drmanhattan16
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User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
24d ago
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
What's the source on that?
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
The reason for losing that support has nothing to do with being pro/anti-Jew. It has to do with the viral videos of Hamas actively massacring civilians who were not threats to them in any way. Right now, the world is entirely aware of what Hamas is doing. That very much sticks in people's minds when they see a person endorse Hamas. The fact that you jumped straight to "Jews are at the top of the progressive totem pole" is insane.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
How far am I supposed to take this analogy? Because if I take Hlynka's position and apply it here, then we are left with the idea that outsiders have no obligation to actually consider the probability of fraud occurring, and that they should be free to accept payment to accept the idea that no fraud occurred.
That doesn't strike me as particularly rational and virtuous, respectively.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
I'm shocked that the most obvious explanation for why this fiction is so popular was missed - it's literally not something most people have experience with! Of course people are interested in stories about that which they know nothing about, because reality is mundane and you have to actively seek out the interesting things in what you are familiar with. Rare is the story that is interesting even while historically accurate, and even then, it's typically because the audience isn't familiar with such things. Shows like White Collar, movies like Avengers, books like Twilight or Hunger Games, etc. are pieces of fiction that the reader has no experience. Why wouldn't they be fascinated at how these could be imagined?
Secondly, look at Tanner's examples of older heroes explicitly seeking out power.
This was not some new ideal in Shakespeare’s day. For the sake of name Athena spurs Telemachus away from home; for the sake of rule she spurs Odysseus homeward bound. Yudhishthira gladly leads his brothers on the path of dharma, but it is a dharma of kingdom and acclaim. Aeneas, Sigurd, Gawain, Gilgamesh, Rama, Song Jiang—search the old epics and annals for the modern distrust of heroics, and you find it in none of them.
Notice how frequently divinity appears. Yudhishthira and Aeneas are the progeny of gods, Rama is a god, etc. Indeed, this should not be surprising - when the hero is given a form of divine mandate, that mandate is often moral itself. To obtain power to carry out this mandate cannot be immoral. These gods are not The Corporation from the Waifu Catalogue or some evil ROB.
In contrast, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Divergent, etc. are not given such a mandate (I haven't read the last one, but from what I've heard, I don't recall any mention of gods in the Greek or Abrahamic sense). They are products of minds raised in a far more secular society.
This is not a rebuttal to Tanner, to be clear. I have not grappled totally with how one would rank the reasons he and I have listed, or any other reasons people come up with. But I would encourage at least some skepticism towards Tanner's case that this is so obviously an example of how Westerners have been rendered impotent and conforming.
drmanhattan16
4mo ago
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
They probably would argue that Israel has obligations to support humanitarian aid into the area, both legally (international law) and morally, as the formal state with a much stronger military and large amounts of US backing. It's worth noting that this was exactly what deBoer's position was (is?), and he's hardly as bad-faith as some actors.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Am I misremembering, or was this the one in which Fox was shown to have peddled the idea that Dominion's voting machines were rigged but not even the hosts saying it believed what they were saying?
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1X_KdkoGxSs
New video by Lex Fridman, Destiny + Benny Morris vs. Mouin Rabbani and Norman Finkelstein on the I/P issue.
I'm posting this here because Finkelstein made this into a greater farce than one could ever have imagined. Weird blend of Rabbani/Morris debating specific historical points and Finkelstein/Destiny basically fighting each other.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Because you're trying to shift the burden onto the people who are "election deniers," using terminology itself which is smuggling in your default position the election should be assumed to be legitimate unless there is a strong showing of facts to meet some high standard. It "seems reasonable" to do what? You think it's reasonable to have your default position and burden obligation and evidence standard. And that's fine by itself, but this language is all part of how you're attempting to simply assume the default position by fiat to shape the field against anyone who would question the results of the election.
What's the non-presumptive phrase to describe people who deny the 2020 election was legitimate, and why would it not be subject to the euphemistic treadmill?
much of the way the election was conducted was declared illegal after the election when the outcome could no longer be changed; much of the way the election was conducted in explicit contravention to state law, i.e., the "agreed-upon method"
What's the source for this?
