ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Russia and China's positions on Ukraine and Taiwan are first and foremost based on nationalism and what you could call ethnic sovereignty, and only secondarily based on pragmatic security concerns. You can read Putin's essay on the topic for a pretty clear description of what motivates him. Some excerpts below:
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.
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Most importantly, people both in the western and eastern Russian lands spoke the same language. Their faith was Orthodox. Up to the middle of the 15th century, the unified church government remained in place.
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The incorporation of the western Russian lands into the single state was not merely the result of political and diplomatic decisions. It was underlain by the common faith, shared cultural traditions, and – I would like to emphasize it once again – language similarity.
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At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions, which went as far as to claim that the Ukrainians are the true Slavs and the Russians, the Muscovites, are not. Such ”hypotheses“ became increasingly used for political purposes as a tool of rivalry between European states.
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But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.
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In essence, Ukraine's ruling circles decided to justify their country's independence through the denial of its past, however, except for border issues. They began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united us, and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation. The common tragedy of collectivization and famine of the early 1930s was portrayed as the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
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Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia. Inevitably, there came a time when the concept of ”Ukraine is not Russia“ was no longer an option. There was a need for the ”anti-Russia“ concept which we will never accept.
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.
You can see that while the idea that Ukraine is a springboard for foreign powers to threaten Russia geopolitically makes an appearance, issues of national identity take precedence, including the idea that Ukrainian identity itself is a weapon that threatens Russia. This is not the kind of essay an American could or would write about Cuba in 1962, which is a case when there was a strategic threat from a foreign power without any shared ancient history or blood and soil concerns involved.
As for Taiwan, while it is not an ancient part of China the way Ukraine is an ancient part of Russia, its significance is that it is the last piece of territory (with a Han majority) taken from Qing China by foreign powers during the Century of Humiliation that remains outside of PRC control today. The CCP justifies its rule to a domestic audience by claiming that only they can undo the damage done by the Western powers and Japan during those years, firstly by making China too rich and powerful to be invaded or subjugated ever again and secondly by getting back all the territory that was stolen from them, including Taiwan. The fact that Taiwan is part of the First Island Chain with the potential to strangle Chinese naval trade in the event of a war is certainly of interest to their military planners, but it is a distant second in terms of motivations for invading or blockading the island.
I think Americans often have trouble understanding the way nationalists in other parts of the world think because it is quite alien to their own thought process, but imagine for a moment if most Anglo-Canadians were still diehard royalists who held a grudge against the US for expelling their ancestors during the Revolution and for being traitors who deny their true English identity, and would seize on any opportunity to punish them and force them back into the imperial fold. Sure, there might be offshore oil wells, cod fisheries, or Great Lakes ports of strategic importance involved in any dispute, but that's not really what it would be about.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
There is certainly espionage happening that needs to be dealt with, but the wording of the announcement would seem to indicate that implementation of this policy will, like most things to come out of this administration, be indiscriminate, haphazard, amateurish, and probably lead to a worse outcome than if nothing had been done at all. If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds. However smart you think white kids from the midwest are, they aren't going to become ubermenschen who are worth 4 Chinese apiece just because we banned affirmative action and are kicking out all the international students.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.
Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think liberalism is in for another rough century, but assuming it isn't rendered obsolete by AI-backed surveillance states of some sort, I think the same lessons that Europeans learned by 1648 will be re-learned by an even larger fraction of the human race this time around (tree of liberty, blood of tyrants, you know how it goes). It may take a couple more swings of the pendulum back and forth between right-wing and left-wing illiberalism and who knows how many deaths along the way, but people will eventually realize that trying to crush their ideological enemies underfoot has a tendency to backfire and that the revolution always eats her children. This is little consolation to those of us who have to live through it, but so it goes.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Today's version of "learn to code" is "learn a trade." There is a dearth of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders, etc. right now and there are well-paying jobs available for those who choose to enter those fields. The other part of the answer is just that the last generation of coders came of age during a gold rush and now those mines have run dry. Not everyone is born in time to be a 49er.
All the same, the US is probably still the best place in the world to start a business doing whatever you can imagine. Want to breed exotic fruit trees in Florida and sell subscription boxes to rich patrons with adventurous palates? Want to figure out the secret recipe for Roman concrete and start a construction company building docks that don't degrade in seawater? Want to build a fleet of nuclear-powered asteroid mining robots and take control of a functionally infinite supply of rare elements? Want to join the Vesuvius challenge with your superior ancient scroll-deciphering algorithm, become the greatest classicist who ever lived, and then go on tour with your AI buddy Plato reciting all the lost works you discovered to a captive audience? In the rest of the world they ask why, but in America we ask why not?
Think what you will about the migrant caravans knocking at our southern border, but the fact that so many people choose to make that perilous journey, not only from utterly destitute countries, but from China, with its gleaming cyberpunk "cities of the future" and zero crime or homelessness and growing power and influence throughout the world, tells you what the American Dream still means to people.
