Mer
11mo ago
Maybe if for example the US had stayed out of WWI it would not have been quite the decisive victory for the allies and thus the terms might have been not as bad for Germany. With less bad terms, maybe Hitler never rises to power and thus we never encounter “peace in our time” rhetoric.
It's a fairly persistent narrative that it was the harsh terms of the treaty of versailles that lead to the second world war, but it's always struck me as a load of rubbish. If your enemy is still strong enough to make another serious go of invading you a generation after you have decisively defeated them, it's an argument that you were not thorough enough in their hobbling, not the reverse. You don't hear many people saying that the Romans were in danger of the hurt feelings of the Carthaginians causing another great war when they made their desert and called it peace.
The problem with the post-WW1 peace was that it did not change the fundemental conditions that lead to the outbreak of WW1. It left a Germany that was humiliated and embittered, but still in pretty much the same place it was before the war. If your aim is to prevent the rise of Hitler and WW2, you need to disarm its military at the end of the war, rather than letting them go home under arms, occupy the country and then dissolve Germany as a nation. Of course I'm referring to the nation as a political entity and not advocating for some sort of mass disintegration of all Germans, but I think having Germany forcibly broken up into a series of smaller nations is a fair price to pay for starting the greatest war in history and then making the rather inadvisable decision of losing it.
I would say that WW2 was a consequence of firstly, that special brand of German pig-headedness that convinces them that everything must be done the German way. And secondly, a dangerous cocktail of American softness mixed with the bitterness of two empires that had just spent the lives of a generation of their men (and a whole lot of money) with very little to show for it.
Somewhat tangential to this point, I'm not typically given to writing great long essays for the internet, but I do feel that one day I will be compelled to research and write a great screed about the US and it's approach to international relations and diplomacy. I'm thinking of opening it with "American diplomats and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race".
Mer
11mo ago
it is important to continue until Anheuser-Busch is driven to bankruptcy.
I would say it's probably more important to have realistic goals.
Mer
1yr ago
They're not equivalent. Conservatives engage in hatred based on identity, and liberals engage in hatred based on beliefs.
I would say that's a pretty bold statement to make about two very broad groups of people. I've personally observed both groups hate people for both reasons.
Putting aside the excessive generality, I would say that I object to this rather glib slogan on the grounds that beliefs are quite often an integral part of a persons identity and that in fact the lines between identity and belief are often so blurred as to make the distinction meaningless.
If I, a member of the Hawkmanii tribe, attack and murder a member of the Boarmanii tribe from the next valley over based solely on him being a filthy Boarmanii (who had it coming because you can't trust these "people"), would I have killed him based on his identity or his beliefs? By modern standards we would be considered to be members of the same ethnic group, distinguished only by our styles of dress or perhaps how we choose to wear our beards. Yet both of us would become murderously violent towards anyone implying that there is anything even remotely similar about us, I was born a Hawkmanii, I will die a Hawkmanii.
This ad campaign is just a reminder that conservatives still view being trans or gay as a political choice first, and a personal characteristic second.
So these hypothetical conservatives consider gays/transgender types to be repugnant because they perceive them as making an incorrect political choice, not because they perceive it to be an immutable characteristic? This seems to undermine the argument you made in the very line above.
Mer
1yr ago
If you would murder someone from another tribe regardless of their personal beliefs, then you're murdering based on identity
But their beliefs are their identity, it's the only way in which they are different (from a modern first world perspective). Identity is a question of what individuals believe to be important, both in themselves and in others. You can take a Hutu baby and a Tutsi baby from their respective homelands, raise them in a black american ghetto without any information about where they came from and they would not identify or be identified as Hutu and Tutsi, they're just black. Yet raise these same babies in Rwanda and one may very well end up dismembering the other with farming implements in a wide ranging genocide based solely on their identity.
To give another example that you keep banging on about, being gay. There are plenty of examples of cultures throughout history that do not share the modern concept of "being gay". I'm massively over-generalising here, but for ancient greeks, having sex with men was something that you did, not something that defined you. If you showed up to ancient Athens and insisted that having sex with or being attracted to men was this incredibly important, immutable part of who you were, they'd probably consider you to be strange and childish.
In both the cases above, the cultural context informs the identity of the individuals involved far more than their genetics.
The trend is obvious. Liberals will frequently eat their own based on failures of belief regardless of identity, like with Al Franken. Conservatives will frequently support their own based on identity and regardless of belief, like Donald Trump and his history of cheating on his wife with a porn star.
How exactly does Justin "Minstrel Show" Trudeau fit into this? And what intrinsic genetic traits does Donald Trump share with his fellow american conservatives that is shielding him from harm? As far as I can tell, there is no genetic link between conservatives (if there was then by your logic it would be haram for liberals to oppose them based on their conservative genetics anyway).
