody would say "if we only had a socialist country" ignoring the USSR ever existed. Which I guess what the left is routinely doing, so not much new here.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
I just ignored those parts. Given that most critique of the capitalism is given in the voice of the character which understands very little about how humans work and derives most of its knowledge on the subject from soap operas and actively avoids getting any personal knowledge there, on top of being beset by a rich bouquet of psychological issues, it can be even taken as a satirical critique of the contemporary (and, really, all) left. I am not sure if that was the author's intent, but it certainly lends itself to this way of reading.
That said, "evil megacorp" is a staple villain in SciFi, at least in the settings where corporations exist at all, so it's nothing really new. And in general, economics and politics is almost never properly explored at all - the author doesn't seem to be interested in how that all "free stuff" works on Preservation Alliance - you just reverse the polarity and apply transquantum flux capacitors. Same, never explored what exactly motivates the corps and how they work and why, or why they need so many humans working in "mines" at all, given how advanced their tech is. If one can't get over it, the range of enjoyable SciFi would be greatly reduced. Fortunately, all that stuff is pretty easily ignorable for me, and most of the content is not about that at all.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
That said, if it's Reddit we're talking about, it's kind of self-selected for the worst excesses of woke, so maybe overall picture is not that bad. No idea, I am still holding some stupid hope that they'd wake up one day and figure out this is all BS. Probably won't happen though.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
Would you acknowledge the evilness of Armenian genocide if we agree to drop the "unique" part?
JarJarJedi
26d ago
I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago
Nah, around 1200 BCE actually. But that's not the reason not to acknowledge the unceded claim of Canaanites to the land, of course.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right".
Wait, I thought "the right" are supposed to be all Nazis? So all the Nazis are voting for Israel now, against Austria, where literally Hitler was born? That's hilarious.
ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland
On a more serious note, a disappointment of a decade, tbh, how quickly and easily Ireland turned anti-Semitic (let's not be coy, that's what it is). What did the Jews ever done to them? I have always been a fan of Irish and wider Celtic culture, but this thing makes me sad.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
Probably has something to do with UK laws. Maybe some Google lawyers are scared somebody would sue them if some image casting somebody powerful in bad light is generated. UK is not a good place to be sued for defamation. While Google is probably not scared that somebody in UAE sues them. May be related to that.
JarJarJedi
26d ago
Imagine you have a number of tasks to do. Some of them are relatively quick - maybe up to 15-20 minutes, some will probably take hours. You will eventually need to do all the tasks but you can do them in pretty much any order. Which ones do you start with? Is it the small ones to get a quick win and keep yourself motivated, or the largest one, so that once you do them you'd feel you made a lot of progress and what is left is easy work now compared to what you've already done? What would you do and why?
JarJarJedi
26d ago
Just finished Murderbot series. Very fun reading. I hope the author writes a dozen more, if she doesn't get tired of it.
They have separate drinking fountains and lecture halls "for whites only"? I kinda find it hard to believe, any documentation to that?
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