Why would random people or even Trump be required to agree to the election is assumed legitimate standard because "his side" lost a bunch of court challenges about illegal election law changes?
"Required" is a strong word. But the case gets weaker with each failed court challenge. At some point, there's no vitality to it left.
the 2020 election wasn't decided by 7 million "votes," it was decided by 50,000 "votes" in 5 states
That's not the point. The point is that millions of voters, who I suspect didn't think they could ignore the results of another state simply because the laws in that state changed, still went out and voted for Trump.
This isn't, in other words, a case where a disinterested party is being approached to accept the validity of the 2020 election, this is a case with a very much interested party.
Ultimately, this still leaves me no more persuaded on the "and then?" part of Hlynka's position. Even assuming that the truth of the 2020 election is unknowable, why is there no obligation for those think Biden didn't win fairly to consider how much of their motivation is simply losing the election?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
There were 74 million people who voted for Trump according to Wikipedia. Even if we think that number is too low, or that Biden had some part of his supposed 81 million votes forged from nowhere, it seems like reasonable to say that Trump supporters were not sitting out election day hoping that only others would vote him. They probably went and voted for him as well. If you accept this premise, then we seem to have the basis of an agreement to a contract - using established election rules, both sides would vote and the winner would be who got the most votes (nominally speaking). Trump supporters added their bit of strength to the validity of using the election as it ran to decide if Trump would continue to be the president.
Given this, I don't see why it's attempting to smuggle in my position as the default to say that the party who alleges the agreed-upon method was invalid due to fraud has to demonstrate why that is the case.
drmanhattan16
8mo ago
Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
drmanhattan16
30d ago
They wont get "unfair" utility by spreading their opinion more than before, and the argument would be one where both sides arent particularly enjoying prolonging.
The problem is that we'd have to discuss the facts on the ground, and any anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers would inherently get to promote their view that they don't think Jews are by default as trustworthy as others. For some, their goal is just to spread doubt and get the talking points out, not to actually reconsider their views on the Jews or anything related.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
group of open-minded free-thinkers
Don't self-aggrandize, you might actually believe your own hype.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
I want to eventually get some grasp on feminism as a whole. While I can find pro-feminist writings and arguments easily, I find myself unable to find anti-feminist arguments of a suitable quality.
Therefore, I'm asking for recommendations on anti-feminist arguments, books, etc. Ideally, these should be as evidenced, charitable, nuanced, etc. as one would expect from the older SlateStarCodex posts. They don't have to be perfect, but I'm going to be less engaged with someone trying to tell me the feminists are all stupid or evil or some combination of the two.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
But it's not going to go anywhere. No one is going to back down on the credibility of their sources, especially if the inferential distance is too large.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
Is there something wrong with this? I mean I doubt the person who said it is some kind of doctrinaire Marxist criticizing profit(or at least, I doubt that they're criticizing Home Depot for profit), so they're criticizing construction as something inherently bad.
I think the argument the argument very much is about the profit part. Fleshed out, the argument is that profiting from an action incentivizes you to convince others to want that action. For example, for-profit prison systems would advocate for sending more prisoners their way.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
That means you don't really even want elections, right? You just want negotiations over policy. Because if the losers, as I suspect, are a bit more motivated by losing than they claim to be, then no amount of proof would work because they don't care about proof in the first place.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
If the claim in court, where you do need to be very specific, was that people weren't allowed in, but they were and just kept far away, then the claim should reflect that, right?
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
From your report's summary:
There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. In all likelihood, more eligible voters cast ballots for Joe Biden than Donald Trump. We found little direct evidence of fraud, and for the most part, an analysis of the results and voting patterns does not give rise to an inference of fraud.
Seems like this is the key takeaway for anyone.
Is your ultimate point that elections have security issues, or that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump? People who want to argue the first are free to do so, I'm open to the idea that we can tighten election security, especially for state and local elections (where more serious claims appear to be made).
