ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
I'm not here to change people's minds. I'm here because this is the online equivalent of an Enlightenment-era coffee shop with a rotating cast of brilliant and eccentric characters with whom to play word games and perhaps learn a thing or two about the world. Like its 18th-century antecedants, it may spit out some future revolutionaries, philosophers, or reformers who will go on to change the world, but that will happen out in the real world, not in this training ground.
Here, the bold may sharpen their rhetorical knives in combat against ideological demons modern and ancient that have been banished from polite society; some of us are just around for the thrill of the fight and don't have any grand vision for remaking the world, while others may discover that they had no stomach for it to begin with.
As to what may happen down the line, I suppose I'm just a high enough decoupler that the fact that in some future conflict I may need to take up arms against the majority of my fellow posters here doesn't bother me too much. If that ends up being the case, then it was fun while it lasted and I wish you all good fortune in the civil wars to come.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I think it was unrealistic to expect the bond forged between Americans and Western Europeans in the trenches between 1917 and 1945 and then reinforced by another half-century of preparing for WWIII together to endure forever, especially once those events fell out of living memory. Tanner Greer has begun a series of posts on this topic, in which he quotes a prescient speech by Robert Gates from 2011 and points out that for the first time nearly everyone holding the levers of American foreign policy is either too young to remember the Cold War as a formative political experience or was uninvolved in the institutions through which aspiring political and military leaders at the time forged personal and emotional connections with their European counterparts, ending with this exhortation:
It is no longer sufficient to argue that NATO, or a free Taiwan, or any of ten thousand other things, are good because they buttress American hegemony. That presupposes American hegemony is a thing worth preserving in the first place—a presupposition not shared by all in power. Our arguments must strike deeper.
These are days of dread possibility. Victory will not be had without contesting fundamentals.
To focus on just the Ukraine angle, today's Russia is not the Soviet Union. To the extent that it threatens anyone, it threatens the nations on its European periphery and not the United States. This change means that Europeans cannot realistically expect the same level of support they were receiving when the enemy was mightier and the danger greater. On paper, the economic disparity between European NATO and Russia indicates that they should be able to crush Moscow with one hand tied behind their backs even without American aid. Most of us know intuitively that it wouldn't be that easy, and explanations tend to converge on the idea that Europeans have become complacent and entitled, taking the fact that they can cower behind America's shield for granted and indulging in luxury beliefs that having a military or borders or a distinct national identity is icky and reeks of fascism. If the rug gets pulled out from under them in the form of military assistance or security guarantees, they will have one last chance to get off their asses and reclaim their place(s) among the great powers of the world, and if they can no longer muster the ambition to do that then they can go play Museum Fremen in their cathedrals and wait for some new, more vital culture to replace them.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
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."
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
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
2mo ago
To quote John Adams, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." The point is eminently not for our children to go back to the manual labor or agricultural drudgery of our ancestors. Any immigrant will tell you that they are working hard to enable their descendants to be lazy.
Does the sequence proposed by Adams lead to a "weak men, hard times" cycle? Perhaps, but it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation.
The Russian elite were for centuries francophiles who disdained the slavic culture of their peasant countrymen. In fact the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language, so it was clearly non-obvious to them that they should do this.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
I don't think Gavin Newsom ever really had a shot at becoming president. It would take a political genius of the highest order to thread the needle of a road to Damascus style conversion on the issues of urban dysfunction and public order in California to neutralize that angle of attack, while preventing defections from his existing base of support, so unless he can somehow turn San Francisco into Singapore in the next 3 years all his opponents need to do is show live footage of open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in the streets to end his campaign before it begins.
As far as LA is concerned, the fires are only nibbling away at the edges of the city and not reducing downtown to ash, so not much rebuilding is even necessary. I think a large earthquake would provide more opportunities for that type of renewal, as it would damage or destroy buildings over a much larger area. Not that I hope such a thing happens, but it seems inevitable that one of the major west coast cities will be hit by one within the next decade or two.
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
Was human sacrifice widespread among American Indians? And did most of them really eat your internal organs after raping your children?
Large-scale human sacrifice requires a certain population density and organizational sophistication that with a few exceptions, such as the Mississippian culture centered at Cahokia, did not exist north of the Rio Grande. There were certainly individual sacrifices as part of religious rituals in many tribes similar to those in Celtic and Norse Pagan societies in pre-Christian Europe, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind when describing any of those cultures the way it is for Mesoamericans that lined up thousands of war captives to cut their hearts out and build racks of their skulls.
As far as treatment of captives goes, torture, rape, and being sold into slavery were par for the course in the pre-modern world, so in my book Enlightenment-era Europeans deserve recognition for being more civilized than their contemporaries, while everyone else gets a "that's just how things were back then" pass. There's also the fact that British colonists only started encroaching on Indian territory in force after an apocalyptic series of pandemics had swept through and caused many of them to regress to a more barbaric state than they were at prior to European contact. This is most clear where we can read the accounts of sixteenth century European explorers who describe seeing densely populated farming villages with impressive fortifications and richly adorned chieftains in the same locations that eighteenth century explorers observed only a few isolated savages in loincloths hunting deer in the woods. In that situation there are fewer guardrails against individual acts of sadism or depravity.
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
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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
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
The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.
Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.
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
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
5mo ago
But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you.
