remzem
1yr ago
If you don't let Jewish NGOs buy up your legal system and manipulate your elections by prosecuting anyone resisting it's anti-Semitic don't ya know?
remzem
7mo ago
lol, I mean sorry, but picturing someone despondent because their internet post didn't make it out of the oven fast enough is just embarrassing.
If you have a long effort post to make, why not just make it as a reply to a less narrow top level post like the one above? Shorter posts like this generally have a much broader scope and therefore you can have a lot more replies and jump off into a larger variety of topics. If someone writes a 10 page essay about that time Feinstein almost got killed by left wing terrorists in response to her passing then people that might want to discuss some more topical aspects of the event are forced to post an entirely new top level comment. Which is obnoxious considering this place is already a chore to navigate and horribly disorganized. Especially for anyone trying to find older discussions.
I did, OP is directly quoting me in that "completely oblivious" section in an obvious low-effort (effort doesn't equate to word count, despite what mods here believe) boo outgroup post. I reported and called him out on it and as is more and more common in the west these days the authorities ignore the crime and go after the person calling it out.
It's a running problem. Someone posts a 5000 word (((Parentheses))) screed on here and you have no idea what to do about it, maybe they get a warning several thread derailments later. Someone calls the poster a schizo moron (which they are) and they're banned.
remzem
7mo ago
Not sure why you consider it worth it.
The people here are interesting, but everything else about this place makes it so obnoxious to use that I go through phases of being frustrated by the limited means of engagement and the convoluted rules.
It's rather ironic to complain about posts generating more heat than light when you obviously don't apply the same standards to your moderation. Maybe the reason this post when to shit was you jumping in all "bad cop" to try and save the quokka effortposters from their despondency. You think of that maybe?
remzem
10mo ago
Ok, I will post high effort sneers like the rest of the posters from now on.
remzem
4mo ago
One thing that's always bugged my about progressivism and especially EA is that despite all their claims of being empathetic and humanistic they completely ignore the human. They are ironically the paperclip maximizers of philanthropy.
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed? Doctors and lawyers? Someone that cares about humanity would want to ask these questions. A paperclip maximizer that discounts a persons humanity entirely and just sees each life as some widget to maximize the number of would not.
The purpose of empathy is to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand their feelings. Except, to do that you have to have some level of understanding of how they function, some mental model of their mind. Else you are simply projecting. It's easy to just imagine what you'd feel like if you were in Palestine or Israel etc. Except that isn't empathy. Even just listening to what a person says isn't truly empathy. If I were an alcoholic and I said I wanted a drink, to someone that has no knowledge of me it might seem a nice thing to do, but clearly it would not be. I'm not sure what it even means to have empathy for someone you don't know. I'm not sure it's possible. What is it really that you are feeling? Do you believe people are all the same, with the same wants? same needs? some values? It's such a dim view of people and of the world.
I suppose some people do, "We're all human," is something you'll hear espoused by this ideology, but that is literally the least you can have in common with another person. Trying to apply it to any other human interaction is instantly ridiculous. You wouldn't apply that logic anywhere in life, you don't hire someone just because they're human, you don't befriend someone, care about someone, hate someone. It's basically an open admission that you have nothing convincing to say. Even if someone was forced to compliment their worst enemy they'd manage to ad lib something more convincing than, "he's human."
Anyone that has had relationships with other humans, so basically everyone, knows how complicated it is to actually know someone. You can have spent years living with a partner and still be completely caught off guard when your mental model goes awry and your attempt at empathy then completely falls flat. The idea that some ideological group is more moral or more caring because of the sheer number of lives they've saved completely discredits and belittles one of the pillars of being human, getting to know each other, socializing, learning friend and foe. It discounts their humanity itself, that it's even necessary to get to know or to understand someone before you can help them. Your wants and needs don't matter, you are a widget, you need x calories, y oxygen, to continue existing and I will supply these needs, such altruism, wow.