This is evident in one of the other replies to me that claims that blue collar hostility towards gay men is justified because gay men are intrinsically likely to sexually harass straight men. The poster linked an identity, being gay, with an inevitanle political action, sexual harassment, to justify the hatred of gay men.
It is strange to me that you consider sexual harassment to be a political act. I would say it's pretty reasonable to assume that gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than a straight man is. Ergo, if you're afraid of being sexually harassed or assaulted by a man, you would be wise to focus your defenses towards gay men. From the perspective of our hypothetical blue collar worker, the problem is not the immutable characteristic (attraction to men), the problem is the increased risk of the bad things he doesn't want happening to him.
I wouldn't blame a woman for being more frightened of being sexually harassed or assaulted by a straight man, why would I fault this hypothetical blue collar worker for drawing the same conclusions?
This whole website is based on the idea that it's better to object on ideological rather than tribal lines, even if tribalism is powerful. Conservatives are clearly the side of power through tribalism, and liberals are clearly the side of power through persuasive ideology.
Ideological lines are tribal lines. The very next sentence you accuse the enemy tribe of being the bad mean people who are ignorant (perhaps they are also smelly?), whereas your tribe are the good virtuous ones who seek to rise above such petty nonsense. You would have to be willfully ignorant to end up on a site like the motte and not have been presented with an abundance of examples of those from the liberal tribe acting solely out of opposition to the conservative tribe.
Conservatives would like to pretend they are hating people for their beliefs, rather than their immutable characteristics, so they recast immutable characteristics as political beliefs so they can justify their identity based hatred.
They're smart enough to pretend that it's just harmful beliefs and actions from gay and trans people that they object to, like drag shows for children, surgery for children, and men in women's sports.
This commercial cleverly displays that this is just a facade designed to persuade moderate liberals such as myself that they are looking for any compelling reason to attack gay and trans people because their hatred is based on identity.
I honestly can't tell if you're trying to rile people up here or if you're just that arrogant and close minded. I would say that you started from a fundamentally flawed understanding of identity and have developed a self-serving explanation of why your team are the goodies and the other team are the baddies from there. How does your mental model account for the existence of gay conservatives for example? Trump is probably the most pro-gay president ever, he was publicly pro gay marriage while Biden and Obama were still saying that marriage was between a man and a woman.
Mer
10mo ago
The song was insanely popular at the time, but of course, someone who's chosen to write a book about why said popular song is ackshually not cool at all is a far better arbiter of coolness than the general population.
Mer
1yr ago
You can’t
That's quitter talk, you absolutely can build enough housing, it's just a question of if the will to do so exists and what we consider to be adequate housing.
Mer
11mo ago
I feel much less clever and witty when I need to directly explain my points rather than obliquely make them with historical references, but very well.
The point of that post was to draw a parallel between the final stages of the Roman Republic and the modern era, specifically the moment before Tiberius Gracchus made the first moves in a long chain of events that ultimately lead to the collapse of the Republic. Mostly this was done to somewhat cheekily point out the folly of the quote I amended, demonstrating that it could readily be applied to a system that was about to undergo several bloody civil wars and "reigns of terror".
The Republic collapsed into civil wars and eventually gave way to the rule of one man at the height of its power and security. The catalyst for its disintegration was elites leveraging the disgruntled masses to further their careers battling against elites that sought to supress said disgruntled masses for their own benefit. I could go on, but the parallels are obvious, the USA is consciously modeled after the Roman Republic and has in many ways followed a similar trajectory thus far, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it might continue along that same trajectory.
Also I should say that the poster who you were replying to had a point, although I disagree with the idea that America is an empire (or that the Republic was truly an empire either). Power is a force and follows its own laws in the same way that natural forces do, there is too much power converging in Washington for it not to change the system that channels it. Much like the Republic, the US has gone from backwater to Hegemon practically overnight, in the case of Rome it turned out that a system designed to govern a leading city state could not survive the sudden pressure imposed on it by the near absolute power, time will tell how the US fairs.
Mer
10mo ago
Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.
I'd say if you're at the point of writing fan fiction about a setting you're past the point of being "superficially" a fan of something.
A fan is not defined by how much they "get" their chosen obsession, it is defined by the level of enthusiasm/passion for it.
Being moved to write gay fanfiction that completely misses the point of the setting makes someone as much a fan as a person that memorises pointless trivia (who also misses the point of the setting, but in a male way rather than a female way).
Everything bad that is happening in this war is the result of Russia starting the war. If the war continues, the bad things will inevitably continue. The bad things will stop when the war stops, and since Russia cannot be convinced with words, the only way to stop the war is to kill Russians.
This seems like a pretty reasonable position to take, more pragmatic than most in the west have been willing to publicly state. If this was a more commonly held belief in the corridors of power in the west, the war might have been over by now.
