OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
The US census considers MENA people white, but I think that if you asked the average competent user of English, "Are Arabs white?", "Are Turks white?", or "Are Iranians white?", they would answer "no", and if so, then I think Mizrahim cannot count as white either.
In general I think the central example of 'white people' is northern and western Europeans. Nowadays I think most people consider Slavs white and consider Italians white, but it starts to get a bit hazy when you ask if, say, Greeks are white. And then Turks or Arabs are definitely not white.
You're free to say that you count them all as white, but I would argue that is a non-standard usage. Mizrahim are, I would say, definitely in the same category as Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and so on, and most people do not consider them white. At the very least, they are not in the same category as northwestern Europeans.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
The idea that the United States is not and should not be an ethno-state predates 1977.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is in no sense responsible for American civic nationalism. What on Earth are you talking about?
Well, I think the Israeli case is somewhat complicated, because Israel understands itself as the state of 'the Jewish people', and that category is somewhat woolly. 'Jews' as a category includes lots of people who are usually considered white, and also lots of people who are clearly not white. In a sense Israel isn't an ethno-state at all, but a religious state; but of course, Jewishness is both a people and a religion. The racist right generally wants to reduce peoplehood to genetics or descent, and that doesn't really work in the case of Jews. Jews are clearly in some sense a people or an ethnos, but defining them genetically or in terms of traditional racial categories is difficult. Aliyah includes everyone from Sephardic Jews in Spain to Bnei Menashe in India, from the obviously white Ashkenazim to the obviously black Beta Israel.
I find it helpful to compare Israel to its neighbours. Is, say, Saudi Arabia an ethno-state? Not... really? It sort of views itself as a nation for Arab people, but not all Arabs belong there. It imports a large non-Arab underclass while enriching its Arab citizens. It's also a religious state, to a higher and stricter degree than Israel is. Ultimately I'm not sure the word 'ethno-state' actually helps us that much. Compare, say, Azerbaijan regularly getting shirty about Iranian Azeris and saying that all Azeris ought to be part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan clearly understands itself to be the national homeland of the Azeris, it encourages Azeris outside the country to identify with it, and it does horrible things to non-Azeris on territory that it thinks rightfully belongs to Azerbaijan. That seems a lot like Israel.
I think that Israel is a state founded upon a particular religion and a particular ethnicity, with the explicit goal of maintaining the supremacy of that one ethnoreligious group in a particular territory. In that light I don't think it's particularly unique; most of its immediate neighbours in the Middle East are similar. The clash with the Palestinians is notable because the Palestinians are no different to Israeli Jews in this respect. The Palestinian cause is that the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is firstly Arab and secondly Muslim. The Israelis are not unusual for their region, save perhaps in having more money and guns than their rivals.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
Well, at least this time you're admitting openly that you think that Jews are malicious.
It seems to me that you're taking a large and common sensibility that is shared across most ethnic groups in the US - that the US is not and should not be an ethno-state - and then implausibly blaming that entirely on Jews/Zionists. The causality here is not at all clear. It's true that Jews generally support Israel, and Israel is an ethno-state, but they are far from unique in that light (that is, people in the US being positively-disposed to a foreign country that they share heritage with), and it's also unclear that there's any particularly strong correlation between 1) supporting Israel, and 2) wanting the US to not be an ethno-state.
I would point out, for instance, that group in America that hates Israel the most is also the group most opposed to the idea of the US as an ethno-state. Support for third-world immigration is surely highest on the left, especially the radical left, and those are the people who hate Israel most.
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
Well, firstly, Israel doesn't qualify, surely? Let's say that Ashkenazim are white, but Ashkenazim are, though dominant, a minority in Israel. The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi. If you count Israel as a white ethno-state, then I think you have to count pretty much every Middle Eastern country as a white ethno-state.
