JulianRota
1yr ago
I've read a fair amount about the IRA's guerrilla war / terrorism campaign. One of the things I noted is that quite a lot of the violence they carried out was not executed with a great deal of care - things like, making sure you're killing the right person, making sure there aren't any bystanders who you would also have to kill in addition to the planned target, making sure it's done at a time and place without too much witnesses or evidence, etc. There was only a relatively small number of hardcore members who were capable of carrying out savage violence with careful planning. I concluded from this that it's genuinely hard to find people who are both prepared to carry out gruesome acts against innocent-seeming targets and also sane and rational enough to be intelligent and careful about it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Can we do the same for everyone in all those foreign nations that we allegedly don't know anything about who cries out for American intervention every time they pick a fight with their neighbors and get in over their heads? I'd be more than happy for us to pull out of NATO, the Pacific, etc, and best of luck to all of the nations there dealing with China and Russia without us.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I always wonder, why do we only get this sort of pushback on comments about warfare? I can advocate for fires being fought without somebody talking about how I might not be a very good firefighter. I can advocate for goods being delivered quickly and reliably without being a good truck driver myself. I can say putting a bridge over a river seems like a good idea without being a civil engineer. So how come it's only if I think war is necessary or suggest fighting it in a particular way that somebody will come by and claim that I'm not a good enough warrior myself? What does it matter? Can I say the reverse, that you aren't allowed to advocate for peace until you've actually watched your children be brutally murdered before your eyes by your neighbor and still advocate for peace with them?
JulianRota
1yr ago
A couple points around this that I don't think have been covered well enough yet:
The surrounding Arab countries never did really support Palestine or hate Israel that much, or trust each other that much. A big part of the reason Israel won their large-scale wars is that the Arab countries never did really unite. They were always scheming against each other, trying to ensure that one of the others did most of the fighting and took most of the losses. Yeah they don't like Israel, but they have not proved willing to put their own regimes at risk by committing sufficiently large forces to combat that they could be vulnerable to coups or counter-invasions if they suffered large losses.
Also, for anyone who looks at a map of the area, the surrounding Arab countries have hundreds of times more land area than Israel does. If any of them really cared about the Palestinians, they could easily offer to let them move into their countries. But none of them has ever offered that, even on a small scale. It seems they like the Palestinians more as a thorn in Israel's side and maybe as martyrs than they do as possible neighbors. (Jordan hasn't accepted any since 1967).
Given those realities, I don't think there's any way any action by Israel could lead to a united Arab world deciding to work together to raise large militaries and commit them to joint action against Israel, even leaving the nuclear angle out of the picture. If that was anywhere near being in the cards, why wouldn't they do the much cheaper and simpler option of offering the Palestinian people refuge in their countries first?
Of course, that also means I have no clue what Hamas is actually going for here besides a quick and briefly satisfying spasm of horrific violence mostly against civilians followed rapidly by an inevitable crushing by the IDF.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think Israel has any meaningful capability to attack Iran. I wouldn't go so far as to call them a paper tiger, but their ability to project and sustain forces significantly beyond their borders is slim. Iran is pretty far away with numerous countries hostile to Israel in between them. Even a single airstrike seems unlikely to succeed - the combat range of the strike aircraft in their inventory barely reaches the closest border of Iran over the shortest possible route, which overflies a lot of hostile territory. Hitting any actual targets inside Iran would probably require aerial refueling in hostile airspace. I expect they want to keep what forces they have close to home to protect the country from direct threats rather than risk them on super-long-range missions.
They would need to use medium range ballistic missiles or cruise missiles to attack Iran, which they probably don't have, aside from nuclear-tipped ones.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Look at the expressions of the people who did get it - they were really skeptical and thought they were being set up for something. The one guy who was into it was a Mr. Beast subscriber and fan himself. It's probably like 1,000x more common for a random person trying to get your attention in public to be trying to get something from you or harass you somehow than to actually give you $500 for a trivial low-risk task.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I initially thought the temp ban for that top level post was a little excessive. But it does appear to be the case that it generated a lot of low-quality noise and very little good discussion. And I'm not super thrilled to have a lot of top-level posts that are basically, somebody please tell me more details about interesting happening X.
I'm not sure what really happened. Maybe the original SSC sub had an audience that was smaller and more connected to Scott's vibe, so low-quality posts were more likely to lead to high-quality discussion. But that doesn't appear to be the case here and now.
