Tintin
1d ago
Maybe when you don't have many muslims in your country. They move into pole position quickly. Bondi beach, definitely muslims; Brown U, main suspect is muslim. If you get a deadly antisemitic attack in western europe, it's a 90% chance it was muslims. I was just checking incidents to confirm this; and apparently just 2 months ago a syrian -british citizen killed 2 jews in manchester; I didn't even hear about that.
Tintin
1d ago
Ah yes, the classic cafeteria tray argument that if they refuse to do the evil thing, the next guy would do it (or girl in this instance). I gotta say, I've always been schocked by the near-complete refusal of people here or in /r/slatestarcodex to sacrifice a single dollar for morality ( 'cultural reasons', lmao) . Maybe they deserved to crawl for their DEI masters. Yes, I expect them to turn it down.
Tintin
1d ago
Our conception of deep evil was some grainy photo of 'no blacks or irish need apply' while our job portals said 'no white men need apply'. People will soon forget, like they always do. "It was just a few seminars, and I was largely against it". If they let you have a job at all, they demanded these professions of faith where you had to confess to being a worm. No humiliation was seemingly enough. I'll remember how brazen they were.
I hold women responsible for this. Even those who did not actively support it. It's not morally neutral to accept a promotion someone else was blatantly, unfairly shut out of. Part of my disagreement with the far right on female promiscuity, aside that I fundamentally don't care about it, is that it enshrines a woman's sex life as the only expression of her morality. The far right/trad right is completely helpless because women have all this power now, and rightists have no way to acknowledge it and hold them accountable. "they're ..they're.. sluts.. and the perverted men make them do things.. they're having sex and..." I'm sure that's it, buddy.
Tintin
2d ago
I much prefer an ukrainian victory. The most likely scenario for that is simply that putin dies. I don't think his replacement will make anything resembling putin's demands for a ceasefire. I think his demands are literally insane and this isn't discussed enough.
Forget the ukrainians, the europeans, the americans, morality, who did the thing first, the day-to-day osint chatter, saint Olga, and everything else. Bird's eye view, long term. It's been years. Hundreds of thousands dead, economy cut off and re-tooled. Every month thousands more dead. The russians are fighting a war on the scale of world war I for ... some benefit most Russians, I'm sure, couldn't articulate.
You really have to discard the value of russian lives to almost nothing, and think you're in an existential war with the west, to continue this.
Tintin
14d ago
He sounded like he was referring to a real, specific incident ("some German politician telling Trump that": "Germans were the first victims of national socialism"), not some vague disculpatory vibes ("it wasn't really us") in another country. This strongly reinforces my priors of polish hallucinations.
I do think these old legal cases about reparations, still hanging around, are poisoning the discourse. It's like listening to lawyers arguing about a plane crash. Neither side has a primary interest in the truth. The cases should be either chucked or settled for all time, now. Flip a coin if you have to, I don't care, but get it over with.
Tintin
20d ago
Well, yeah of course morality aside. I actually think people were too easy on the germans of the time, my grandparents. We let them get away with their lies; that they didn’t believe, or profit, that they didn’t know, that they were threatened, that the war just happened to them, and that it was hard.
One reason they wanted lebensraum was to prepare for an autarkic economy because they knew their activities were going to lock them out of international markets
I think that’s more true of japan; they thought that without the resources of an empire, they could never fight and win a long war, therefore they could not threaten one, therefore they’d be relegated to the third rank of powers.
Hitler had a more dramatic, crazier theory: as more nations became industrialized and more populous, they would find it increasingly difficult to exchange their competing industrial goods for the limited food surplus from more agrarian countries, who themselves were industrializing and therefore there was less and less food surplus to trade. So he needed lebensraum to avoid the inevitable Malthusian starvation of his people. Not such a bad guy after all. Well, other people would still all starve. Anyway, it’s not that he loved autarky, it's that he thought all international trade would soon break down naturally. And then he planned to ‘keep a balance’ between the lebensraum-agrarian part (farms in the east)and the industrialized part(german factories) of his empire so that there would be no reduction of the agrarian food surplus and no starvation.
Tintin
20d ago
If you look at Nazi society it didn’t work very well for the people who were in it.
What do you mean? Morality aside, it appeared to be working great. As you say, Hitler was remarkably popular, even after the extremely costly war was lost, and all the evil was revealed to those who pretended not to see.
First, like FDR, he presided over the recovery for the worst economic crisis of the century, which by itself confers Saviour status, even though it’s likely just mean reversion. In foreign policy, he was a gambler who repeatedly won big. At first the western allies kept flinching, giving him everything for nothing, and then when push came to shove he even easily beat what was in theory the best army in the world, partly because of his own tactical input.
In domestic policy, he understood himself as both of and as a ‘friend of the people’ – as a lower middle class guy, a corporal, he disliked both the liberal elites which ran weimar and the old conservatives elites, the ‘vons’. Aside from the economic recovery/rearmament boom, he was also transferring to poor germans the wealth stolen from jews, and later, other people’s jews’, and other people’s. Because of all his achievements and popularity (which he and his regime cared very much about), for the first years there was little repression.
