coffee_enjoyer
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had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later. From Wikipedia —
When the Mongols invaded the former lands of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century, Moscow was still a small town within the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal.[27] Although the Mongols burnt down Moscow in the winter of 1238 and pillaged it in 1293, the outpost's remote, forested location offered some security from Mongol attacks and occupation, while a number of rivers provided access to the Baltic and Black Seas and to the Caucasus region.[28] Muscovites, Suzdalians and other inhabitants were able to maintain their Slavic, pagan, and Orthodox traditions for the most part under the Tatar yoke
What happened to Kievan Russ is actually relevant to the topic. Kyiv decided to fight against the Mongols, which led to the total desolation of Kyiv and the destruction of the original Kievan Russ culture. Something similar happened to Baghdad. But the Slavs in Moscow decided to acquiesce to Mongol rule, which allowed for the salvation of Kievan Russ culture and the continuation of Russian Orthodoxy. So there are two important things to consider here: Moscow and Kievan Russ are historically the same culture / people, and history shows how delusional concepts of self-determination have destroyed Kyiv before — until, of course, Moscow liberated its former territories, because they chose to submit to the Mongol’s greater strength. (nota bene: being zero percent Slav, I don’t care about anything happening east of Poland, and having the Slavs destroy each other is as beneficial to the West as having the East Asians destroy each other or the Semites destroy each other. But I genuinely feel that there is something deeply wrong with the waste of life in the Russian-Ukraine war especially with Ukraine’s low TFR.)
coffee_enjoyer
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11mo ago
Are they going to try a George Floyd-like psyop to increase Democrat favorability like in 2020? They could do it from the perspective of Blacks, Indians, or Women. I can see something like a fraternity being falsely accused of raping an Indian woman, I can see Stop Asian Hate rearing its head again but the head being browner than before… I don’t know if bodycam footage of a black criminal will be as persuasive as it was in 2020. In New Jersey we had anonymous flyers show up that were anti-Indian but likely issued by Indians, maybe something like that will happen. So many different vantage points.
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6mo ago
A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values because these two qualities work in tandem with intelligence to produce meritorious results. I doubt Alex Berenson was the smartest person at Yale by testing, but his temperament enabled him to confront the establishment on COVID, making him more valuable than his peers. The reporter who pressed on the Epstein story, Julie Brown, is an old woman and attended Temple University, but for some reason was the only one of her journalistic peers to pursue something which many of them hid. Edward Snowden went to community college. Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered the grooming gang scandal, went to Durham University.
With every job there are moral decisions that require certain values and temperamental qualities. If these are lacking then there are huge civilizational costs. I don’t know if a Vivek Ramaswamy has these optimal qualities. I don’t know if Asian students are temperamentally or culturally disposed to risk their reputation to fight against a corrupt power structure or official. I would argue that their culture is too credential-oriented, results-oriented, and conformist for that. There should be more studies so that we are absolutely sure that “relatively new” immigrant groups have the inner qualities that are required for influential positions in society. Maybe the studies will show that Asian students are actually more likely to have these qualities, I have no idea, but I’m sure the SAT doesn’t measure them.
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8mo ago
Found more information. Posting it as a reply instead of editing the already-long OP. The NYT issued a reply to critics today:
Times Opinion rigorously edited this guest essay before publication, verifying the accounts and imagery through supporting photographic and video evidence and file metadata. We also vetted the doctors and nurses’ credentials, including that they had traveled to and worked in Gaza as claimed. When questions arose about the veracity of images included in the essay, we did additional work to review our previous findings. We presented the scans to a new round of multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility. In addition, we again examined the images’ digital metadata and compared the images to video footage of their corresponding CT scans as well as photographs of the wounds of the three young children.
While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication. We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.
This is related to some of the issues brought up ITT as well. Eg, regarding the quality and legitimacy of the photos (@netstack , @jeroboam , @The_Nybbler, @NelsonRushton).
Regarding the point by @sarker that the doctors were brought to Israel by PAMA, the author of the piece writes on Twitter that
I learned of the existence of PAMA when the Society for Critical Care Medicine sent out a call for volunteers to work with the World Health Organization in Gaza, which went through PAMA. I've literally never spoken to anyone at PAMA about the public advocacy work I do, they're not involved in it in any way whatsoever
This also answers the criticism by @Quantumfreakonomics that anyone who would help Gazans medically must be a Hamas supporter. The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Health Organization are top authorities who disagree with that.
