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NelsonRushton


				

				

				
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joined 2024 March 18 00:39:23 UTC

Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.

I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.


				

User ID: 2940

NelsonRushton


				
				
				

				
3 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2024 March 18 00:39:23 UTC

					

Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.

I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.


					

User ID: 2940

I agree it that it is much easier to be a Martyr if you aren't the head of a household. So it is reasonable to expect more heroism for God and country from single men than young married men, for example. On the other hand, I also think that does not excuse the behavior of German so-called Christians at large under Nazi rule, by more than a smidgeon.

I upvoted this but I think the commonsense reason is even stronger: Hitler tried to murder all of the Jews of Europe and he nearly succeeded.

I'm not about to start defining pagannes,

I don't think I am obliged to pay much attention to your claim that the Hebrews were pagans, when (1) it is against common sense, and (2) you decline to give a definition, along with what you feel are clear examples and non-examples, of pagan religions.

Just a note that I haven't forgotten about this and you are probably right. I just need to do some reading to see what to change it to. Thanks for the comment.

I don't think the solution is to deport them all. The solution is what Germany used to do, which made immigration from their poor neighbors (e.g. Poland) roughly zero: make sure illegal aliens can't get a job, public education, welfare, or a place to live. They'll deport.

On the other hand, as long as life is better for illegal residents of the US than for legal citizens of Mexico, and I and my family live in Mexico or South of there, nothing is going to stop me from getting into the US. Wall? pshh. Under the wall, over the wall, through the wall, around the wall, bribe, fly, or swim, one way or another, I'm getting my family to higher ground.

Press X to doubt.

The fact that it is doubtful is itself of first importance, because it is beyond doubt that, say, the Romans were pagans, if "pagan" means anything. On the other hand if "pagan" means anything, there must also be religious practices that are or were not pagan.

Most predicates outside math and the hard sciences are fuzzy, that is, matters of degrees -- and finding threads of truth to "x satisfies P" is always easy but also therefore always uninformative. The questions in this case are (1) is "pagan", as opposed to non-pagan, a meaningful (if of course rough) categorical distinction among religious practices? (2) if so what are its characteristics, and what are its alternatives and their characteristics? and (3) do the Hebrews fall inside or outside of the "pagan" cluster, by comparison with its paragons such as Rome and pre-Christian Scandanavia?

Are you saying yes, (something), and yes? If so I'd like to know what the something is. That is not the commonsense answer so you owe a good argument, beginning with an explicit answer to (2): what is it to be pagan, and what are the alternatives?

I've been accused of a lot of things -- but total ignorance of the Hebrew Bible, that's my new favorite.

Either you believe in the 'post-war consensus' 1 2 and you have a pocket theory for why Hitler is justifiably considered the master of evil, or you don't believe in the 'post-war consensus' and you recognize the satanization of Hitler as a function of human psychology interacting with propaganda that is necessary to justify the overarching moral narratives of the winners of WWII and the cold war.

I don't agree with this bifurcation. The form is ((A & B) or (~A & C)), so obviously it isn't a tautology, and I am not interested in B or C. More specifically, I am not interested in whether or not Hitler is worse than Mao, and I am not (here) interested in why Hitler is so strongly demonized in popular culture. My interest in this post and the one that will follow is discuss, propaganda aside, what actually is distinctive about Hitler's ideology.

It is also just a plain fact that US intelligence shortly after WWII regarded Jews as a security threat to the United States.

This is the same org that recently said right wing extremism is the greatest threat to US national security. I never took them seriously as you seem to, but maybe I should have another look.

Any reader can compare what is actually Isaiah with your tripe about Humble forbearance.

Funny, that was going to be my argument, too (except for the word "tripe").

I think Thomas Sowell is hands down the most notable right-leaning political thinker of our lifetime, and Conflict of Visions is Sowell's favorite Sowell book. I hope you'll read it if you haven't.

chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.

OK I see, you are quoting Chapter 13 not Chapter 3. Looks like the Babylonians are in for some Old Testament justice.

This is something I will address at greater length in my next post (note that it was me who first brought up Moses in connection with Genocide), but long story short is this: if we compare Mein Kampf and Isaiah, one is self-righteous, entitled, and enraged, and the other his humble, repentant, and resolved. Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.

There is also an important question of fact here. The moral axiom that connects Judeo-Christian foreign policy , so to speak, from the bronze age to the 20th century is this: like a police officer making an arrest, you are obligated to handle your enemies with the lightest touch you safely can -- but no lighter, and them's the breaks. As a matter of fact, in the bronze age, the lightest touch you can safely use, when bordering a near-peer ruthless belligerent, may be enslavement or genocide (what is your other option? "I guess that war is over; whew; you can all go home now; better luck next time wiping us out and raping our wives and daughters "). But I do not believe Jews per se were threat to Germany at all -- even if Marxism was a threat to Germany (which it was), and Jews were disproportionally Marxist (which they were). The 30,000 Jews who won medals for bravery in WWI were certainly not a threat to Germany -- but many of those very men, and their families, perished in Nazi death camps all the same.

