KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
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Winner of Motte Post of the Year 2019
User ID: 905
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Rage Fueled rant: What is with the intellectual bankruptcy on Ukraine?
I'm not talking about fog of war stuff, or always erroring towards one side... even the most stern eyed realist struggles with emotions infecting analysis...
I'm talking about respected, degree holding, prominent figures... who have built careers around the dispassion of their analysis, engaging openly in the worst, laziest, most childish, intellectual abuses when it comes to Ukraine.
I was listening to a commentator, i had followed for quite some time, and thought of as quite dispassionate (won't link him... he's dead to me) who just opened a video declaring that "The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
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set aside everything else... set aside your faction in the culture war, set aside what you think of the war...
Can you think of another war where this language would be tolerated from an allegedly dispassionate subject matter expert?
"The Second Libyan civil war (2014-2020) was the clearest example of good vs. evil in the 21st century", "The 2014 Gaza War was a matter of Good vs. Evil", "Gulf War 1 was really about Good vs. Evil", "the Falklands was a clear example of Good vs. Evil", "The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was entirely a matter of good vs. evil (though there you could make the case... they were fighting the Khmer Rouge)", "The US invasion of Grenada... really just a matter of good vs. evil", "The Sino-Indian war was really a matter of good vs. evil", "The bay of pigs invasion, when you get down to it, was about good vs. evil", "The French War in Algeria was a clear matter of Good vs. Evil", "The Spanish civil war was a true contest of good vs. evil", "The Irish war of Independence was really a conflict of Good vs. Evil"... WW1? Good vs. Evil. The Russo-Japanese war? Absolutely good vs. evil, had to stop the yellow menace. The Boer war? Entirely good vs. evil (though again there you could make the case... the British, Canadian, and Australian contingent invented the concentration camp in that war to deal with the Rebellious ethnic Dutch colonist...The Boer, the scum race of the Transvaal)
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If you heard any figures saying these were matters of "Good vs. Evil" you'd immediately discount them and probably think them some anti-intellectual freak. In my first year history course I received a D on an essay for an anachronistic, sides taking, argument 1/1000th as egregious. (I argued the attitude expressed by a Ming dynasty diplomat describing India could be interpreted as "Westward Orientalism")
This figure would be embarrassed describing any other war in such terms... hell I'd never even heard him use such language discussing the second world war...
And yet the 2022 Russo-Ukraine war... that's the war so egregious he'll throw intellectual impartiality to the wind in the name of sheer denunciation.
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It's not even the most egregious war currently being fought within 1000km of the Black sea. That infamy belongs either to the reignited Nagorno-Karabakh war where Azerbaijan and Turkey are trying to squelch the young democracy in Armenia, or the ongoing conflict in Syria where turkey is likewise trying to Squelch the increasingly autonomous Kurdistan and its various democratic movements ... We don't hear about these conflicts though, because Turkey is a NATO member and a keystone of Europe's treaties to keep migrants out.
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I could grasp this, though not respect it, if this figure was somehow tied up in the US establishment and had career opportunities riding on it... but he's well independent of that. Just likes the coolaid.
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This trend i also egregious if you consider the rhetoric around the Ukraine war... That its fought for democracy, that Putin is an Autocrat... that this is a war for freedom....
Such as the freedom to criticize your government? Do you? Nope, just criticizing the people the government and media tells me to criticize.
The applause signs around words apparently being more important than any meaning the words themselves might have.
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Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
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Sorry if this is ranting... I actually respected this commentator and this combined with other things was just a remarkable intellectual slide... I feel dirty... like the time engaging with him left me dumber somehow, and now I have to go back through ideas I first heard from him and check for the rot.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
There shouldn't be.
Fines, disfigurement/dismemberment, death. Those should be the only punishments.
Taking decades off someone's life is vastly more cruel than taking a limb, and the dilution of killing someone across 50 years by making them waste in a prison dilutes the resistance you get.
If every life sentence or decades long interment had to be replaced with a public execution or a public cleaving of limbs with the judge in mandatory attendance... there'd be a hell of a lot less of it, and a very good shillings point for public outrage and resistance.
Prison is like all bureaucratic solutions, it exists to dilute responsibility for the decision and to impose the costs of the decision with a minimum of potential for resistance.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Could you add a feature where if you hover over a user's name it shows a little window that previews their profile?