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8mo ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process. Are Nina Ng and Dr. Mark Perlmutter die-hard anti-Israel extremists? Even if we ignore the bias that would lead one to conclude that every Arab and Muslim working as a doctor is a sympathizer to Hamas (of course, we would never say this about Jews who have associations to Israel), this conclusion doesn’t make sense in light of the testimony from the Vietnamese American and the white midwesterner. Due to language barriers, most doctors working or volunteering in Gaza are going to Arabic speakers.
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9mo ago
AI may invert the common wisdom that studying English is worthless and studying computer science is the wise decision. If AI takes off as anticipated, employers will look for word people who are trained in analyzing prompt replies, using specified and nuanced language, and consuming hundreds of pages of written text per day. English and history students would be great at this.
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9mo ago
Why didn’t you think about it instead of “rolling your eyes and groaning audibly”? This doesn’t mean anything to me. My dog also rolls her eyes and sometimes groans and her reasoning is mediocre.
You have misinterpreted the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s an epic, which commemorates the deeds of a heroic man who meets a variety of figures and obstacles. The very existence of the Epic is a rebuke against hedonic philosophy. Siduri is a young woman who keeps wine, both symbolic of vanity. Gilgamesh argues against Siduri and moves on. The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.
Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy?
Dances were not spontaneous in European history. They were organized, the dance routines themselves were orderly, they were scheduled on a calendar, and there were rules about gender intermingling. The only people I see dancing spontaneously in joy are homeless people, schizophrenics, and characters in Hollywood movies. Even today dancing is not spontaneous. You plan to attend an event in which you dance, and you conform to the dancing tradition of the group — this occurs even if you’re a member of the Crips!
I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology
blinks
People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun
People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.
Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?
“Spontaneity” is a late 20th century meme. But joy is a real thing, and it’s telling that we no longer speak in terms of joy today but fun. Joy is a deeper pleasure than fun. We wouldn’t say that a person who spontaneously binge drinks experiences “joy”, or the person who stands in a crowded bar jumping up and down. People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.
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9mo ago
Can someone steelman humor to me?
I’m beginning to wonder if humor is actually bad for us. Important qualification: in-person humor exchanged between friends is amazing for connection and friendship, and so in this capacity it is instrumental toward a good thing (bonds and brotherhoods). But this is no longer the dominant form of humor. The dominant form of humor is now worthless, distracting, and frankly retarded stuff on social media. This humor serves no instrumental purpose. It’s not the teacher whose sense of humor enhances your comfort and learning. It’s not a friend whose sense of humor bonds guys together. It’s not Scott’s wordplay that makes his ideas memorable. It’s just cheap pleasure. And I think it distracts people from taking life seriously.
Have you ever been in a serious conversation where someone keeps making jokes, and it’s impossible to obtain the same seriousness again? To me that’s the Worst Thing Ever, and I think this mental state is how many people are living because humor has penetrated every social media platform. The way many friends now stay in touch is sharing an instagram reel or a meme. But this is all occurring online, so rather than reinforcing friendship it reinforces (anti)social media consumption.
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20d ago
What metric would you trust?
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TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
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Hijab is becoming less common. The requirement is for the veil to fully cover the hair, but from watching any video of Iranian streets most women totally ignore this — it just barely covers the back of their hair
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a majority of Iranians use VPNs
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20d ago
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1mo ago
I see, per capita deaths. You don’t see anything wrong with Israel killing, at minimum, 36,400,000 “Chinese civilians” worth of Gazans? I mean, as a per capita equivalent to Gaza. I think that if you’re continuing to kill so many innocent people when they pose zero continuing threat to you, that you are a sociopath. Especially when you were the ones whose oppression led to the attack. How many “Chinese citizen” per capita equivalents should Israel kill? All 1.4 billion?
chose not to surrender
They are willing to surrender, but Israel refused to accept conditions.
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2mo ago
There are determinants unrelated to willpower and unrelated to personal lifestyle changes which cause obesity. This is one factor and there may be many others. Everyone who uses “CICO” in obesity discourse means that, by everyone attempting to modify one of these variables, we can sizably reduce waist sizes. What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.
Unless willpower and lifestyle changes can be shown to significantly modulate obesity rates at a population-level, and in the long-term, in a way that isn’t merely survivorship bias or an outlier, then CICO is as useful, insightful, and interesting as saying “narcoleptics need to stay awake”, “insomniacs need to sleep”, and “a thirsty sailor adrift at sea must never drink salt water”. It acts as a brainworm that just derails actual discourse around obesity.