I don't have any specific advice about long-term prospects. I'm preparing myself mentally for the singularity, societal collapse, and everything in between, and just count myself lucky that I'm around to watch the fulcrum around which the rest of human history will turn. We're all stuck on this crazy ride together and might as well enjoy it.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Harvard at least seems to think that the Supreme Court decision changed things. Looking at the admissions data for some other schools, it seems that the results are all over the place, most likely because each tried to achieve their desired racial mix via novel methods and haven't worked out all the kinks yet.
In any case, I thought the whole point of getting rid of affirmative action was so that we would stop caring about things like "[race] makes up [percentage] of the population and so deserves [percentage] of the seats." If you just wanted the racial spoils system inverted in favor of white people, then a lawsuit on behalf of Asians whose goal was admissions purely by test score was probably never going to achieve your goals.
Really we'd all be better off if there were a clearer distinction between admissions at technical schools like MIT and Caltech, which would do fine on a purely meritocratic exam system, and places like Harvard and Yale, which if they had any balls would say "We are private institutions and will admit whomever we damn well please, because our job is to groom the future rulers of this country, not churn out a bunch of programmers and engineers who will never hold the reigns of power." I thought perhaps the disruption of the pandemic would allow for reforms of that magnitude, but sadly the higher education system seems content to stumble along with kludges and half-measures until its bubble inevitably bursts.
ResoluteRaven
7mo ago
Anti-Indian sentiment within the Anglosphere seems mostly confined to Canada and the UK, increasing in the former noticeably in the last few years because of the enormous ongoing immigration wave and diplomatic disputes over the relict Khalistan movement-in-exile. Indian-Americans are a cut above most other immigrant groups as far as education, income, and general "merit" go, even compared to Indians in other countries, so they don't tend to draw a lot of flak. Perhaps if India achieves a similar global status as China, Indians here will go from being ignored all the time to occasionally being harassed due to geopolitical events before being ignored again.
Is the whole race and dating thing really that fucked?
In the last few years the gender imbalances in interracial relationships seem to have evened out a bit in the US, at least with respect to Asians. I assume the increased prominence of Korean music and pop culture around the world had something to do with this. It will probably take popular perceptions a while to catch up and the stereotypes that were validated by the old OkCupid data are still alive and well, usually played for laughs but sometimes tinged with real resentment, particularly from the groups at the bottom of the totem pole i.e. Asian men and Black women.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
In my experience, there are a substantial number of ideologically captured researchers working in hard science fields where it doesn't affect their output very much, but who would consider moving to Europe if they felt the government was sufficiently hostile to their politics. Losing these people would result in serious brain drain, even if it would probably make the social sciences more productive.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Why is this judge's decision not simply part of the process by which "the country" decides who to let in and who to expel? Are the president's desires the sole legitimate expression of the national will? We have a government of laws, not of men, or at least that's how it was intended.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I think Ukraine can win the same way Finland "won" the Winter War i.e. inflict disproportionate casualties against a numerically superior opponent for years on end, and after being beaten into exhaustion sign a peace treaty in which they give up 10% of their territory and accept forced neutrality. On paper this is a loss, but it kept them out of the communist bloc and they ended up a western-aligned NATO member without suffering economically or politically the way Poland or Czechoslovakia did in the interim.
At the end of the day, it's the Ukrainians at the front making the decision to fight or not, and as long as they're shooting at our geopolitical rivals I have no problem with arming them. So far, their revealed preference is to hold the line, and the moment that changes it will be clearly evident in the form of mass protests, mutinies, or defections, and their government will have no choice but to sue for peace. It's not my place to tell them how many of their lives are or aren't worth sacrificing for their cause, whatever they think that cause is.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
Let's say that if we import 200 million Indians, our economy would be the best in the world forever. If we do this, do Americans “win”? Well, not biologically. We would have won a socially constructed number-based game that has zero impact on our biological success.
This would only be true if Indian immigrants and their descendants never married into the existing American population and remained a culturally and genetically distinct population indefinitely, which is clearly not the case. The children of elite Indian immigrants marry their White, Jewish, and East Asian peers all the time and have children who are about as Indian as Japanese curry powder. There are other countries where this is not so e.g. the UK where British-born Indian Muslims and Pakistanis seem to often get arranged marriages with peasant girls from back home, leaving their children in a perpetually unassimilated state, but even the few arranged marriages I know of in the US occur between two second generation immigrants who themselves are detached from the social networks that would allow them to continue the practice.
Is a person who has mixed-race children less biologically successful than one who has an equal number of children of the same race? From the perspective of a single gene perhaps, but from that point of view the optimal outcome would be to field an army of clones rather than engaging in sexual reproduction at all. I'm reminded of Roman naming conventions here, to wit: "The ideal Roman family was, in effect, one Appius Claudius after the next, each one quite a lot like his father, on and on forever." With all due respect to the Romans, who I, like any man, remember fondly at least once per day, the mere thought of such stultifying monotony makes me want to fedpost.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
As far as I know, the schools most dependent on tuition from Chinese international students to stay afloat are mid-tier public universities in flyover states, not the most highly ranked, and by extension the most woke, private schools. I suppose Iowa State may still be too progressive for Vance or whoever is the brains of this operation, but I think a better strategy would have been to kneecap the top colleges and then raise up some midwest state schools in their place.