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and **follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.**”
The issue with the bolded part is that that's not a defense. In particular, the ones they cite are Libs Of Tik Tok, Gavin McInnes, and Ron Desantis. You could maybe excuse Desantis, but you still have to grapple with the question of whether mainstream conservatism itself moved in the direction of Nazism in recent years, which is probably something IH's accusers don't have any issue believing. They might be wrong, but it's not a trivially dismissed point of evidence.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background
You're improperly summarizing the actual point that post made - The game being referenced where he put "14/88" in doesn't allow values for that field if they aren't divisible by 5. He had to choose that number.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK.
This is a valid defense, but it's impossible to prove just from IH's actions where he actually stands on the topic, and so you can't tell he's saying these things to just mock the left or he's doing it because he's inserting what he actually thinks as jokes. It's not an unheard of strategy - Nick Fuentes has a clip of him saying that humor was a way to promote his brand of politics and that he couldn't obviously be forthcoming about what he actually believed.
I've watch IH's videos, including the ones mentioned in the post you linked. The Bike-lock professor one was straight up "4chan does good thing by catching attacker" and mocks neopronouns at the beginning of the video. Which part of this is mocking the lefties?
Ultimately, IH needs to cease his policy of silence and be forthcoming - both about the plagiarizing and where his actual politics stand. That's inherently the burden you take on when you aren't in the Overton Window. That applies to literally anything a person does.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
Your description of what Christians "meant" when they asked "how can you be moral without God?" is so charitable to them that I'm going to ask for evidence. I have never seen this as the intended meaning.
Secondly, I have no idea what "clicks" you are talking about when you say you need to use Lizzo in your post. Is that the image that appears in the email that goes out? For that matter, why those two women in particular?
drmanhattan16
4mo ago
Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform?
It's not only a gaming platform, that's why. They have an art section where people spend their time drawing, or a just chatting section where people can do things like day trading or politics or whatever.
drmanhattan16
10mo ago
(Side note: since we live in the clown world, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that the word "barbarian" is used in purely descriptive, not pejorative, meaning - as "somebody who is not part of the imperial culture" - and, in fact, for the purposes of this definition, I am a barbarian myself and many of my friends are Barbarian-Americans)
It has nothing to do with "clown world", you are straight up analogizing the US to older empires that were far more explicitly formulated on a racial or ethnic basis, likewise analogizing illegal immigrants as less-civilized. You are free, of course, to idiosyncratically define "barbarian" as those who don't belong to the culture of the US (insofar as such a thing exists). But let's not pretend that this is some "clown world" shit, and that everyone in a "saner" world would understand that you weren't trying to insult those who are the "barbarians" here. It was an insult long before the advent of the "clown world".
Ideally Ukraine will be a part of NATO as its allies fund its reconstruction. Even better if it means the death of current Russian regime. No better message for every other tyrant eyeing the lands near them.
"Both sides lies" is a meaningless platitude. Perun covered this exact topic 2 weeks ago and argued that Ukrainians are still incredibly supportive of fighting Russia, though they recognize that its going to be hard and grinding. Russians are harder to poll due to fear of state punishment for the "wrong" opinions, but even then, there's less support on the Russian side for fighting the war to its conclusion than there is on the Ukrainian side. He also doesn't ignore all the things "between the lines", talking explicitly about the average Ukrainian soldier's age issue in the linked video.
Supporting Ukraine is an affirmation of the post-WW2 status quo in which war for the sake of expansion will not be tolerated. Russia may fear Ukraine slipping from its control, but the reason Eastern Europe did that is precisely because Russia has acted on this notion of spheres of influence. Moreover, every dead Russian, while tragic, and every spent ruble on military equipment is part of the cost that Russia will have to deal with. No better cost-effective solution for depleting the resources of an expansionist and corrupt system.
Moreover, you know why Putin won't demand the Polish parts of Poland? Because Poland is in NATO. That's precisely the threat of Ukraine after the 2014 revolution, it may join America's umbrella and then it can never be touched.
Peace would be nice. But, and I recognize that I have less stake in the issue given that I'm not losing people myself over the issue, I believe it would still be good for the Ukrainians to continue fighting. I support giving them as much as they ask for and more.
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