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4mo ago
You don’t have to be as extreme as SecureSignals to see how crazy this scenario is. Ukrainian’s talk about “land” and protecting their sovereignty when a foreigner owned most of their land’s resources via corruption, to launder to his own people thousands of miles away. You mention Poroshenko, but Poroshenko had the awareness to go after Kolomoisky, which is why Kolomoisky fled to Israel (until Zelensky’s reelection, which was his own project). Kolomoisky really wanted his Jewish protege Oleksandr Lazorko in charge of Ukraine’s oil industry at a separate company, and when Poroshenko fired him…
On the morning of March 20th, [a journalist] Leshchenko got a tip that armed men in camouflage and bulletproof vests had arrived at the Kiev headquarters of Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil and gas producer. Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank Group has a forty-two per cent stake in the company. The men spent the weekend securing the building: they brought in supplies, blocked the entries, and even welded metal grills onto the front entries. One of the men told Leshchenko that he was from the Dnipro-1 Battalion, which has been funded largely by Kolomoisky.
In mid-March of this year, Ukraine’s government put in place reforms meant to improve corporate governance, curb the power of oligarchs, and, in particular, to reduce Kolomoisky’s authority over the oil-and-gas sector. Kolomoisky wasn’t pleased, and on March 19th, Radio Liberty (a branch of Radio Free Europe that was founded as an American news source for the Soviet Union) posted his first YouTube hit. The video opens with a group of men, who are dressed like soldiers, carrying boxes, sports bags, and what appear to be firearms into the headquarters of the state-owned oil-pipeline company UkrTransNafta. Its C.E.O., a Kolomoisky ally, had just been replaced, meaning that Kolomoisky would lose his considerable influence over the company. Kolomoisky is then seen leaving the building, flanked by thick-necked men in black.
When foreigners raid your country’s resources with their own paramilitary forces, and arrange for people to become president, you don’t have sovereignty. The reason these people fled Russia is because Russia stamps down on this stuff — replacing it with their own Slavic version, sure, but at least it doesn’t go to an insular tribe from a different culture. See what they did with Bill Browder.
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5mo ago
Trump was given the number 1.7 million presumably when he asked his intelligence advisor — conferred with all of the intel of the American Empire — how many people would need to be relocated from Gaza. The advisor gave him the number of living people in Gaza, not caring about “unaccounted for” or anything besides being alive. I think this number is accurate, because he has said it on different occasions now and because it’s the exact thing his brain is trained to remember. (He literally encodes it in his memory as a real estate project, you can tell by how he speaks about it, this is his savant-level skill and it’s a simple number to remember.) Determining how many Gazans are alive is a trivial task for the America intel community — use drones and satellites and movement tracking. They’ve wrangled them through corridors, they look at aid dispersal, the population isn’t exactly in hiding.
that's assuming the initial numbers (2.3m)
It’s the Lancet... we can assume it is trustworthy on this number.
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5mo ago
Tariffs are a cost on every consumer, but the revenue of the costs can (hypothetically) go only toward reducing the lower and middle class tax burden. So the cost is compensated only for the < rich. Also, wealthier people are the biggest consumers, and the things they buy cost more, like Canada Goose.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I looked for UN / amnesty / HRW reports and whether there were reputable new reports on it. If Hamas were employing non-teenage children in a military capacity, it would be publicized widely and talked about regularly. It would be a huge deal and an important propaganda coup for Israel/America. It would also be Israel’s #1 talking point whenever the subject of casualties come up. Not even crazed academics would be able to defend Hamas at that point.
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8mo ago
A preteen can easily be a child soldier
That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet. There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.
the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need
This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places. As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article. Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?
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9mo ago
You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset
But I have asked these to myself. I’m still considering the steelman case for music. The overuse of music is problematic because it’s a superstimuli that utilizes aural emotional cues. When you listen to too many sad songs you may become desensitized to the natural aural cues of sadness (in the voices of others, primarily). At the same time, because music is simply a packaged emotional state, we have to be wary of enjoying misleading music, which presents an emotional state that isn’t beneficial or realistic. The consequences of poor music consumption are both the potential dulling of real life emotional sensitivity (listening too much) and in being carried away into a fantastical emotional state (obsessing over the wrong kind of music). There’s adolescents who experience unreasonable despair because they listen to too much music of despair, just like how in 18th century youths were captivated reading the Sorrows of Young Werther (which Dostoevsky mentions in the opening of one of his books). This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way. It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good. Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression. Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.