Looking around at social media and world events I can't help but wonder if this is some major glitch with human psychology in the digital age. Too many strangers, too much opportunity for, "selflessness." So many people caught up in an empty and self serving empathy that has no imagination for others. Meanwhile people that have normal empathy are dismissed because they aren't as "selfless" as the newer movements. Spending time with and focusing on people that share your values isn't altruistic because if they share your values than you are less selfless than the progressive who cares about the stranger. (Not to mention the bay area tech bro that managed to save 0.0345 persons per dollar spent, blowing away the nearest tech bro competitor who only saved 0.0321)
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group. If you really want to help others you need to understand them, that means spending time with others, not with concepts. If you're lucky you might eventually find a few people that you understand well enough that more often than not your actions are positive and beneficial to them. Congratulations you have now invented the family and traditional community.
remzem
7mo ago
It's a stupid rule. Should just be some kind of keep it neutral in top posts type rule. It's more interesting when there is a variety of discussion. Often when you wait for someone to make some long effortpost it will narrow the context down to some aspect of the event that isn't very interesting. Then people are less likely to participate in discussing other aspects of it. I even feel like some users do it on purpose as a way to head off obvious discussion points. If anything it should be the opposite. Discussion starters should be more open and short, responses should be higher effort.
remzem
7mo ago
Yea the US is not at war, weird how we still end up spending on this garbage. Why don't the people on this forum that are so concerned about Ukraine ship themselves there? They are taking foreign recruits.
get weapons to save a thousand of Ukrainian lives
This is a bit off topic, but as a realist I really wonder at the neocon thinking here. I'm asking you since you are vocal about your beliefs, but really anyone jumping into this question would be fine.
Assume you are an average Ukrainian. For reference that is someone probably working Ukraine's most common job, a factory worker, making the Ukrainian median salary of 600usd a month. If you live in the South from Odessa to Dontesk, or the east from Donetsk to Kharkiv than you more than likely already speak Russian, especially if you are in a city. You've lived in a country that was a Soviet territory, then a Russian puppet state, and now a western puppet state. What would most likely happen to you in the following scenarios:
-Russia invaded and the Ukrainian leadership completely capitulated and the war was over before it even started.
-Russia invades and you fight back, the west is initially supportive but pulls its support when it becomes clear the war has become one of attrition and there is no path to victory. You lose the war a couple years later, sometime in 2024-25. (current timeline)
-Russia invades and you fight back, the west gives you whatever support you want, the war drags on for years and years as more and more are sent to a front increasingly supplied by more modern and deadly weapons systems.
To me if I'm the average Ukrainian I prefer scenario 1. I probably still have a pretty below average life, maybe I keep a good mindset about it, maybe alcohol is cheap enough it doesn't matter. I don't die though, no conscription, and as long as I'm not part of the ultra nationalist movement I'm unlikely to see much of a difference, there is a new set of corrupt officials to bribe here and there to get through daily life, but life is mostly the same. At worst there is a major uptick in terrorist attacks as ultra nationalists shift to insurgency type tactics. Though without western support it's not clear how long these would last.
Since I anticipate you will take issue with the framing and suggest a hypothetical where Ukraine gets all the aid it wants and then wins and takes back all it's territory and for some reason Russia decides to never look west again... What wonder weapon would result in this actually happening? Even if we gave them nukes that seems to just result in a stalemate, since if Ukraine nuked Crimea* or Moscow, surely Russia would make sure Kiev no longer existed. In fact given the sheer number of nukes Russia has it might make sure most of Western Europe and the US no longer exist as well. Other than that there doesn't seem to be any conventional weapon that doesn't simply result in more escalation. They are already scraping the bottom of the barrel for conscripts and are at a serious population disadvantage. Sometimes surrender is the better move and the one that saves more lives, if it didn't and everyone that surrendered instantly died than it really wouldn't exist as an option.
This place is beyond bleeding heart, 90% of the pro-ukraine "arguments" are just dressed up feelings with little to no reasoning.
Russia is going to invade Poland and Germany and eventually the US if we don't do something! -anxiety
We are destroying our great enemy for a pittance! -hate and phobia
Something Chamberlain yada yada appeasement. -anxiety
etc.
There is nothing to argue with, when people are being emotional you can only reach them with emotion. I find shaming them works well.
Edit: but I will take the hint and timeout myself from this topic. No more posting in this or the other thread on the same topic for me.
remzem
4mo ago
Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?
Of course I wouldn't expect a stranger to help me. I'm arguing that it's not possible after all. In retrospect even people that do know and care about me have had some pretty spectacular failures on that front, though I don't blame them as long as they forgive me my own.
Death is necessary. We live in a world with physical limits, without death the resources eventually run out. Most of life from the realm of the microscopic to the complex workings of human society is just the process of determining what is worthy of those limited resources. When the determination is subjective we call it morality or justice and when it's objective we call it nature.