There's always the "be the change you want to see" option - try to post higher quality responses ourselves even if the original post or thread parent is bad.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'd say that ToaKraka's post is a good example of actual high-quality journalism. All of the relevant facts presented clearly and concisely with minimal spin and links to relevant sources. It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.
JulianRota
1yr ago
This gives me a thought - maybe there's a time-energy thing to it too.
So let's say that IQ is an expression of how much intelligence you are applying at the moment. Maybe it's at the maximum when you're doing some hard thing, but it probably isn't that high all the time. Most of the time, you're using much less intelligence. Even smart people do pretty dumb things once in a while. So then for every person, there is a "peak IQ", which is the maximum amount of intelligence you can ever conjure up. And there's also a measure for maybe "IQ minutes" for how long you can apply that level of intelligence and what level of intelligence you are capable of applying at other times throughout the day.
If you take an IQ test, presuming that you want to take it and want to score well, then you do what's needed to ensure you're at peak IQ, so that it measures your actual peak IQ. It is still a useful measure, but it's harder to measure how much you can actually apply that and how much intelligence you display when you aren't being tested.
Maybe the average smart person is really smart for like 3-4 hours total at work, and maybe 1-2 in their personal life. This is plenty to have a good job and make a good living and have an interesting hobby or two.
Maybe what Elon Musk really has is extraordinarily high IQ minutes. Thus, his peak IQ is generously high but not out of the league of smart people worldwide. But if he can apply all of that intelligence for, say, 18 hours a day, versus 6 max for the average person of that IQ, well then he can get quite a lot done. Like start and run a revolutionary electric car company and also a revolutionary rocket company, and like 4 other companies for things that seem a little wacky but could be revolutionary someday, and then I guess buy and run Twitter too just for kicks.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The parent I responded to there had written a longer response with more detail that I was meaning to respond to now, but I guess he deleted it. (It was pretty long but reasonably charitable and clear IMO, so I thought it deserved a reasonably high-effort response). Oh well, I guess I'll say most of the same stuff here.
I was actually biased to think moderately positively of TK before I read his piece, as most of the areas I read seem at least modestly biased towards him. I wrote about it a bit on this site. I wrote in that thread what actually changed my mind. I had basically presumed that his ideas were too censored and too difficult to get out there such that it drove him to terrorism. But he actually wrote himself in that very essay in P96 that he did violence because he did have opportunities to put it out there, but not to be distributed to his satisfaction. As I wrote there, I reject the idea that you get to do violence because nobody thinks your ideas are interesting. If nobody thinks your ideas are interesting enough to pay attention to, you should work on improving them and presenting them better, not blow people up.
That Mr. Ellul wrote similar things I think more proves my point than refutes it (I believe you both that he wrote similar things, but I'm not sure to what extent he rejected or endorsed violence to spread his ideas) - it's perfectly possible to have such views and advocate for them in normal and peaceful ways. I think that, considering the public image TK has gained from his bombing campaign (since we're all talking about him), it's perfectly reasonable to point out the holes in his ideas and remind people that he did make the decision that his ideas were important enough to justify aggressive violence - not even towards specific people responsible for opposing him or rejecting his ideas, but people he felt were part of the industrial system that he wanted to tear down.
I also believe that part of the generous interpretation many have given to his work is due to the re-definition of freedom that he used. A casual reading of many of his sections with the implicit belief among the general public in the western world that "freedom" refers to basically classical liberalism, things like free speech, free press, rule of law, etc leads many of his ideas to sound significantly more insightful and reasonable. But once you know that he redefined it to mean the "right"/need of individuals to go through the "Power Process" of doing substantial work for their basic needs, it all sounds rather different. Whether Industrial Society is inherently destructive of "classical liberalism" freedom is yet to be determined - that could be a complex and interesting discussion. But Industrial Society being inherently destructive to "power process" freedom is trivially obvious. I have a feeling that this may have been done on purpose. An honest writer simply looking to promote his ideas rather than mislead people would pick a different word, rather than one so loaded with pre-existing cultural baggage in the West.
Parent post also seems to be accusing me of not knowing enough about nature, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc. Presumably this is meant to lead to an argument that such lifestyles are actually much better than I had presented them as. At least, that's the most charitable interpretation IMO, part of my issue there is that he didn't actually make an argument for whatever it is he believed, just implied that I was ignorant. If I am, please go ahead and let me know what facts you know that make the arguments less valid, don't just imply that they're there.
