TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Other than the "strong NATO increases Russian paranoia of unrelated unconventional attack" bullet point that I mentioned above, I don't see how it appreciably increases the risk of an accidental conflict. NATO and the Warsaw pact were crammed right up next to each other for decades without major incidents along the European border. Russia specifically has bordered 5 NATO States for over a decade now, and it's even turned Kaliningrad into one of the most heavily weaponized regions in the world, like a dagger ready to stab at Warsaw which is <200 miles away or seal off the Baltics via the Suwalki Gap, but again there's been no major incidents.
Conventional militaries are still needed for offensive actions against non-nuclear powers that the US and Soviets both engaged in during the Cold War.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
And why think that the only thing Russian elites could possibly fear from NATO is a ground invasion or a nuclear strike?
I'm not saying this, as per my first post. I'm saying the arguments of "NATO is a threat" coming from Russia boil down to two flawed lines of thinking:
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That NATO is a threat from a conventional sense, in the form of a ground invasion or a nuclear attack. The problem with this line of thinking is Mutually Assured Destruction is still as relevant now as it was in the Cold War. Some pro-Russian sources/posters say the threat from NATO is indeed conventional, but they never have a good answer for the fact that MAD makes it irrelevant.
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That the West is a threat in unconventional ways, in form of fomenting pro-Democracy movements or general economic + cultural hegemony. The problem with this line of thinking is that NATO expansion is a non-sequitur. The fact that Finland and Sweden are joining NATO doesn't particularly make Russia more vulnerable to unconventional threats like these, other than serving as a vague barometer that the West is doing well.
Even allowing for a sizeable degree of irrationality (since rival elites indeed probably have an inflated sense of how dangerous their outgroup is), it's still very difficult to see how NATO gets through MAD or how it's directly relevant to unconventional threats.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
The thesis of the article is not that Russians merely said that, but that they believed it
That's a conclusion this article tries to offhandedly make, but most of the evidence presented is unrelated to that point. If the article wanted to conclude that Russians genuinely believed NATO was a threat specifically from the point of a ground invasion or a nuclear first strike, it needed to do a lot more work justifying why Russians thought NATO was willing to commit collective suicide by ignoring MAD when there were decades of Cold War precedent saying this wouldn't happen. Instead, the article tries to sneak that conclusion through the back door by handwaving away any irrationality with a whataboutism that the US was irrational for invading Iraq.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
The "delusion of grandeur" is in regards to many Russians wanting the days of being a great power back, when in reality the Russia of today is too dysfunctional, corrupt, and kleptocratic to keep up with the likes of the USA or China.
People in the West may very well have done similar things if roles were reversed. That doesn't necessarily make it just, correct, or rational though.
The broad thrust of this article is arguing against a strawman. Nobody really disagrees that Russians might have said NATO was a threat. Anyone in the West can point that out freely and openly without fear of reproach. The issue is that NATO wasn't actually a threat in any plausible scenario in the way that Russians were describing it. Russians (or Putin specifically) typically alluded to NATO aggression either from a ground invasion or a nuclear first-strike, both of which were never in the cards given it would start World War 3 and mean a huge portion of the Earth's population from both sides being wiped out in an instant. Some Russians may have drank the propaganda koolaid and genuinely believed the West was willing to eliminate Russia in a geopolitical equivalent of a murder-suicide, but they were mostly relegated to the fringes.
What Russians/Putin were actually worried about was one of three things:
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Western cultural and economic hegemony. NATO expansion doesn't really directly impact this, but NATO expansion serves as a barometer that the West is still triumphing over the former Soviet Union.
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The West fomenting pro-democracy movements in Russia, similar to the Color Revolutions. Much of Russian society and Putin in particular have a deep antipathy for democracy, seeing it as not only a personal threat but as an invasive, enemy ideology and incorrectly blaming it for the turmoil of the Yeltsin years. Again, this doesn't really have anything directly to do with NATO expansion, but the fact that NATO is expanding at all means the West is robust enough to possibly try something like a pro-democracy coup in the future.
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Loss of their sphere of influence. Many Russians still see their country as a Great Power, and the fact that NATO even has the possibility of being extended to Ukraine is deeply insulting.
So yes, many Russians say "NATO is a threat". But no, no reasonable Russian thinks NATO is a threat in a conventional sense since Russia still has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. Instead, saying "NATO is a threat" is used as a dogwhistle to stoke generalized anti-Western sentiment or to appeal to delusions of grandeur, i.e. that Russia should reassemble the borders of the Soviet Union.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
This will likely accelerate the Left's attempts to move to a more pro-censorship platform. They also might pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
He appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others. I would not call that a failure. Did other stuff too.
That was McConnell's victory, not Trump's. Trump wanted people who would be "loyal" to him (he was obsessed about "loyalty" for more than he was concerned with any coherent political philosophy), but his advisors pushed him to trust McConnell. Any Republican president with a heartbeat could have done the same thing.