This doesn't seem true to me. Political speeches have been decreasing in sophistication for nearly a century at this point, at least in Democracies where you can have the votes of every thinking person but, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, "still need a majority." If the voters demand something contradictory like "we want to give billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine but not pay more in taxes or suffer any material consequences" then all the smartest politicians will spend their days coming up with ways to trick the populace into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, praying that they won't be the one left standing when the game of musical chairs ends.
As far as convincing the averge person in the west to support Ukraine, "Putin is like Hitler" will work a lot better than "the system of international norms that have prevented large-scale interstate conflict in Europe since 1945 are dependent on all nations renouncing territorial annexation as a means of resolving their disputes, and any violator of these norms must be swiftly and severely punished to prevent a return to the bloodshed that characterized the first half of the twentieth century", but the latter is there if you want it.
But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back.
There is no way he or anyone close to him genuinely believes this, but it would be stupid to undermine his bargaining position before ever setting foot in the negotiating room. Such concessions need to be made privately to avoid public humiliation (or potential defenestration).
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
I think it's worthwhile to be introspective about what you like and why, but trying to shame other people into being attracted to someone they're not, as some black and trans progressives do, is worse than useless.
ResoluteRaven
9mo ago
Answering the question as stated, though perhaps not as intended, the vast majority of the people in the world have seen substantial improvements in their material standard of living over the past two decades. In some places that might just mean going from being desperately poor, sick, and starving, to being desperately poor, malnourished, and overworked, but China went from being a source of cheap plastic knockoffs to a maker of electric cars and smartphones on par with anything Western companies can produce, there's now high-speed rail in Indonesia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan, and countries like Malaysia and Poland have more or less converged with the developed economies.
Limiting ourselves to the US, Gwern has a good writeup on the subject, though it's pre-pandemic and so misses things like anti-obesity drugs. Obviously nothing on the scale of first getting access to cars or the internet, but that's a pretty high bar to expect to clear every generation, and even then there's a decent chance AI has you covered in that department. In the end though, whether we're born into a time of progress or decline (or material progress coupled with moral decline, or any combination thereof) is never under our control to begin with, so it's just something we have to learn how to accept and live with, whichever way the dice roll.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
I think the amount of weapons, money, and intelligence that was being provided at the start of the year should have been maintained for the time being, but I also think we should have used the threat of cutting off this funding to encourage European nations to rearm and build out their own military capabilities. No no-fly zone, direct air support, or American boots on the ground under any circumstances short of a Russian attack on a NATO member. If the situation were particularly dire for Ukraine and they asked for further assistance, I would be fine with Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. sending "volunteers" to bolster their ranks, with the understanding that such soldiers would not be protected under NATO Article 5 and would be disavowed by their governments in the event of capture to maintain a fig leaf of plausible deniability, and that this was the last possible escalation on our end i.e. no NATO troops fighting under their own flags, including European NATO members.
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
To prevent further loss of Ukrainian territory so long as and only while the Ukrainian government and people are committed to continuing the fight. When they no longer are, a ceasefire will be signed and the front line will become a DMZ akin to Korea's, patrolled by peacekeepers from either some neutral third country or a mixture of troops from NATO and CIS member nations. I don't care about Ukraine's original borders or the destruction of the Russian state or military, only maintaining the norm that countries should not annex the territory of their neighbors.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
If Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine (with the exception of preventing the loss of Crimea, which I think is his red line), then I will admit that whatever level of western support led to that outcome was too high, as it led to an even worse violation of international norms than the one it was intended to punish. I will conclude the same thing if this war leads to the Russian government collapsing in such a way as to lose control of its nuclear arsenal or have its eastern territories annexed by China.
ResoluteRaven
5mo ago
There were certainly a few black slaves and freedmen in imperial Rome. Most were probably Nubian, as travel along the Nile is easier than across the Sahara. I would not take lack of genetic traces in modern populations as clear evidence of absence, as modern Italians bear essentially no imprint of the cosmopolitan population of the classical Mediterranean. Parts of Europe under Muslim rule such as Sicily and Iberia would have continued to host some number of sub-Saharan African slaves into the medieval period and I'm sure some made their way to Constantinople as well. I have also come across the claim that Lisbon was 10% black just a few decades after the Reconquista.
If we are limiting our scope to say northern European states under Catholic rule between 550 and 1400, then I think the presence of even a single black individual there would be highly unusual and noteworthy, but the argument that some part of Europe has been inhabited by a non-zero number of individuals we would call black at most points within the last two thousand years forms a motte from which the bailey of "here are some black vikings or knights in medieval England" can be defended. I won't pretend to know the motivation of everyone making these claims, but I imagine the most informed and introspective among them believe that they are presenting scenarios from within the realm of possibility that, while not the most likely, are the ones with the greatest expected social utility in the present day.
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
3mo ago
My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.
Discussions about homelessness always remind me of this Onion headline. If almost every country in the world, including your own several decades ago, doesn't have the problem you have, then maybe you should stop doing whatever it is you're doing.
Scott clearly gets it:
despite then insisting that all his readers learn the difference. And he even knows what solutions will work:
The issue here isn't that people are being hypocritical by mumbling platitudes about treating homeless people better, it's that liberals will smear any plan that doesn't center the welfare of "unhoused individuals" as cruel and draconian and thereby force others to use their framework as a prerequisite for engagement rather than telling the truth, namely "we don't give a damn what happens to those people; just get them off our streets." I don't even see how restoring the old system of mental institutions would be any less cruel than letting these people kill themselves slowly and publicly, though I suppose people might oppose it on libertarian grounds.
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