Laughter is an inherently positive human experience
So is doing opiates. But the reason we don’t do opiates is because the pleasure is transient and “pleasure” is a limited experience, so if we experience pleasure from opiates, we experience less pleasure from real life — which has disastrous consequences. So it is with an inappropriate use of laughter. Laughter is relief, and if you experience too much relief from the comedic superstimuli, you may experience less relief where it matters — real life. This is really the root claim… laughter can be deeply relieving, but it’s a relief that is completely unattached from anything significant.
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19d ago
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1mo ago
I think the Gazans and the IDF soldiers have agency, but I only want to see one of these groups punished severely
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5mo ago
Then perhaps they are. If a bored boy can’t get any value from Tennyson, then there is no value in Tennyson, except to keep academics busy.
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5mo ago
The gesture makes sense for an American salute. The arm is raised outward and upward, like a child reaching for his parent, yet the arm extends maximally (declaring reach) and is held straight (expressing restraint and order). The normal American salute is silly and unnatural — you have the sun in your eye or something? — but the Roman / Bellamy salute can plausibly trace back to something primordial, as all good gestures do. The hand over heart gesture is too sentimental and must be thrown away. Of course if I had my way we would all be blessing each other, that’s probably my favorite gesture.
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6mo ago
I disagree with this in the strongest possible terms. The flagellate was more than a spectacle of suffering. The flagellate truly confessed and remembered his sin before his self-punishment. There’s psychological research to support both this practice and the medieval “mechanical” treatment of repentance generally. When a memory is reactivated (retrieved) it becomes labile (malleable) immediately and for up to six hours, in which period the valence and instinctual response regarding the memory can be modified. Provided that the flagellate has reactivated the memory of his commission of sin before his punishment, this would act as powerful counterconditioning which will (unconsciously) make him averse to the sin in the future (this may take a month to fully occur neurologically). This has been studied for instance in respect to alcoholism: “Disruption of relapse to alcohol seeking by aversive counterconditioning following memory retrieval”, “Long-term behavioural rewriting of maladaptive drinking memories via reconsolidation-update mechanisms”, etc. (The opposite can occur as well, which supports the mechanical way that gratitude was “practiced” (reactivating prosocial cues before the enjoyment of, say, a succulent Chinese meal)). If there were flagellates in California, perhaps things would be different.
Let us consider the California Question with special attention to what our Psalmists have to say —
Fret for your figure and fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and fret for your car
It's a bullshit three ring circus sideshow
The archetypical LA mindset is characterized by distraction and consumerism. It is not characterized by the recognition or repentance of sins (errors); it’s questionable whether the local leaders even believe in those. The fire is the Divine Mandate, contrary to the OP, at least symbolically speaking. The fire is “improbable but longterm-certain threat that has gone unrecognized”, and “failure to plan longterm”, and “failure to elect strong-minded leaders who care”, and then “failure to prioritize changing politicians”, which involves “failure to prioritize changing culture”, and descending to the relevant individuals with wealth and time there is “failure to sacrifice status in order to grow the right culture”, reaching to those who fretted figure and latte and contract and sideshow more than than what is actually Good. A ton of innocent people are going to suffer from this, too, which makes their sins so much worse.
Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation
And tidal waves couldn't save the world from Californication
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6mo ago
I literally explained this in the parentheses of the first sentence. If you are an American, of literally any ancestry, then your reproductive success is harmed with the introduction of Indian genes. Your biological success is reduced by introducing H1B immigrants, especially as it makes eventual citizenship more likely. Because this is a new introduction at a time when every group is low TF. And so this applies to all non-Indian Americans. Are you American? You have genes and are affected.
It makes sense that Hamas members would be found working at the organization, as the org employs 13k Palestinians. This says nothing about UNRWA really, only about the nature of secretive political movements. Literally any organization that employs 13k in Palestine will have some of its members go on to collude with Hamas. A radicalization rate of 9 out of 13k is insignificant, and actually tells us they UNRWA does a good job vetting its employees. “0.007% of UNRWA were determined by the UN to be working with Hamas”is another way to put this. None of them in leadership position at UNRWA but just working as drivers or teachers. So this seems more like casus belli for cutting aid.
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