He seems even more of an 'establishment guy' than Trump.
I wouldn't call Trump "establishment" in any sense, so I agree that Desantis is definitely more establishment than Trump. That said, Trump is a proven failure while Desantis at least has potential.
It's a squares and rectangles thing. Most EA proponents are likely Rationalists, but Rationalism is much larger than EA. Again, nothing in Rationalism particularly predisposes people towards altruism, it's just that if you're conspicuously charitable then EA gives you a framework for determining the effectiveness of your contributions.
Do you have a rundown on how he is? Maybe a link or something? Again I'm not familiar with this guy.
Was he justifying his actions in the name of Rationalism or something? People are acting like this is a huge deal that all Rationalists need to reflect on, but as far as I can tell this is just a guy who donated to EA who went down for fraud in his business. There's not much literature in the Rationalist movement that says it's a great idea to commit fraud, so I really don't see why people are doing large mental updates on this.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
This seems more like a "gotcha" then a genuine prompt to get people to reconsider the nature of truth. Without knowing how you're construing 2 + 2 != 4, I can fairly confidently guess it's one of the following:
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An arbitrary redefinition of "2" or "4", e.g. "2 AM" or something silly like that.
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Highly advanced mathematics, possibly something non-Euclidean.
If the person you're asking is polite, they'll likely go along with it, but their internal monologue is probably something less like "this makes me rethink everything!" and more like "ugh, this guy really want to show me how smart he thinks he is".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
This post is silly. Effective Altruism != Rationalism. Rationalism doesn't say people need to place a huge emphasis on charity or helping others. At most, there's a peripheral link since some big names like Scott are involved in both.
There's also no direct link to Rationalism since crypto isn't intrinsically pro-Rationalism either. Perhaps this SBF guy considers himself a Rationalist (I don't know, this FTX blowup is the first I'm really hearing of him), but even if that was the case it doesn't impugn Rationalism any more than WW2 impugned facial hair since Hitler and Stalin happened to both have moustaches.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Yeah, Trump seems like exactly the type of person to pull a Teddy Roosevelt if he loses the R nomination. The two most obvious outcomes at this point for Republicans are either 1) they nominate him and probably lose again in 2024, or 2) they don't nominate him and Trump does everything in his power to lash out at those who he thinks "betrayed" him, which could also plausibly cause a loss in 2024. A better outcome for Republicans would be if Trump just drops dead due to old age so the next generation could take over without Trump trying to burn the house down.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I assume you're referring to Trump? As president, I think it's pretty safe to say he was the most powerful person bar none while he was in office, no?
While a cold war had been brewing between Desantis and Trump for months, Trump just initiated open hostilities in a series of tweets on Truth Social:
Now that midterms are over, and a success… NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people…
…from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did! Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win. I didn’t know Adam so I said, “Let’s give it a shot, Ron.” When I Endorsed him,…
…it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s Endorsement. He said, “I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your Endorsement.” I then got Ron by the “Star” of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a “Crack Head”), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one…
…I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…
…And now, Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, “I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.” Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer… This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive. The Wall Street Journal loved…
…Low Energy Jeb Bush, and a succession of other people as they rapidly disappeared from sight, finally falling in line with me after I easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Trump clearly wants no primary challenges for the 2024 election, which is why he's gone out of his way to ensure some R hopefuls wouldn't start campaigns if he was in. Desantis, however, pointedly refused to rule out a 2024 campaign of his own, much to Trump's annoyance. As of the time of writing, Desantis currently has almost 2x the chance to become the next president on Election Betting Odds as Trump (29% vs 17.8%), and the midterm elections helped Desantis and hurt Trump. Anecdotally, I've seen a bit of movement towards Desantis on usual Trump strongholds like 4chan, with some saying Desantis is like Trump but "he actually does the stuff he says instead of just tweeting about it", although it's hard to get a representative sample on an anonymous image board for obvious reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
That was a typo on my part, the rest of my post stands.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
As an opening salvo of the presidential primaries of 2024, the midterms were a great night for Desantis and a pretty bad night for Trump. Dems had high hopes for Florida a few months ago, as it's ostensibly a purple state. Desantis made headlines for his Martha's Vineyard + Disney stuff and it was plausible that swing voters may have punished Republicans for this. In the end, though, Florida was a bloodbath for Democrats. Rubio and Desantis both won by double digits, and many democratic congressional districts were wiped out with recent redistricting changes.
Trump, on the other hand, has egg on his face. He helped clear the lane for weak senate candidates like Oz and Walker, and they underperformed similar races (e.g. governors) through split ticket voting. It's impossible to redo the election to see what it would have been like if Trump didn't back candidates, but it's not implausible that Trump's meddling cost Republicans control of the Senate chamber. It also probably shrunk McCarthy's house majority a bit, making it more unwieldy and difficult to restrain Biden.