Mer
11mo ago
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised plebs, materially they have never had it so good. The Republic brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Only the gods can answer that, now enough of this, lets go to the forum. I've heard that Tiberius Gracchus has some new land reform he's wanting to talk about.
Mer
9mo ago
Over the years online I've encountered a few people who make this kind of argument and I have to say that it baffles me.
I'm a man and I can honestly say I've never for a moment felt envious of women and I really don't understand the people who say that if they could choose, they would choose to be born as a woman. The only thing you've really listed that bothers me is child support and custody, I've got no kids myself but I feel for the good fathers who get a raw deal from the courts.
The "minimum deal" of life for men is worse than for women. The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first.
I'll take being homeless thanks, I'd much rather be bum-fighting a junkie than live my life as any woman. I've been in plenty of fights, brawls and various other flavours of fracas over the course of my life and I've enjoyed them all thus far, I don't know what the hell your average woman does to pass the time nowadays (eat hot chip and lie?) but I have to imagine it would be deathly boring by comparison.
Mer
1yr ago
Yet men-as-depicted-by-women are still recognizably male and deeper than men's men – if sometimes unrealistically sensitive and vulnerable, even absolute brutes
I've not read much written by women in my life, but on the occasions I have I have to say that I've always found the way they write men to be jarring. There have even been times when I've read something without knowing anything about the author, come away thinking that something was off (everyone seems kind of gay? - my inner thought process at the time), lo and behold it's written by a woman every time. This was really the experience that lead me to believe that women as a group have a somewhat over-inflated view of their own understanding of the inner workings of men. I do think this street runs both ways, with the men that bother to try and understand women that is.
Mer
11mo ago
I think you've chosen a very interesting place to stop your chain of logic here, not examining why Britain "wanted to get involved from the very start". Given that Britains war aims were essentially to keep the continent pretty much as it was before the war and preserve the balance of power in Europe, it is in fact accurate to say that Britain chose to use the excuse of maintaining Belgian independence in order to join the war in support of Britains true goal of supporting Belgian independence.
Mer
1yr ago
the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back
Damn, how many invasions did I miss?
In all seriousness, the US (or more broadly speaking, the west in general, don't know why you're leaving western europe out here) didn't "expand into eastern europe", it was invited in, largely because eastern europe was sick of Russia and what Russia had to offer.
Mer
1yr ago
so what makes Ukraine so special?
It's a big country in Europe and not in the Middle East/Africa, to put it crudely.
Putting aside the "emotional" component of things as well, there's real benefits for the US to be had in this conflict, the US has been throwing pocket change and whatever rubbish it can be bothered to pull out of mothballs in exchange for watching Russia repeatedly shoot itself in the feet and legs.
Yarvin just seems agitated that his ideological opponents seem to be winning.
This, combined with those who reflexively oppose the west, seems to explain a lot of the pro-Russian sentiment in the west for this war.
Mer
11mo ago
Extremists die in ditches. The strong, the canny and the lucky make history.
The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave. The Paris Commune did not fail due to a lack of extreme beliefs, it failed because extremists are by their very nature terrible at making the kind of compromises you need to make in order to advance your goals.
Mer
1yr ago
It's pretty clear that the desire to have kids is not universal. My source: the many people who never have children or express a desire to have children and in fact go to great lengths to avoid having children.
Mer
1yr ago
Fringe loonies will do what fringe loonies do. I wonder if the usual suspects over on /k/ are still fervently denouncing Ian as a dirty commie for disabling comments on videos related to Rhodesia.
I have a huge amount of respect for Ian for staying the course by remaining professional and basically apolitical. The man just wants to talk about guns, their workings and their history.
Mer
1yr ago
It's exactly the same thing. Black people are stereotyped as large and violent, orcs are large and violent, so orcs are black people
Tolkeins orcs aren't particularly large and their capacity for violence is either at the behest of masters who herd them into battle with the crack of the whip, or a kind of petty and mean vindictiveness that doesn't really seem to align with stereotypes. Similarly, Warhammer orcs/orks are football hooligans and don't come across as particularly "black". Warcraft orcs are just a "noble savage" mish-mash, although they are the closest, what with the history of slavery, but it's weakened by the half a dozen other inspirations.
Maybe it's a US thing, but the assosciation between black stereotypes and orcs still seems pretty weak.
For the same reason, not every depiction of a greedy banker is intended to represent Jews, though some are.
Of course, I don't think Rowling intended any coded message about jews in her work, as I say in another post, I think she was just drawing from the cultural well in general for her book and it just so happens that a lot of stereotypes in Britain about bankers/money men have crossovers with those about jews.
Mer
10mo ago
I've got to be honest, I was fully expecting this to be yet another "trust me bro, it's good I swear", but that was actually great.
I might actually give this show a watch now and I watch damn little TV.
