ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
19hr ago
You can't be a Nazi and fight for a country run by a Jew.
This gets at an interesting difference between the western and Russian (or at least Putin's) definitions of Nazi. In the west, the defining feature of Nazis is their hatred of and desire to exterminate Jews, and any feelings they have about Russians are orthogonal to their Naziness, whereas in Russia the defining feature of Nazis is their hatred of and desire to displace and kill Slavs (and Russians in particular as the leading Slavic people), and it's their feelings about Jews that are orthogonal to their Naziness.
Now, I would say that the former definition is closer to historical reality than the latter, but this misunderstanding is why we in the west have been bemused by speeches about the "denazification" of a country with a Jewish president. Moreover, your typical Ukrainian Neo-Nazi probably ended up that way because he has heard all his life from the Russians that Nazis are people who hate Russians, and since he does in fact hate Russians he figures he might as well put on the uniform and become more intimidating to his enemies.
ResoluteRaven
19hr ago
If a country in Sub-Saharan Africa or any other region with reportedly lower intelligence ever catches up economically to the west without natural resource shortcuts such as oil or rare metals I would see that as proof either that we are not measuring intelligence correctly or that intelligence differences between populations are not relevant to things I actually care about.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
If the question is simply whether these factors exist and are harmful in certain contexts, then I don't think anyone can deny that. However, I think anyone claiming that they are responsible for an increase in depression or chronic health conditions over time is incorrect, as homes have gotten substantially cleaner and better ventilated over the past century in most countries and the general shittiness everyone seems to feel these days has alternative psychological and sociological explanations that others have outlined downthread.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
What would "postnational" mean without reference to some non-arbitrary, non-"I'm-not-touching-you" definition of Canadians? Who or what is sovereign on Trudeau's definition? Trudeau?
Presumably Canadian citizens, the rules for becoming one which are determined by the elected representatives of the current citizenry. Could such rules be considered arbitrary? Sure, but I think you need more than that to claim that they are illegitimate e.g. you can argue that the representatives were not enacting the will of the citizens, you can argue against democracy as a process for deciding questions of citizenship, etc. Also, if Canada had really ever been a single nation they would be speaking English in Quebec.
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship.
While they were in most respects stingy by modern standards, the fact that they had any form of naturalization at all was a radical break from all of their Mediterranean neighbors e.g. Athens where only people with two citizen parents were citizens themselves or Sparta with its permanent helot underclass, and this contributed to Roman military dominance as they were able to radically increase their available manpower over time. I also think the sort of mass granting of citizenship to allies as a reward for military service that Rome engaged in would be seen as radical even today, something akin to the US giving all inhabitants of Sonora citizenship in exchange for them suppressing the cartels (the closest modern equivalent might be the French Foreign Legion, which is relatively small).
Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans.
If we're going by the standard chronology, where the zenith of Roman power is the death of Trajan in 117 AD, then I don't see how this is true. 2 of the 5 Good Emperors were Iberians and no one seems to have cared, not to mention the long string of Illyrian emperors who ended the third century crises and founded one, if not the greatest of Roman cities i.e. Constantinople. On that note, the fact that a bunch of Greeks went around for a thousand years calling themselves Romans seems evidence enough of the assimilatory power of Roman institutions (interestingly enough these Romans functioned more and more like a nation as they lost territory and became weaker, but it certainly wasn't the same as the original nation).
ResoluteRaven
3d ago
A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory.
Strictly speaking, a post-national state need only lack a people defined by common birth or shared ancestry, and can have one defined in other ways. One can argue that nation-states are a superior form of social organization to those other ways, but they are neither untried nor historically novel (e.g. Rome, Islam).
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
France
Macron dissolved the national assembly and called a snap election after being clobbered by the National Front Rally in the EU parliament, which I didn't know until now was a thing he could do. Considering what's happening across the channel as well this is definitely shaping up to be a year of major political shakeups across Europe.
Gaza
Israel managed to rescue four hostages from Hamas. Thankfully they didn't shoot them by accident this time.
Iran
A list of candidates to replace the late President Raisi has been approved by Iranian religious authorities. None of them are familiar to me, but the claim is that they are sticking to religious conservatives as one might expect.