I could counter-argue that while I am no expert on such lifestyles, he in turn may not know much about just how complex the logistical chain is that makes available all of the modern goods that we take for granted and exactly what life may be like when they are completely impossible to obtain. I specifically mean the "safety net" concept that I mention elsewhere in this thread. It may not be terribly hard to live a lifestyle superficially similar to what is described by TK, presumably Ellul, and others - I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the continental US voluntarily living like that is in the hundreds of thousands. But it's only superficial if you still have the grocery store to solve any food production problems that come up, the hospital to solve any medical problems, the hardware store for any tools you can't fabricate, etc. Even if you never actually go to any of those, the mere fact that it's possible tends to change peoples' behavior. How many people volunteer to put all of those perpetually out of reach for their entire extended family for all eternity?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think your options are too limited. Right now, it seems that Russia doesn't have the combat power to push much further into Ukraine than it already has, at least not faster than a snail's pace, nor to do anything dramatic like capture Kiev, regardless of how much help we do or don't give to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Ukraine doesn't seem to have much chance of pushing the Russians back any time soon, regardless of how much help we do or don't give them. I don't think this is going to change either aside from large-scale direct intervention from Western troops, or several decades training up Ukrainian forces.
So the only practical options are probably 1. Continue to feed men on both sides into a pointless meat grinder, or 2. Sign some sort of peace treaty giving Russia at least most of what they already captured officially.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Update - it seems this story has some legs:
The Canadian Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota (no relation) has now resigned over this incident.
Meanwhile, Poland has reportedly "taken steps" towards extraditing Yaroslav Hunka for "crimes against Polish people of Jewish origin". That story doesn't seem to have the update of Mr. Rota's resignation.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I think at least we can say, Nazism doesn't mean what it means to us to people who lived in Eastern Europe.
One of the more surreal things I've experienced lately was when I asked on the Motte Telegram back around the start of the war (which has a couple of actual Ukranian residents), basically, so what's the deal with Jewish Zelensky having an apparently-actual-Nazi unit (Azov battalion) serving in his army? Taking Western views at least sort of seriously, surely an actual Nazi unit would refuse to take orders from a Jewish President, and a Jewish President would surely boot an actual Nazi unit out of the army he was Commander-In-Chief of. But all the Ukrainian residents were like, yeah, so what, why do you think this is weird? Even for English-speakers who presumably have at least some exposure to the Anglosphere, the idea that Nazis and Jews might not like each other much just seemed incomprehensible to them.
JulianRota
1yr ago
There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?
JulianRota
1yr ago
You're mostly right. My statement wasn't meant to say "TK should go live with the Amish because they're exactly like what he proposes" - I don't think they are either. What I think is more like, the Amish are 70%-ish of the way from mainstream society to what TK says he wants, but they actually exist now, are accessible, and decent odds you could find an Amish church that would let you live with them for a while. Living with them would let him learn a lot about what it's actually like to live in such a society, how to live decently well with minimal contact with the industrial world, and get an idea about what it would be like to go further.
JulianRota
1yr ago
He did, but it's not clear to what extent he was actually living the kind of life he advertised, which would include getting all of his own food, water, and other supplies from nature by himself and never from stores or other things sourced from the "industrial economy". At the very least, the materials required for the bombing campaign most likely couldn't have been built without outside supplies. I rather doubt he did considering how little knowledge of living off the land he started with and how much time he must have devoted to the bombing campaign.
There's also the point of safety nets. In TK's advocated world, if you fail to hunt and gather or farm enough food, then you starve and possibly die, tough shit. Living in a shack in the woods in the United States, even if you mostly get your own food, you still have the option of going to a store if you fall short, or to a hospital if you get injured or sick. Maybe he would voluntarily refrain from those options, but I don't think we know.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I interpret the posts you started this thread with as making the claim that Jews as a group categorically refuse to do agricultural work because the Talmud says they aren't allowed to. But the articles that you posted seem to basically agree with the one I posted - that Jews mostly moved away from agriculture because the religion did mandate that they become literate in an age where that was rare and difficult, and there were more lucrative jobs available for those who were (though usually not lucrative enough versus farming at the time to persuade people of other religions who did not have a religious mandate for literacy to take them up). So agreed on that I guess?
This is also evidence that the mandate for literacy is actually real and recognized as so and obeyed by the great majority of Jews throughout history. You seem to be attempting to claim there is a mandate to not do agricultural work, which I can't see any evidence of historical or near-modern Jews actually perceiving, recognizing, or obeying. It may not be super-popular, but there definitely are substantial movements around Jewish Farming, and I've never heard of any Rabbis or Talmudic scholars making a claim that those movements are wrong. And you'd think they'd get rid of Sukkot too if they really did hate farming.