Mer
10mo ago
After all, you're basically torturing yourself regularly, week after week, for seemingly no purpose whatsoever other than to, well, keep doing it?
You get to enjoy it after a while, then eventually you find you can't imagine yourself living without it.
It's (usually) only the first few weeks that a new form of regular exercise feels like torture, then the body gets on board with the program and finishes up the initial adaptation and it gets substantially easier. Then as time goes on, you start to see the benefits, the body continues to adapt to better handle the strain and eventually it becomes part of your identity. If exercises did continue to feel like torture even after hundreds of hours of training, nobody would presist in them.
Cause men tend to be more insane than women.
I would say it has more to do with testosterone than with anything else. It's an incredible chemical, a real life super-soldier serum that we only take for granted because it's "always been this way". Your average man will see greater results faster than your average woman in (almost all) forms of sports, which would certainly help a lot as seeing progress is a real boon to getting invested in any particular form of exercise. The social differences between how men and women value sport are also all certainly downstream from the differences that testosterone impart.
Mer
1yr ago
Nuclear power has a lot of benefits, but it takes a significant amount of time and money to get online, with the benefits being generally diffused. The number of organisations that can actually get a nuclear power plant online for long enough that they can start to make a profit is quite small.
AI is comparatively cheap, the changes are quick and easily observable and the pay off for an individual willing to utilise it is substantial. As a class medievial European nobility may have benefited from a complete ban on crossbows and handguns, but the ratio of costs to return of employing these weapons meant that anyone who chose to defect and take up their use would out compete those who did not. The same is true of AI, it cannot be ignored.
Your appeals to a reasonable nation performing certain obvious reasonable tasks are pointless. This is clown world. You need to think dumber.
I'm appealing to human greed and desire for power. You need to think smarter.
Mer
1yr ago
The second thing is that my heart breaks for Protestants. The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the church. I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.
I have to say that my least favourite thing about the religious is the capacity of some to be so incredibly condescending and to not even have the common decency to be aware of how insulting they're being.
I am not religious, but I do come from what was historically a very protestant culture (with its own national bent on how a religion "should" be, as is typical) and to me I must say that I see very little difference between the american corporate protestants and the catholics. Both are overly obsessed with elaborate ceremony, pomp and spectacle, with the greatest difference between the two being that one is simply crass and the other is vulgarly ostentatious. I could also say that both are essentially scams designed to extract money and influence from large bodies of people eager to find meaning and a greater understanding of what it's all about.
I generally do not voice these opinions unprompted in the same way that I am not given to walking up to people in the street and slapping them in the face without provocation. I assume that most people have reasons for making the decisions they do and are operating off of different information than I am.
The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things
Are probably attending for the same reasons you would attend whatever weird things catholics do, because they're presumably getting something out of it.
I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.
This sentence alone is so incredibly arrogant that it makes my head hurt just processing it. The idea that protestants must collectively deceive each other about how totally awesome and right catholicism is just because they're bitter about.... something? I have to say that in my experience, there is no collective grudge among protestants against catholics, if anything it is entirely the other way around. I've lived in countries with large protestant communities my whole life, never spent any serious amount of time in catholic countries or communities and the only place I've ever heard anyone talk about the split between catholics and protestants was from catholics. Hell, I've heard significantly more about protestants from catholics than I have from protestants.
The problem is that with a few words changed, everything you've said also applies to Russia.
Russia can't replenish its materiel at the ridiculous rate it has been expending it and even the deep soviet stockpiles will begin to run dry. It's worth noting that the single greatest donor of weapons to Ukraine has been Russia courtesy of many gifts left behind in good will gestures.
As for rhetoric, if what we're hearing in the west is hysterical then I lack words for what prevails in Russia. I recall discussions of sinking the UK under a giant tidal wave caused by nuclear explosions airing on Russian national television and the ongoing drumbeat of how this conflict is an existential crisis for
PutinRussia.Nobody on this earth knows how this war will end, or when. Some people may think they do and some might even turn out to be correct, but that will be a coincidence. This kind of business is far too large, complicated and full of moving parts to understand from any angle while it remains in motion, only once all the pieces have stopped will we be able to pick it apart and declare how obvious it was how things would turn out.
That said I still favour Ukraine over Russia on this one, they've got much stronger backing, have proven to be surprisingly competent and far more motivated than their Russian adversaries. The Russians by contrast have a military so dysfunctional that it verges on that of an Arab state, which seems to be institutionally more focused on battling with reality than with the enemy. Incidentally this aspect has been somewhat dissapointing for me, a long time fan of Russian doctrine, who has frequently argued that the Ivans are not as incompetent at warfare as is popularly believed. Apparently this sage wisdom must be updated to include military as well.
The biggest handicap to Ukrainian victory at this moment is the strange reticence of some western politicians to cheaply win a decisive victory over a long term adversary.
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