A lot of people add a fair bit to their profiles or some important detail that makes it vastly easier to remember who they are/get a feel for them/ build community... and you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on their name, go to their profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread.
I remember interacting with someone for months on the reddit version, finally thinking to click their profile... and suddenly realizing the person I was interacting with was famous, had an entire body of work, and I'd actually read their stuff but never realized it was the same person.
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This would also incentivize people to add detail to their profiles, and make the userbase/community that much more internally familiar.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
I get like 1000-2000 per each post in the initial run of 1-2 days when I'm linking it everywhere I can, such as here... and then an additional 50-200 per day across the whole Substack sometimes it spikes up to 400 per day if my Twitter game is particularly good.
My top post has about 5,000 unique views.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Long piece I wrote on the state of Legacy media and how its degraded in the past 8 years.
In the piece I argue that the primary business model of legacy media is not providing entertainment or even selling ad space, but rather selling selective silence to deep pocketed interests: Whether they be the military industrial complex, big pharma, NGOs or ever more often, the governments they're supposed to hold to account.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
1 million dead Jews would be less than Holodomor or dozens of more recent genocides....
Imagine finding out the legitimacy of America's and Israel's moral narratives rested on fewer dead bodies than America's interventions against Iraq or Vietnam.
People have been arrested and imprisoned for questioning the holocaust narrative, lives destroyed... the regime has gone to really fucked up propagandistic ends to protect the post-war order's founding mythology, and I'm someone who doesn't contest the figure.
If you could actually show Hitler killed fewer Jews than Lenin killed Russians 20 years earlier.... Then why the fuck was the US and UK backing the USSR vs. Germany? Both of them invaded Poland. That was a cooperative effort. By rights Britain and France should have declared war on Russia in addition to Germany in '39...
Could it be the great powers motives for the second world war was just as cynical and suspect as the first, and the entire post war order founded on misrepresentations of the war and Churchill's and FDR's motives for killing a generation?
That's the logical conclusion that's been drowned out in national myth-making and the obscene parading of dead jews, gypsies, and other victims...
The Holocaust wasn't even begun until '42, America and Britain justify their war with events that happened after they declared...
But if it became public knowledge the Holocaust was grossly overstated (I doubt it was)... All of a sudden the last unifying pro-regime narrative dies.
There'd suddenly be entire schools of thought arguing Hitler was doing what was necessary to contain genocidal bolshevism... Swastikas would become accepted political kitsch for angsty teens just like hammer and sickles are.
"Rage for the Reich" would start playing sold out shows.
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I doubt there's anything really there in holocaust revisionism... culture shifted fast between 45 and 65...I imagine something would have outed if it was bunk...
But man, to think the question doesn't matter? It sure matters to every grade school and high school history teacher when they preach the good word of how Anne Frank gave her life so that the rest of us might live under US Global Hegemony.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
I'm sure there was some advocate of secular dictatorship in 1790s France who remained staunchly opposed to Napoleon all the way through 1815 because "Well not like that"
You only live once and you if you wait on principle you'll come to your grave having spent your life waiting. You dance with the girl at the ball.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
You're thinking Marines. They're the Amphibious assaulters, and by rights should be under the navy... Which they are, technically... the department of Navy which doesn't allow meaningful crossover between Marines and Navy.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
So I'm an Amateur SupCom (Supreme Commander: Forges Alliance) player... so even further afield.
But applying my non-existent expertise...
Russia hasn't been leading an "Offensive". And the maybe 10-20 km they've creeped over the past 3 months isn't anything that could "Culminate"
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Russia has avoided all logic of maneuver warfare since about april-may, all real dynamic movement has been near non-existent, and they've "Advanced" at the slowest imaginable snails pace, even for less than full mobilization forces they have.
None of this makes sense unless you internalize the most most important stat of the war: Russian Artillery outnumbers Ukrainian artillery 10-1.
This is a scenario that there isn't really a famous war of it happening before, or atleast not one where its penetrated pop culture But it happens all the bloody time in SupCom.
Basically when you have a numerically comparable force (not outnumbered 3-1) a massive artillery advantage, and some densive capability sufficient to resist a counter-attack you can creep up to territory your opponent HAS to defend, and force them to occupy and maneuver in it under constant bombardment of your artillery.