Now how did Hitler think when the shoe was on the other foot, and his own tribe was being a pest and got their asses kicked? If the allied cause was a Jewish conspiracy like Hitler charged, then he should have expected Old Testament justice at Versailles. Austria and Prussia, and their union in the German Empire, had fought bloody wars of aggression against the allies with whom they sought terms at Versailles, and in some cases against their fathers and grandfathers. So by Hitler's own logic, the allies would have been within their rights to push for a final solution to the German Problem while they had the upper hand. But the Versailles treaty, hard as it was on Germany, was not the Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport) -- and yet what did Hitler say about it? Vae Victus? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not exactly. He said it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination. Poor baby.

And that's identity politics: group justice with double standards. It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.

Sources?

I was hoping you were referring to the dystopian movie Brazil, written by written by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard.

What are the references to? They don't seem to be from the book of Isaiah. For example you have

Every Babylonian who didn't manage to "flee to their native land" (3:14) would be slaughtered, including prisoners (3:15), infants (3:16,18)

But Isaiah 3:14-16 reads

The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts. Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,

This is all about God's judgment upon Israel, and in any case doesn't match the themes of fleeing, slaughtering, prisoners, or infants.

Putting part of your post in quotes and googling leads me to this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/11a4ttc/isaiahs_prophecy_of_the_destruction_of_babylon_is/

which misquotes Isaiah over and over. Did you check those with the original source (the Bible) before you posted?

The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weren't seen as especially noteworthy.

Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?

  • It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics.

I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.

The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2

Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?

Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree"

lol. What does you not accepting it look like? Whatever it is, knock yourself out.

I think we've reached a terminal point in this thread of the discussion, where we are at what Sowell calls a "conflict of visions". I have read Isaiah in its entirety, and I presume you have as well. There is no more data to collect, but we see the data through the lens of different concepts and different values. The truth is, you aren't going to convince me of your reading of Isaiah through dialectic, and I'm not going to convince you of mine, even if we are both being honest and logical. The denial of that truth is a chief delusion of the so-called "Enlightenment". A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side...". That's life.

With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way.

I wish you would have given an example of a source. I'm skeptical of this (that any Roman myth has the tone and general purpose of Isaiah) to begin with, but if it comes without a source on the first stab, I'm doubly skeptical.

Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it. [emphasis added]

Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?

The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.

modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.

Many modern people are descended from the interbreeding of masters and slaves. What I mean is, if only they had incorporated conquered people into their society having the rights of citizens.

Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies).

Can you point me (or us) to Hitler's statements on this?

people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on

I don't think this accurately describes our shared common moral sense. If people in a black church take up a collection to send money to hungry children in Zimbabwe, that they could have sent to even hungrier children in Ukraine, then they are advancing their race at the expense of others and few people have a problem with it, and I wouldn't have a problem with it. On a similar note using religion instead of race, if two people were taking up collections, one to aid persecuted Christians in Pakistan and one to aid persecuted Muslims in China, I would preferentially donate to save-the-Christians, and I think that is OK too, and I think it also accords with common sense (and that the push for "effective altruism" defies common sense).

What is wrong in our moral common sense is not advancing your people at the expense of others; it is advancing your people by violating the negative rights of others. Which is what Hitler (and Lenin and Mao) did, of course.

Then isn't the simpler explanation the years of propaganda they go through in public schools, or all the media portraying him as the ultimate evil, while the ins and outs of communism are mostly glossed over?

I'm surprised this has not been the go-to explanation in the discussion. The clue is not that Hitler is stigmatized, but the pattern of the what Moldbug calls the "cathedral" minimizing and excusing communist atrocities even after they became known. I think this pattern is obvious.

At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape

I agree with you that Nazi persecution was more predictable and narrowly targeted than that of the communists, but you left one important group off your list of those who were marked for death by the Nazis: people who would not keep their mouth shut and their tail between their legs. The fact that there were so few of these is a testament to how ironically wrong Hitler was about the alleged greatness of the German Volk. Hitler pointedly lambasts sycophants in Mein Kampf, but he hypocritically demanded it of his vassals and subjects, on pain of death. Hitler reigned over a nation of Spucklecker (spit lickers; his term for sycophants) -- and if they hadn't been, he couldn't have.

I don't think spit-licker is too unkind a term for someone who professes Christianity, and yet silently, passively watches the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I have never done anything so brave as stand up to a murderous tyrannical regime, and so I cannot claim that I would have done anything different than what most Germans did, even most of the ones who recognized Hitler as a ruinous, berserk tyrant. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't. What I am saying is that those of us who are (or might be) spit-lickers should recognize those among us those who demonstrably aren't, such as Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as better men than us in the most important way. In the words of Solzhenitsyn,

And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul, let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret.

Not exactly a secret, but not nearly as embedded in our cultural consciousness as those caused by Hitler. You should try asking 30 young adults who the most prolific mass murderers of the 20th century were. I did that experiment several times in the 90's. Stalin was rarely mentioned, and Mao was never mentioned once. Hitler was always the first name on the collective lips of the class. The situation is probably a little different now, but I would be very surprised if perception has caught up to reality.

It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people.

If only they integrated the people who worshiped those idols.