ResoluteRaven
8mo ago
For a moment I thought Poland was being flooded by Belarusian citizens fleeing Lukashenko's government and was wondering why they were complaining about what was clearly some divine plan to make Poland great again by heaping ruin on its neighbors one by one and rejuvenating the Polish population with millions of their Slavic brethren, but I see now that these are in fact the usual migrants.
The way I see it, we can group people who want to move to a new country into three main categories: highly-skilled individuals that basically everyone agrees should be let in, people fleeing active warzones that a majority (albeit a smaller one) agrees should be let in for humanitarian reasons, and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better (you probably want a few of these people around to do certain low-skill jobs). The latter group is by far the largest and is what causes the most problems, since if allowed to move freely with open borders they will demographically swamp your population in a way the first two groups will not.
Since any reasonable immigration policy would be able to distinguish between "real" and "fake" refugees, I support maintaining a list of "ongoing conflicts from which people fleeing may claim asylum" (most likely at the national level, allowing for variation depending on financial ability and local tolerances) and deporting anyone who can't prove they are from one of those places, ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them and who would be justifiably mad at e.g. some Nigerian trying to pass themselves off as a Syrian. Perhaps some version of this has been tried locally in the past, but clearly not at a scale commensurate with the challenges we face nowadays.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
And to be extra fair, it's not like Obama ever had a real choice about publicly identifying himself as black. Realistically, given how American society views race, he never would have been able to pass himself off as a white man. 99% of Americans look at him and immediately think "that's a black guy", they don't think "that's a half white, half black guy".
My vague recollection and also this bit by Trevor Noah is that Obama was referred to more often as mixed-race early in his campaign before he was properly accepted by the wider black community. It was certainly also a conscious decision on his part to lean into it, but not one he made as early as say Kamala Harris, who chose to attend an HBCU (the story told among Asian-Americans being that she was too dumb to get into a better school and realized that she could only achieve success by black standards and not Asian ones).
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more.
The result of the Winter War was that Finland did not become a Soviet puppet state and suffer under communism for half a century. I consider that a victory and worth the blood that was shed, and I am guessing most Finns would as well, even if from a tactical point of view it was a guaranteed defeat.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.
As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
We've had multiple scientific revolutions, yes, most didn't have anything to do with the Enlightenment or its ideas though.
Which ones would those be? Isn't the entire concept of a scientific revolution the product of Enlightenment thinking? You could claim that the Enlightenment resulted in a mutilation of man's soul, a great disenchantment that replaced his heart with metal and wheels, but our understanding and mastery of the material world is the one fundamental, undeniable truth about our civilization. To claim that any other society in the 300 millennia that modern humans have walked the Earth has even come close is to claim that Venus is brighter than the Sun. Prometheus may be punished for his hubris, but the fire is real.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Even if the downward spiral from Democracy to Caesarism is unstoppable, if you act too soon or too rashly (e.g. if Caesar took the crown from Antony and declared himself Rex, the Gracchi brothers holding on to the tribunate at all costs, etc.) you run the risk of the masses and the old elite uniting to tear you down. As such, if you want to seize power you must still occasionally demonstrate obsequious adherence to the rules while working to keep the bulk of the population on your side as you slowly push the Overton window in your preferred direction (for the record, I think Caesarism is bad and this would not be a good outcome).
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
The New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted for 500 years, is often considered a golden age. China has also experienced multiple 100-200 year long periods of relative material prosperity and cultural productivity during the Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The Gupta Empire, called the golden age of India, lasted over 300 years, and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan lasted 268 years.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory.
I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Why not just offer citizenship to illegal migrants who volunteer to fight in Ukraine? The US already more or less does this with our military and the French have their foreign legion. It will get a decent number of problematic young men out of your country for the time being and most of them will probably be killed. As long as your army still has a high enough fraction of natives the survivors will forge bonds of fellowship with their new countrymen that will prevent fragmentation of the state after the war. This strategy worked for the Romans and Chinese for centuries, only failing for the former after a period longer than our present political system has existed.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The Romans and the Ottomans certainly were. Hell, Egypt was run by Circassians for centuries and the elite of Tsarist Russia was disproportionately Volga German. An empire by definition consists of multiple peoples without a common ethnic heritage, so all this nationalist talk of "foreign brains" would be alien to them.
The absolute last thing anyone here needs is more blackpills about dating. Yes, the apps suck. Yes, there are people who will always be more attractive than you due to the vagaries of genetics and society. Yes, birth and marriage rates are going down the drain. No one can deny these things; we live them every day and they have been discussed to death here and elsewhere. If you have some new data apart from Tinder screenshots, that would be interesting. If you insist that we must all accept our place at the bottom of the totem pole in our new de facto polygamous society, that could be an interesting line of inquiry too. After all, we have plenty of historical examples for comparison, as well as other analogous traits (e.g. will people respond any differently to being told they belong to a group with below average IQ vs. a group with below average reproductive success?). Just give us something to work with besides "we're cooked, gooners."
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