I would say he bribed the germans far more than he threatened them, but bribe implies that they didn’t intrinsically want to follow him in the first place. The truth is, as vile as he was, he genuinely cared about and improved the life of the common man (in peacetime at least, and with increasingly evil means), and they always loved him back.
Tintin
21d ago
It’s clear they did not expect them to fight back much. It would be the same mistake to assume that of UK-FR-DE in case of russian invasion of estonia, say. The 20th century has shown that seemingly placid people can get quite excited about war, quickly. Okay, maybe the italians wouldn't fight. Then again, that may be for the best.
Tintin
21d ago
Still buys into a hyper-agentic view of lecherous men and women as true sexual objects without desire or agency. If some top men plotted to give sexually inert women sexual freedom to satisfy their perverted male urges, it stands to reason that they also gave them the vote earlier, the right to vote and work, anti-harassment laws etc. If vague dissatisfaction with the current situation is evidence of failure, those things and more were all poison pills.
Tintin
22d ago
Should we increase aid to Ukraine? I think so, but I'm not in charge. So based on current realities, I can… still not do anything. Again, what are you suggesting I do, concretely? That I ‘advise’ ukraine? Fine, I will tell them that based on the august opinion of russian and american commenters, a total collapse of their frontline would be bad for them.
And having been so informed, what am I supposed to do if they prefer continuing the war to accepting russia’s terms? Force them against their will, ‘for their own good’, to accept the terms? Withdraw support, threaten war maybe? How much am I supposed to sacrifice to harm my own ally so that my enemy can get good terms?
we'll try and get Russia to accept the smallest amount of concessions possible.
I'm all for that. But this is achieved by increasing pressure on Russia, not Ukraine. For example, we could be far more open to threatening putin with war, like sending 'peacekeepers' to lviv, for 'security purposes'.
But I appreciate the chutzpah of a russian trying to reframe europe’s unconditional support for ukraine as somehow morally responsible for ukrainian deaths at the hand of russia.
Maybe after we threaten to withdraw support and zelensky tells us to go fuck ourselves, putin will decide he wants all of ukraine anyway, which is far easier now that ukraine has less equipment. I don’t believe putin wants peace. I don’t even believe he wants peace on the terms he just proposed. It’s all a charade for trump’s benefit, putin and zelensky playing hot potato.
Tintin
22d ago
I assume the Ukrainians know more about how much more they can take than us comfortable westerners.
This is what the EU should say, according to you: "Okay, Ukraine, thanks for all your sacrifices defending our sphere from an aggressive rival power, heroic stuff, but based on our 2000 km away expert analysis, you're going to lose everything momentarily, and this hypothetical outcome would be embarrassing for us. So to give you the proper motivation, we're going to cut off aid until you sign a terrible deal where you keep some rump state."
Does that make sense? Or does this EU sound like it’s being fed lines by russia?
All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please.
But why?
Because the better the deal ukraine gets, and the least russia gets, the better it is for us. While we do care about the well-being of ukraine, we also care about damaging russia, because russia is an enemy and a threat. If ukraine wants to keep on fighting, and russia takes some more losses, that is fine with us. We're certainly not going to pressure our vassal to sign a deal favourable to our enemy; that's not how any of this works.
Everybody kinda conspires to ignore the agency of the ukrainians; trump and the americans always have main character syndrome, while putin’s entire ideology, and his main reason for the war, dogmatically depends on ukraine’s lack of agency. So Putin keeps trying to talk to trump, who doesn’t care besides the vanity boost of ‘ending another war’ and certainly doesn’t control zelensky, or the europeans, who have no concession to give to him because they are not hurting, and also don’t control zelensky.
Tintin
23d ago
Why is it delusional? What I mean is, what has the state of the war to do with Europe's willingness to concede anything? Say countless Ukrainians are dead, and the Ukrainians are nearing collapse. Not Europe's problem. I wouldn't even give russia a guarantee that Ukraine not join nato. All the pressure is on ukraine, and russia. Europe will just go along with ukraine’s decision. All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please. I have no idea why everyone acts like europe is the one who gets to decide to keep fighting.
Tintin
25d ago
(see e.g. some German politician telling Trump that "Germans were the first victims of national socialism")
Who said this?
in WWII animated flashback scenes demonic Poles with glowing red eyes hunt down the hiding Jews
I don’t know what your media produces, but no one here thinks the poles committed the holocaust, and even you merely accuse the germans of minimizing the poles as victims in favour of the jews, not make them the perpetrators. This controversy and the related one about the ‘polish camps’ sounds like the poles are hallucinating an offense to get angry about.
Helmut Kohl's government was opposing Polish access to NATO, for reasons that largely echo current Ukraine's - that it would be "taunting" Russia. Plus ca change.
Are you implying that this unremarkable position is equivalent to the molotov-ribbentrop pact? Or that germany failed ukraine somehow? Since 1990 the germans have been nothing but friends, allies and financial supporters of the poles.