Burkina Faso
Russia's foreign minister Lavrov took a trip to Africa recently, pledging military support for anti-insurgency operations in several nations as part of the Wager Group's Russian Africa Corps' growing presence across the continent that is securing vital mineral and political (i.e. UN votes) resources and displacing western nations (France in particular) that used to fill this role.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
I know several people whose fathers were in their 50's and mothers were ~40 when they were born, some of them being the youngest sibling of a large number and others being the only child. The latter sort might be a bit more socially awkward than normal, but that seems to be more from similarity to their parents than anything else. I would say the main concern in such a situation is the child having to care for their elderly parents earlier than the norm, but apart from that there are no major issues.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
Your taste is not atypical for someone raised in or around immigrant enclaves where disdain for "white people food" is quite common, but less so for someone that grew up eating and therefore has at least some childhood nostalgia bound up with said food. All the same I think Western food is too broad of a category to dismiss, as even limiting ourselves to the US we have regional cuisines or styles of preparation (Cajun, Southern barbecue, Southwestern) that can put up a decent fight against what China or India has to offer.
As far as explanations for why people prefer the latter, one involves the industrialization of food production, which over time transforms meals from family gatherings where a peasant grandmother slaves for hours over a pot to squeeze every last drop of flavor out of rare and precious ingredients into mass-produced microwaveable slop that people eat by themselves solely for sustenance and not enjoyment (and this is not just in western countries; the food that the typical Japanese person eats every day is also to my eyes bland and unappetizing compared to the Korean or Chinese equivalent, since the latter two developed later), and the second is that you can usually get a better deal eating at a restaurant owned by a poor immigrant than one owned by a local i.e. why would I pay $20 for a craft burger and fries or a single appetizer at a good Italian place when I could get a giant bowl of pho for $12 (your local prices may vary proportionally) instead?
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
Even if we accept that these ideas were the product of 20th-century Jewish immigrants channeling their conscious or unconscious bias against white gentiles, I don't think it necessarily follows that knowing their motivations would be that much help in your fight against their ideology, any more than knowing the biographies of Marx and Engels would be particularly useful if one were engaged in a geopolitical rivalry with a communist state (rather than understanding Marxism as interpreted by living party members).
Here I'll borrow a metaphor from Scott to make this more interesting:
I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.
I'd wager that most of us here believe something along these lines, although we differ in the details of what exactly the alien is, the merits of being eaten by said alien, in which century it was summoned, who did the summoning, etc. In any case, you seem intent on crafting weapons to fight the long-dead summoner and his kin, rather than engaging the alien directly, and it seems like an ineffective strategy to me.
ResoluteRaven
8d ago
The taboo against using nuclear weapons is strong enough that I think their next use by a state might be a demonstration strike with plenty of advanced warning in an isolated area to intimidate an adversary into submission e.g. by Russia in Ukraine. Another possibility is as the last act of a collapsing regime or nation if e.g. South Korean troops close in on Pyongyang, Arab armies overrun Tel Aviv, or revolutionaries in Iran are breaking down the Ayatollah's doors, but I imagine that in most scenarios people are smart enough not to force the issue and to give the leadership a way out.
Now if we're limiting this to nukes fired in anger in an all-out war there could be a tit-for-tat scenario that goes like this: China hits an aircraft carrier with an anti-ship missile carrying a nuclear warhead, the President calls the Politburo and says "we are going to retaliate, either you offer up a comparable sacrificial lamb or you all die," China chickens out and allows a bunch of ships or a major military base to be nuked, a ceasefire is signed, and everyone sits down to contemplate their life choices.
Meanwhile, non-state actors are a wild card and in the long run I'm sure someone will get their hands on a bomb and use it, but I don't know if the odds of that occurring in this century are particularly high. Terrorists aiming for a high body count these days would probably go for biological weapons or diseases like smallpox if they could, given how much less conspicuous and more effective they are at actually killing people.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
It's no good saying 'oh preindustrial civilization is so great' even if it's true, Ted should've had the wisdom to understand that nobody is going to pull back.