Secondly... no country considers itself a white ethno-state. Ethno-states tend to define themselves more narrowly than that. Russia is in a sense an ethno-state, but the dominant ethnicity is Russian. When you say 'white ethno-state', presumably you mean 'states that organise themselves around a particular ethnicity that falls within the broad category of 'white'', and some of those do exist? To pick the most infamous one at the moment, surely Hungary qualifies?
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.
I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
...huh, I was starting to think you'd left the Motte entirely.
The thing is, once again you're attributing a kind of unique malice and hypocrisy to Israel even though, er, there are lots of ethno-states? Most countries are more like Israel than they are like the US, i.e. they consciously understand themselves to be the nation of a particular ethnic group. This isn't Jews and Gentiles held to different standards. This is the US, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, being weird, and that weirdness originates, I'd argue, in the liberal revolutions of the late 18th century.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I mean, he's correct as to the issue there, right?
A one-state solution is impossible because nobody wants it. The Israelis don't want it, because they correctly believe that it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and it is an explicitly-understood goal of Israeli policy that Jews must always be a dominant majority in Israel. That was the whole reason Israel was created in the first place - for there to be a Jewish state. This isn't a secret anyone is exposing - they say it explicitly. Meanwhile, the Palestinians don't want it, because... I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Palestinians hate the Jews. They do not want to co-exist with them. One of the reasons why Israeli Jews don't want a one-state solution is because they - still correctly - believe that the most likely result of that would be a lot of dead Jews.
The people saying, "Why can't you just all be one state together with equal rights regardless of faith or ethnicity?" are either being disingenuous or stupid. It is obvious to anybody looking at the situation honestly why that cannot work.
Moreover, don't we allow other states to do this? Israel is not unique in holding itself to be the nation of a particular ethnicity, favouring people of that ethnicity, and making policy with a deliberate eye to maintaining that ethnicity's dominant status in its homeland. Japan is probably the most famous other one, and we generally accept that the Japanese have a right to decide how they want to run Japan. Most Middle Eastern countries are like Israel in this respect - just ask the Turks about nationality.
Israel is different to the United States in being an ethno-state, but ethno-states are common. The US is the weird one, not Israel.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Do you take massive consensus in an academic field to be prima facie evidence that there is political pressure, which requires either reform or closure? Perhaps only in the humanities, since we would expect STEM fields to naturally reach consensus?
I'm trying to work out how to make a principled distinction here. History, for instance, seems like a field that does produce consensus judgements on any number of subjects, and this is not in itself a problem. Every historian agrees there was a French Revolution, after all. Even larger questions do seem like they produce consensus answers, or they allow certain kinds of evidence but not others. If I ask the question, say, "why was France victorious in the Hundred Years' War?", some kinds of answer are acceptable and will be debated, but "it was the will of God that the English be thrown out of France" is not acceptable. This doesn't seem like cause for external invention, with apologies to St. Joan.
On the other hand, as this current crisis shows, it clearly is possible for entire sub-fields to groupthink their way into toxic consensus, and insofar as we reasonably expect universities (especially public universities) to serve the common good and be democratically accountable, it seems reasonable for external actors to come in and sometimes say, "Nope, you've disappeared up your own asses, break it up".
I'm not sure I can draw a clear line in advance. I suppose this is a matter for political judgement and prudence? Academia is responsible to politics. But it's easy to say that now, when academia is a monoculture, and politics remains relatively diverse and contested. If we were in a moment where academia was genuinely viewpoint-diverse and politics was a monoculture, I'd probably feel the other way. I can say "academics should be accountable to politics" in the West today, but if I lived in China and that meant "academic conclusions must be approved by the CCP", I would definitely resist that conclusion.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
For what it's worth I've gotten plenty of dates via app and never had anybody say they would go to a date and then cancel at the last minute.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:
On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”
To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.
I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.
Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.
It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Insert obvious crack about the British being wise to that strategy on small islands across the Atlantic, but blind to it at home?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
I'm in favour of normalising hate speech against clankers, at least.