It seems trivial to me that human lives aren't worth saving per se. It's the content of those lives that matters, and if you don't know the content than you can't prove that you've done anything of value let alone something "effective." I mean if you had the choice between saving 1000 lives of people in a persistent vegetative state, or a dozen lives of people you know to be good and functioning people you choose the functioning people right? It's not the lives that matter it's the person, the content. If you could have more people living by putting everyone in a low energy state in some kind of feeding pod, where they undergo minimal activity to reduce calorie expenditure and just enough calories are provided to keep them alive is that good because more people are living? It seems cartoonishly evil.
and those are just overly simple demonstrations, in reality the world is more complex than that. Value is a human thing and though nature occasionally forces our hand the more advanced we get the more leeway we have to be subjective. There really isn't even a way to maximize value because people have different values and therefore competing interests.
That's the problem I have with EA. The whole, "we're saving more people than anyone" thing. Stopping needless suffering. Why is their suffering needless? Suffering can be important, it teaches us things. It leads to improvement. When you are saving them what are you saving? Do you know any of them? It's so surface level and such a philosophically empty paperclip maximizing type ethos.
I do agree that it hasn't been very effective PR for the tech bros so far. I think it worked better for progressives (though people are growing resistant to it) and EA seems to be a silicon valley version that has made the whole process too efficient and made it's contradictions too apparent. It feels too inhuman for most.
remzem
7mo ago
Because moderation is often inflammatory, far more than trolls, they should be held to higher standards. Should police not be held to higher standards than civilians? What a bizarre question. Mod straight up admitted that most other mods would have just warned the user and not banned and then did it anyways due to personal vendetta.
remzem
7mo ago
From what I remember it also became so popular that people were hardly posting in the main thread. Effort is just not a great measure of whether a post will generate interesting discussion or not. Plenty of effort posts end up being one-offs that barely get a response because there isn't much to talk about that hasn't already been covered by the post. On the other hand there are effortposts that don't get warnings that are obvious schizoposts that also don't generate useful discussion but get no warnings.
Length is often conflated with effort, you can find an article and copy out a few long blocks of text and end with a short paragraph that boils down to, "what does the motte think about this?" and not get a warning. If you post the link by itself and ask what the motte thinks, then you do get a warning. It's a bad rule because it doesn't accurately capture what makes posts good contributions and it's too arbitrary, it allows moderators too much room to abuse it when they are having an off day or you happen to get a mod with a weird vendetta to protect the effortposters above and beyond what the other mods would do, like OP did with this post. We had a similar phase with Hylnnka or w/e seeing himself as forum batman for awhile.
If you want to effortpost just create a blog or substack and then post as a new thread. I don't see why you'd spend enough time to be half a day late to a discussion (at least 12 hours) be sad about it and not take the tiny bit of extra effort it would take to make the post more visible and get away with it.
remzem
7mo ago
but sadly they actually believed that they are still superpower entitled to rule over central and eastern Europe
How do you arrive at this conclusion from Russia invading what was literally their own satellite state for 20 years after the USSR fell until the US took it away? It's just completely out of touch with reality.
remzem
1mo ago
I mean the actual leadership. Western control of Ukraine came about after Maidan, the false flag theory is that the Maidan shootings were Ukranian ultra-nationalist or Western false flag. The various figureheads after that like Zelensky haven't mattered anymore than the previous Russian figureheads mattered.
remzem
1yr ago
Maybe if you hadn't spent the last 30 years destabilizing every region (including your own country) for pure greed people would have a bit more trust?
remzem
3mo ago
Trump cares a lot about what his constituents think, he's obsessed with polls. War in Ukraine is unpopular and especially unpopular among his populist right. He could make it clear Ukraine is getting no more money. Then release whatever info the spy agencies have on the 2014 coup to try and paint Ukraine as an illegitimate state owned by the globalists, which would give Europe a way out. Ukraine would be forced to concede quickly, or maybe they fight another month or two.
It's probably the only way to end the war, NATO involvement just ups the escalation, risks nuclear war or other powers entering the fray like China as they wouldn't want their backyard unstable and to be further isolated by western expansion. Though I've been surprised at how non aggressive China is so who knows really, they are a very introverted nation. It's logical though.
I doubt he will do it though, it'd take more calculation. Trump is more of a seat of his pants person. Deep state would immediately start to paint him as weak or a Russian puppet again and it's very easy to get under Trump's skin and manipulate him this way.
Basically the war will continue to the last willing Ukrainian.