I mean, I care about the truth even if the truth is that the type of society that most people would want to live in given the choice will inevitably be destroyed by another type of society that is more fit in an evolutionary sense. That would be sad, just like the fact of our mortality or the eventual heat death of the universe are sad, but we all come to understand and accept such things in our own time, and in general asking questions irrelevant to our immediate survival is pretty central to my conception of what separates humans from worms and jellyfish.
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
Certain Muslim societies seem to retain features of Arab pastoral culture that are either irrelevant to or harmful to their modern day prosperity e.g. cousin marriage in Pakistan.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
Are you claiming that the Soviets did not conduct forcible populations transfers or that there weren't any with the explicit goal of ethnically cleansing Ukrainians? The latter is debatable depending on how you read the intentions of officials charged with dekulakization, pacification of territory annexed from Poland, and the establishment of borders in Eastern Europe at the end of WWII i.e. were they deporting Ukrainians because they were Ukrainians or did the people who were expected to cause trouble just happen to be Ukrainian? Either way, the original question was more about logistics than motivation so I think it remains relevant.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
If the paradisal order was so great, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been getting stomped by farmers for the last 10,000 years.
At the time most of that stomping took place, your average farmer was stunted, malnourished, and sickly compared to his hunter-gatherer counterpart and beat them simply because they could sustain a much higher population of miserable peasants. Of course, if you are evaluating societies on a purely Darwinian basis of survival then whatever won out is superior, but that leaves out every moral and aesthetic consideration that informs most people's judgement of what makes life worth living.
As an example, if we extrapolate current trends in fertility, the median Motte user will be outbred and replaced by individuals with lower IQ and religious sects like the Amish and Hasidic Jews, whose descendants will most likely be either disinclined to or incapable of maintaining our current industrial civilization. Would that then make them better than us? (I know there's a half dozen ways to yes.chad this, but I'm just curious if you hold any of those positions)
ResoluteRaven
11d ago
I believe there's a decent amount of literature in the field of linguistics about sign languages and their relation to visuospatial intelligence and memory, but I don't know the details. I've tried my hand (pun intended) at learning ASL, but never got far enough to truly appreciate the differences between it and spoken languages.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
I mean, ensuring that their entire population has at the bare minimum a subsistence diet of rice porridge and millet is pretty much rule #1 of any Chinese government so there's no way they haven't planned extensively for this, especially considering that every Chinese person I know thinks about food about 5 times as often as your typical white American and has a pantry filled floor to ceiling with non-perishable goods and a freezer that rains down ziploc bags of frozen meat and seafood when you open it.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
What are his metaphysical/spiritual beliefs?
Most people don't really have these in any meaningful sense. Your average Christian, agnostic, or atheist differ only to the extent that they give different answers to questions about god if you ask them directly, but in practice they don't live their lives any differently. Suburban liberals typically have some faded recollection of their ancestral religion, whatever it may be, but are not particularly introspective or concerned with the deeper mysteries of the universe in general. To the extent that they aren't pure atheist materialists, that's because they lack the autistic disagreeableness that most of us here possess and are defaulting to basic human inclinations and behaviors.
What does he do for in person socializing?
He will have a small set of friends from work, old schoolmates, and family (more likely if coming from an immigrant background) within driving distance to share occasional backyard barbecues, movie/board game nights, gatherings at restaurants/bars, sports matches, concerts, etc. This set will often notably exclude his actual neighbors, whom he probably doesn't know very well. Most are lonely, even if they don't have the self-awareness to recognize it as such, and this contributes to declining fertility rates, as there is no social support network for new parents and they may essentially drop out of their friend groups and become social outcasts with only paid nannies and their own aging parents (if they are even in the vicinity) for help.
What’s his definition of Nazi? Surely he’s not literally worried about Adolf Hitler.