The obvious counter to this is just to retreat slightly out of range of the artillery, let there be a large no man's land between you, and then do fast maneuvers back and forth to attack, counter attack, parry across that land so you're still fighting the enemy and not ceding net territory, but you spend a minimum of time exposed to the artillery.
The problem is there's a lot of territory you just have to defend.
Ukraine cannot just pull back off the Donbass... this isn't a grand theater war where Russia is trying to conquer the whole of Ukraine no matter what, and provinces can be sacrificed in gambits If Russia takes all the Donbass, has their land bridge, etc. They're liable just to declare victory and dig in and that'd be it... Worse the Ukrainian army is a good percentage people conscripted in the past 6 months... you start maneuvering them around too much, a lot will take that opportunity to get lost... maybe across a border.
So what do you do when you can't cede a territory, can't hold it without being overwhelmed with artillery, and can't take out the artillery?
You endure the artillery.
I've seen maybe hundreds of players design these plays where their opponent is forced to just feed units into artillery fire, and tie up tons of resources in these attrition scenarios... and none of them ever really looked like they were moving and looked like draws to untrained eyes... then the announcer would point out the kill loss ratio.
This also allowed the player with the artillery to hold a territory with a relatively small force since the enemy's cumulatively much larger stock of units is being defeated in detail over time, and never has enough in position at once to actually attack.
Some players make big strategic sacrifices to break off from this scenario, some do really risking low numbers attacks that sometimes work, some pull of something cool with airpower.
But this is really the opposite of an offensive in the classical sense... you're forcing your opponent into a situation where they have to aggress against you but can't, and ergo suffer high attrition.
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But the big thing is this is the opposite of an offensive which can culminate. Russia is basically fighting defensively as far as I can tell and their little territorial gains exist basically to force the Ukrainians to stay at the front, and not fall back out of arty range. Even we saw how quickly Russian divisions can move in the south of Ukraine at the start of the war... Pretty much all the southern territory was taken in a month... now a tenth of that, with all the northern forces redeployed there, have been static for 4 months? If Russia was trying to do big maneuver warfare they'd either be succeeding or failing and those lines would be moving in every direction. The fact the map looks so stagnant pretty much means they have to be pursuing semi-static tactics.
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
LOL. Amateurs.
Imagine trolling without keeping detailed spread sheets of your interact ratios.
Why even bother.
Just go back to being agreeable if you aren't going to put in the effort to be disagreeable
KulakRevolt
3yr ago
Thankyou so much for your contribution.
It can often feel like the world just wants us to shut up, go away and die, and it means so much to see people value this sort of thing.
Intelligence actually post-dates "Humanity"'s first invention: Warfare.
You find in tribes of chimps and other primates genocidal wars they commit against each other, murder all the men, take all the women... the exact kinda thing you'll be familiar with if you read the old testament or the Illiad.
This is how most higher primates lived for 100s of thousands of years, and it had an incredible selection effect. Unlike most other mammals or animals in general where dominance competitions are non-lethal feats of strength and fitness, lethal conflict doesn't depend on female selection of the winner, and all kinds of tactics that would be judged "less fit" become available... No female in the wild would choose to be the mate of one suitor over another if that suitor only won the dominance fight with the assistance of three friends... but when you murder the rival suitor she can't choose him.
thus humans incredible investment in brainpower as opposed to the the incredible musculature you see on some animals... when humans are starving the body will consume the muscle mass to keep them alive... but not the brain mass. Hunger, malnutrition even comatose states don't result in extreme Brian wastage the way you get muscle wastage... the brain is that important for reproductive success.
The conflicts of violence and mating are bred into our psyches men are obsessed with war... contact sports, war movies, the history channel, they mesmerize most... likewise women are mesmerized by not just love triangle harlequin romances conflicts... but true crime. Endlessly fascinated, titilated, and entertained by the idea of scandalous conniving romantic murders.
Unlike most modern problems we struggle to direct our attention to.. these problems we find innately endlessly rewarding, because like hunting, fishing, cooking, camping... they activate our ancestral reward centers.
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If intelligence is no longer being selected for, its likely because that competition... or rather that method of competing is blocked off... There is no longer a rewarding contest of arms or conniving plots of murder and romance that predictably result in significantly more reprodution in men, and significantly better mates and resources for the women and offspring... Or atleast not at the higher levels of intelligence.
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