As of the time of writing, Desantis currently has a 26.5% chance to be the next president on Election Betting Odds, while Trump has a 19.3% chance. It was even more stark early today when it was 30%+ vs 15%, and while I think this is very unrealistically lopsided in Desantis' favor, the recent movements have captured the sense that Trump fatigue is setting in not only for moderate swing voters, but for a broader swathe of Republicans as well. I personally think Trump still has a 66%+ chance of winning the Republican nomination if he seeks it in 2024, but it's looking increasingly likely that it won't be a simple coronation: he'll have to work for it through a potentially crowded field. If Desantis proves to be an actual threat, things could get really ugly really quickly. All major presidential candidates have a hardcore following of blindly loyal fanboys that will stick with them through basically anything, but through browsing places like 4chan and interacting with some Republicans in my circle of family and friends, it seems that Trump's version of this is quite large. Desantis won't just be seen as an enemy, but as a traitor, and many Trump loyalists will not look kindly on a man who hurt their king.
You can't just compare the % of votes and % of senators representatives and say any discrepancy is gerrymandering. Republicans are more efficiently spread to low population states which have more reps per person. The advantage isn't as significant as it is in the senate, but people in Wyoming need ~500k per representative, whereas California needs closer to 750k per rep.
Democrats did indeed benefit from congressional map changes, but the change was modest and mostly came at the expense of competitive districts instead of R leaning ones.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Most scam accounts aren't anywhere close to being massively profitable. Most eke out a living on the margins through casting very wide nets. Any of them that get too successful get beheaded before long. An $8 up front charge would be a fairly effective at preventing spammers from using the system. If too many get through, they could simply switch to demanding X amount of months of payment up front, further increasing the penalty for spammers that get caught.
On the overall topic, I'm glad Musk is bringing reform, as Twitter has a notoriously opaque and arbitrary policy for granting the coveted blue checkmarks. However, $8 is quite a bit for random Twitter users, and it could fracture the platform further between the obsessives who spend half their life on Twitter and those who just use it more casually. Reporters will also lose their privileged status, so expect plenty of news articles framing any changes in a maximally negative light.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Nice, I actually got notified that I'm on the list this time! IIRC I had one or more QCs back on Reddit, but Reddit just doesn't ping you if more than 3 usernames get mentioned.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
To people arriving late to this discussion, a couple of things might be helpful to know:
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When tailcalled is saying "heritability doesn't mean what a lot of HBDers want it to mean", his actual argument isn't presented in his post. You'd need to go track it down through the link he posted of his substack. It basically boils down to a longwinded form of "correlation doesn't necessary imply causation", i.e. if parents and children show significant correlation on a certain measure, that doesn't guarantee it has a genetic outcome. A good example someone posted downthread would be "knowledege of the French language", which is highly correlated between parents and their children, but which obviously isn't genetic.
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When tailcalled says "HBDers often signal-boost nonserious or dishonest studies", he's mainly referring to people doing this repeatedly on his Twitter posts". He's not really calling out anyone here, and importantly he's not necessarily saying this is an asymmetric problem with HBDers, just that some HBDers do it, which... well of course they do. There are knuckleheads on both sides.
So in the end, I think tailcalled is making points that are agreeable almost to the point of being anodyne, but he wrote them poorly enough that some people (including me, at least initially) are getting confused. On #1, we really shouldn't be forced to track down the basic gist of an argument on another website before the author starts claiming it's a big reason why the HBD-vs-Environment debate isn't advancing. On #2, I think a lot of people got the sense that tailcalled was an anti-HBD'er, but the opposite seems to be true actually. He seems to mostly just be patrolling the pro-HBD side for bad arguments as a way to advance discussion, not necessarily to dunk on the HBD side as entirely meritless.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I think he’s wrong to assume that Twitter is still going to utilize an advertising based model. Twitter’s power user base seems a lot closer to Substack than Instagram or Facebook, in that it is preferred by the intelligentsia.
I wouldn't have believed you a year ago, but keeping tabs on the Ukraine war has surprised me by how many analysts and OSInt people use Twitter as their primary method of communication. Long threads of a dozen+ tweets analyzing a particular topic are common. It's bizarre since Twitter is an unbelievably terrible website for this type of content, yet that's where it gets posted for some reason.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking
What do you mean by this? Do you have any examples?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I did, it just seems like you didn't like the answer.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
By "gets to", I mean that they do it without sufficient deterrence by other powers such that the original Schelling point is broken. If that happens then all non-nuclear countries will now have significantly more incentive to get their own nukes, as they'll know they can extract significant concessions from great powers since the US just proved it works, and as a result any nation that's threatened by a potential new nuclear power now knows they have to get nukes themselves to have any chance at defense.
I like the idea of crowdsourced moderation, although I'm a bit apprehensive since I haven't seen it used anywhere else before.
By the way, do we have anything that does automated moderation reports? I think a specific user used to do it back on Reddit now and then, but it would be good to have that automated.
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