To him, Nazi is more or less a synonym for racist, and what counts as racist is dictated by the collective opinion of his peers, social media, and mainstream news sources. His actual knowledge of the relevant history will be quite limited, though if he sees a NYT article comparing some current event to Kristallnacht he knows that means it's very bad.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese
Polls say otherwise, and my own interactions are consistent with those numbers. Even many Taiwanese boomers who grew up under KMT martial law are, if not anti-unification in the abstract, becoming as rabidly anti-Xi as their grandchildren due to a combination of his own hawkish rhetoric, what they hear from mainlanders fleeing COVID lockdowns and the increasingly harsh censorship regime, and the collapse of the Chinese housing bubble. That's not to say that China couldn't crush popular dissent with overwhelming force as they did in Hong Kong, but most collaborators would have to be bought rather than joining willingly.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
I think the odds of another Taiwan Strait Crisis are reasonably high, but that China isn't ready to pull the trigger on the big one. In the past I suspected they might move on the outlying islands as a trial run for a blockade or invasion, but having seen what happened when Russia took Crimea without a fight but then waited 8 years to invade for real and gave time for Ukraine to prepare psychologically and materially for war, it seems like that might just light a fire under the bafflingly apathetic Taiwanese population and make their job much harder down the line.
The two key challenges the Chinese military faces in advance of any war are lack of experience and internal corruption. Xi appears to be trying to address the latter, but if he wants to give his army some practice he may intervene in the Burmese Civil War as a fairly low-risk enterprise (who's going to stop them, Thailand?) with a reasonable casus belli (instability and criminal activity on their borders threatening national security). If such an action or any other foreign deployment of Chinese troops were to occur I would start worrying more about future wars.
As to whether China would go for a blockade as opposed to an invasion of Taiwan, it's hard to tell without a better read on the psychology of Xi's inner circle. By blockading they would lose the element of surprise if a shooting war breaks out as a result of a ship being sunk or a plane shot down, including the chance to neutralize US naval and air assets in the Pacific with a first strike. If however they think they can psychologically dominate Taiwan so thoroughly that they would submit without a fight then this would seem to them a low-risk approach, as well as the fact that they can initiate it at any time as opposed to an amphibious crossing which can only happen a few months out of the year.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
I've had backyard eggs that tasted better than store bought eggs, but not so much that I would go out of my way to raise my own hens or pay a lot more for them. As others have mentioned, it depends a lot on what the chickens are eating.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
I don't expect every station to be a moneymaker, but I would rather population growth and infill occur naturally around existing stations, which at some point become profitable and can help support the next extension, as opposed to the sort of stasis that suburban voters and zoning regulations implicitly promote. The high levels of dysfunction we see around urban transit centers probably require population densities that wouldn't be reached for a long time, if ever, around new suburban stations, but the correlation between density and homelessness/crime is observed by all and hardens the resistance to any movement in that direction. I will admit that it's hard to tell how much of this is a result of national factors and how much is a result of voters with different policy preferences on policing self-segregating into different communities, and we will never know for sure without some kind of impossible social experiment involving large-scale population transfers.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
Ukraine
US officials are allowing Ukraine to use American weapons in limited (depending on your point of view) strikes on Russian soil, following the example of France. Macron is also reportedly considering sending military advisors (though I'd be surprised if they didn't have boots on the ground already), and his statements in recent months make it seem as though he is willing to condone quite extreme levels of escalation if the Ukrainian position continues to deteriorate, up to and including a repeat of Borodino on the Dnieper.
Mexico
I have just found out that Mexico is having a presidential election this weekend and that the candidate favored to win is a Jewish woman with an engineering PhD expected to continue the left-wing populist policies of the current president AMLO. As you can infer, I don't hear much about Mexico these days, so I assume they're mostly muddling along as they always have. In any case, it's always interesting to see the diversity of political candidates and leaders in Latin America, whether it's Arab strongmen who clean up the streets, a corrupt Japanese political dynasty, Chainsaw Man, or Croatian socialists.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
I watch/listen to most videos and podcasts in English at 2x speed, Spanish or Chinese media at 1.5x speed, and any other languages or things I need to pay particular attention to at 1x.
I wouldn't be surprised if the way people speak or express emotions on their face over a lifetime affects how they look, as well as things like diet and lifestyle, all of which will differ between countries. Rishi Sunak for example has a face that looks very British to me in a way I can't fully articulate, despite his ethnic background.
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