Anyway, I can sort of see what they were going for here - we know you have concerns, we're listening, we want to take your worries seriously. I don't think they understand how widely loathed their technology is, though, and therefore how much what they're saying comes off as a bad parody or even villainous and sneering.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
If it helps any, in my experience Hinge dates aren't worth going on. I was on Hinge for a while, got my share of matches, went on plenty of dates, and they firstly aren't particularly enjoyable, and secondly are not what you want if you're looking for a serious, long-term relationship. I did eventually quit and uninstall the app because it was obvious that the app is not supposed to help you find a relationship, much less a personal connection or even love. It's a device for setting up lots of short-term 'dates'.
You're really not missing much. Long-term relationships are good, and absolutely worth seeking out, but I don't think Hinge will lead you to one.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Without getting into the specifics of this individual case...
As Freddie said long ago, social conservatives have a really good track record when it comes to predictions. Generally they predict some consequence (which they consider negative) to a social change, the social change happens, and then the consequence happens exactly as predicted.
When I was a teenager, I was pretty thoughtlessly liberal on all the major social issues - or at least, on all the ones that I understood. I grew up in an atmosphere where it was just taken as axiomatic that of course social conservatives are wrong, and usually motivated by a combination of fear, ignorance, and bigotry, and all of history is a long scroll of them being wrong about everything. As I got older, I started to realise that that isn't always true, and then eventually realised that, hang on, they have in fact mostly been right. They haven't been correct in every single instance, but they have gotten most of them.
Today, I often see something I think of as an inverse boy-who-cried-wolf, where the social conservatives cry wolf, progressives/liberals/mainstream all loudly insist that there is no wolf, then a wolf eats a sheep, and then the next day the process begins all over again.
I remember a few months ago running into a tweet where someone said that they won't take conservatives seriously until they admit they were wrong on gay marriage and apologise. Naturally the conservatives say, "well, no, because we weren't wrong on gay marriage", and really, with every year that passes, I feel like the evidence is mounting that they were right.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
OliveTapenade
9d ago
This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Tell me more about this?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires.
This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.
The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.
It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
We probably shouldn't be that surprised - the approval of the tribe is something humans are pretty-close-to-hardwired to crave, and the interaction of that instinct with social media can go very dark places. Would you rather be a famous freak, or a healthy, happy nobody? It's not surprising that young people in particular sometimes choose 'famous freak'.
(Apparently it is disputed just how much Gen Z kids want to be influencers or content creators, but even in the lower end, 5% of people is still enough to give you a big supply of freaks.)
I think age does come into it. Most of people doing this are kids, and people in their teens or early twenties often don't really understand lifelong consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are things like taking hormone treatments, getting surgery, or over-eating. Often it's only when you get a bit older and start to feel the creaks and pains that you realise you really do need to take care of your body. Still, if we combine big ambitions, insensitivity to or ignorance of consequences, a greater tendency to reckless behaviour, and brains being hacked by the virtual crowd, this is what you get.
When I was at school, there was usually a clown or a reckless attention-seeker in the class. Sometimes he (it was almost always a he) would pursue attention in obviously stupid, self-destructive ways. I remember a boy whose 'thing' was going up to to the fence during recess and throwing his packed lunch into the road, and watching it being run over by cars. Other students found it funny and cheered, so he kept doing it, day after day. I sometimes wonder how that guy felt a few hours later, as his stomach rumbled...
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I'm actually not sure this is about trans or gender at all.
Finnster reminds me of nobody so much as Nikocado Avocado - somebody who put a huge amount of himself online, obtained a large and enthusiastic following, and became addicted to the likes. This then leads to the person sharing himself more and more, modifying and selling his body in order to gain more and more attention, no matter how permanent, unhealthy, or damaging.
It's tragic, and I feel awful for the people doing this to themselves, but ultimately I have more condemnation for the social media system they exist within, and even for the slavering audience.
I think most people would say that Middle Easterners are closer to Europeans than South or East Asians, Africans, and so on, yes. Arabs are not white, but Arabs are closer to white than Indians or Chinese people.
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