(this probably deserves an effortpost of its own, but indeed literacy is rare and expensive in the pre-industrial age, which includes not only the printing press, but a power source for it, plus decent-quality long-lasting paper and ink in industrial quantities, plus a way to transport large quantities of all of those supplies and the resulting books around a country)
The Talmud is a pretty complex and obscure subject. You pretty much never hear any Jews who are not Talmudic scholars talking about it or basing their lives around it. Indeed, there are college degrees for reading and interpreting it. I am not at all a Talmudic scholar myself, but all of the commentary in the site you posted on the section you linked says it's mainly about marriage and relations between men and women. It seems nobody else thinks the bit that you say forbids agriculture work (or rather, quotes a "Rabbi Elazar" as claiming it's "low") actually does so. It's a book that's existed for thousands of years and had many tens of thousands of people spend years of their life reading and interpreting, if it's actually meant as a prohibition, surely there must be more people talking about that, but I can't seem to find any.
JulianRota
1yr ago
If Jews don't farm, why do they have a major holiday for harvest season? Farming may not be the most popular career for Jews, but it appears there's still plenty of Jewish farmers, even before the Kibbutz movement.
I am also highly skeptical of people pulling quotes from the Talmud to try and make a point about the Jews. The Talmud is a large volume containing many contradictory opinions about many subjects from many historical scholars. It's meant to be studied and debated, not read as a literal book of laws. Can you cite the exact passage that you believe condemns agricultural work and why you believe the intent of that section is to order Jews not to perform it?
I have no idea what the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities was to farming. Certainly they were strongly discriminated against and banned from it in many places. If they refused to try or ask, perhaps they knew they wouldn't get it, or were concerned that they wouldn't be allowed to keep them for long enough for a planting and harvest cycle, or wouldn't be allowed to learn how to do it well. Or maybe it's not very well documented exactly what they did or didn't try to do over the years.
In looking around the net about the subject, I did find this interesting and pretty neutral article about the subject making the case that the root cause of Jews tending away from farming in the pre-historical era was not hostile discrimination or refusal to do farm labor, but instead the religious requirement to be literate (in order to read the Torah) in an era when that was extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. It seems likely that many people thought, if you've got to acquire a relatively rare and difficult skill, better to make some use of it rather than continue to farm.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The point of this place is to practice the belief that we can discuss any subject rationally and honestly. So we strongly prefer to ban not any specific viewpoint, but poor argument tactics instead. If you want to say that Jews are bad, you can, but you have to actually say it and make a rational case for why, not make suspiciously weird and irrelevant posts whose real purpose seem to be to put a eyebrow-raising number into people's heads.
I think this is a good thing - the NN's most compelling argument is usually that they're so censored everywhere, they must have an actual point that the system doesn't want you to hear. We can refute that here - here's a wide open forum for you to post what you actually think, and if it's really dumb it will get shredded just like it deserves.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Brings to mind the "What's Your Job on the Leftist Commune?" meme, where seemingly 90% of people claim to want to be some variation of therapist, philosopher, academic, or barista, while barely 10% show any interest in manual labor, farming, construction, etc. Sample picture
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've never worked there, so I don't know for sure. I'm inclined to think it's basically true though. For one, I don't think Musk's companies hire true juniors - indications are that they expect every employee to be highly competent and motivated. I wouldn't be surprised if getting a good idea through can happen even at the lowest level. Musk is reported to be a notorious micro-manager - that's the good side of it, that good ideas at the lowest level can be found. Of course there's a flip side to all of this too - if your idea isn't actually good or you can't execute on it, you might just be summarily fired.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I wonder what impact the amount of resources they've put into the Ukraine war has had on their ability to respond to situations on other fronts. One of the things the Russia-supporters were worried about is how worried about "big bad Russia" all of the other nearby states will be if they couldn't/didn't bring Ukraine to heel promptly. It now seems like they're in that situation anyways, regardless of whether they are able to pull something they can call a "win" out of the Ukraine war.
I have a habit instead of only ever putting down my keys and wallet in one place in my home. Thus, I never lose them.
I use Melatonin as well. I think that, without it, my natural sleep cycle is like a 26 hour day or so. If I went on without that or an alarm just going to sleep and waking up whenever felt natural, my cycle tends to drift later and later. Melatonin, taken a couple of hours before bed, seems to keep my sleep cycle synchronized with the actual daily cycle.
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