Tintin
27d ago
if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
It used to be 75 husbands to 100 wives murdered by their spouse, way more balanced. But now women can just divorce to get their husband's estate, while upwardly mobile husbands have only the kinetic option.
Tintin
28d ago
I mean it’s not a mystery, they’re explicitly discriminating against men. There are new EU and german laws mandating between 30 and 40 % of the board of publicly listed companies be women. Note that the employees of large automakers like daimler are 87% male.
Tintin
28d ago
I think the scandis are far worse actually, the anti-rape and anti-harassment laws are “world-beating”. Norway pioneered the 40% female board quotas we are now implementing. They have a law on the books that enlarges the scope of sexual harassment to “statements that have the effect of being offensive, frightening, hostile or degrading “. You don’t even need to go to the office, you can sexually harass a woman by contradicting a random woman on the street if she deems it so.
Tintin
28d ago
Last Sunday, I had dinner with my extended family in Germany. They’re what they call ‘Bildungsburgertum’, best class and best-in-class, educated middle class of doctors, teachers, and executives. They accordingly vote either green or social democrat, and gasp if someone dares defend the Afd or Trump.
Cousin‘s girlfriend says she’s in the running for a promotion at the bank she works for because the banking regulatory agency “suggested” they need more ”diversity“ at the top level. She might lose the job to a less competent woman because her rival is also the “director for sustainability” and the title sounds good to the powers that be. I ask her what the hell a bank has to do with sustainability . “Exactly. She just gives a silly PowerPoint presentation once a year and uses that “fulfilled mission” as an excuse to be incompetent on everything else”. Her male boss/colleague/friend did not appreciate being summarily passed over and has tended his resignation.
After the ladies retire to the boudoir, a different cousin’s husband, who works in IT at a large company, picking up on my skepticism, sits next to me and whispers : “It’s pointless if you’re male.” He tells me he just refused a promotion because he doesn’t want to deal with the headache of having women under him, and the constant humiliation of forced diversity. One of his colleague’s career was apparently ruined after a sexism accusation, although he didn’t give details.
He recently had a woman in a junior post who could not do a simple task and would cry sexism(“I feel like you’re always contradicting me and not the others”) if corrected in public or reminded of her duties. He just did her job for her and never corrected her again.
Final words: “I’m not a masculinist or feminist, I hate all those things. I just wanted to do my job. Now I do the bare minimum, I don’t care anymore, I’m a loser” (I had brought up Rao’s archetypes of Psychopaths, Clueless, and Losers earlier).
There was some controversy recently over Helen Andrews’ essay on the feminization of the workplace. I consider all internet discourse a priori overdramatic and disconnected from real people who just touch grass at a barbecue in ignorant bliss. But this couple of anecdotes suggests real life (in Germany, at least) is actually worse than the widely-decried-as-misogynistic Andrews take: open widespread discrimination against men (obviously), ubiquitous fear of one-sided legal and professional penalties, declining competence at all levels.
Tintin
29d ago
If upvotes mean ‘more of this’ and (like most commenters) fuckduck was largely upvoted, shouldn’t there be a presumption of adding value to the forum, that cannot be annulled by you simply finding me annoying?
I admit, I’m not a high-effort, longform poster. More of a mid-effort reply guy. I get bored on the fourth paragraph describing an idea. I don’t have the impeccable prose of a rafa. But we can’t all be rock stars. I’m not a rock, I identify more as the glue, or cement, in a forum like this. I argue with everyone. Someone has to purge by fire all the crank theories and showerthoughts that make up the AAQC. This can come off as hostile ‘call-outs’, ‘shit-stirring’ and ‘condescension’, but I’d say it’s valuable – and I never tried to get anyone I argued with banned, hostile or not.
Mostly, I blame my vulgar name for how things turned out. I never had much problems with other alts before or since. Much like trannyporno, I fell victim to nominative determinism. Milgram’s experiment of sorts: first named as a villain, then treated as one, sooner or later I ended up as one.
Anyway, since I often defended trannyporno, darwin, hlynka, burdensomecount and almost everyone else who was slowly banned or chased away by heavy-handed moderation, I thought I might as well put in a kind word for myself. @The_Nybbler , @Primaprimaprima , thanks for the appeal.
You're all making it too complicated. Do you agree that the status of young women relative to young men is higher than it ever was? How's the fertility? I'm not saying correlation is causation, but it's certainly worth a shot.
Men's 'domesticity' (ie, money they give women, some help) is not actually necessary for reproduction in our age of abundance. Not that it matters, because
What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically. So the whole TFR debate is just a woman-convincing enterprise. And I think it would help fertility to convince them they are not God's gift to humanity, and no, the teacher's praise, and the AA spots they snag are not actual proof they are as wonderful as they think they are. It seems obvious to me. What's the alternative? I don't know how much more praise we can heap onto women, and contempt onto men. Have you looked at Hollywood lately? But does anyone believe that more of this effusive praise will make them reproduce?
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