I forgot that people were posting bare links and then effortposting in replies. I actually think that is a better method of posting than the current top level effortpost style. Maybe that would be a happy medium. That at least requires some good faith, but also doesn't completely narrow down conversation. It also would make it easier to post more general things. Sometimes events happen that have about a dozen differnet culture-war aspects to the point where if you did want to effortpost it's hard to even start. If you wanted to write about the government shutdown right now you could focus on the metapolitics of who it's hurting for the election, general disagreement with how necessary funding is held hostage by culturewar pork, the funding of the border and how dire that situation is getting, the funding of Ukraine now that the majority of voters have turned against it.
edit: There are also just a variety of interesting people here and often I'd like to hear their response to the event itself not their response to the response of the handful of try-hards that get off on imaginary internet kudos.
Though I also agree with the most upvoted reply, effort and quality don't necessarily correlate. That's even more true these days with chatgpt making the appearance of effort effortless. Some of the recent mysteriously (some new style of trolling) deleted top levels had a bot feel to them recently.
remzem
7mo ago
You referring to the Admiral that showed up on tv today?
The only thing that has made a difference in the war so far has been numbers. Ukraine had more of them at the beginning of the war. Their offensive on Kherson pulled enough Russians from the north that they were able to roll through the Kharkov areas. Russia bailed on holding Kherson to make the front more defensible until they could catch up. Russia mobilized more and that mostly equalized the forces and since then Ukraine has made no real gains despite the huge injection of western kit for their Spring offensive.
that is blatant nonsense and repeating russian propaganda warmongering
This is childish and not an argument.
Did you not read the rest? I want an explanation of how that is possible before we entertain it. Since there doesn't seem to be any weapon that would win the war for Ukraine and every new weapons system we supply further risks nuclear apocalypse.
Since I anticipate you will take issue with the framing and suggest a hypothetical where Ukraine gets all the aid it wants and then wins and takes back all it's territory and for some reason Russia decides to never look west again... What wonder weapon would result in this actually happening? Even if we gave them nukes that seems to just result in a stalemate, since if Ukraine nuked Crimea* or Moscow, surely Russia would make sure Kiev no longer existed. In fact given the sheer number of nukes Russia has it might make sure most of Western Europe and the US no longer exist as well. Other than that there doesn't seem to be any conventional weapon that doesn't simply result in more escalation. They are already scraping the bottom of the barrel for conscripts and are at a serious population disadvantage. Sometimes surrender is the better move and the one that saves more lives, if it didn't and everyone that surrendered instantly died than it really wouldn't exist as an option.
I got through two pages of your post history with every single post (on here, reddit is dead) being a post defending US foreign policy. I have a life man, I can't be expected to spend all of it reading effort posts, and if you want to be seen as not a neocon you really should maybe try and not do everything in your power to appear as a neocon? Sometimes it can be hard to square the image we project to the public with our interior views of ourselves I guess. What label do you prefer? US imperialist? Atlanticist? Someone Russia touched in a no-no spot?
I mean someone in the small scale question thread asks if Sudan is a proxy war, something that could be answered by a simple, "There is a lot of incentive foreign powers could be involved but we can't for sure say this it is or isn't." Instead you write up a 5 page rebuttal on how there is no way the US could possibly be involved in another proxy war after it's history of endless proxy wars, when there are actors involved that are already in proxy wars by info dumping a Wikipedia article on recent Sudanese history.
The problem with this sort of argument and a problem that persists with motte style arguments, is that the information that is most valuable in international relations, is also the information you are least likely to have. Long ass effort post write ups summarizing easily available facts are almost always worthless and the endless gaslighting by the "experts" to trust the bare facts and ignore your "conspiratorial" instincts is obnoxious. Which is why it's terribly misleading to just rattle off a bunch of known facts about recent Sudanese history without pointing out the very obvious incentives foreign actors would have to be involved. Are foreign countries perfectly capable of fucking themselves? Yeah. Do foreign actors often give them a push when it's in their interests? Yeah. In the interconnectedness of the modern world and the power certain states have within it, it's almost impossible for any war to not have at least some hint of proxy war to it. That isn't chauvinism, that's just how power works.
Also, how is Obama letting the middle east handle (offshoring) it's proxy wars not just some inception tier proxy warring?
remzem
3mo ago
How so? Russia winning just resets things to the way they were pre 2014, except now they have a puppet state that is completely devastated economically with serious demographic issues to grapple with. I'm not sure they'd even want territory beyond kharkiv / odessa.
remzem
4mo ago
Still fits with my theory. EA like the progressive model but are a bit robotic and misunderstand it. Progressive recognize that EA is pulling a lot from their PR scheme but doing it poorly and spoiling the effect.
I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.
There's more of a trade off than that though. That money and effort could be spent elsewhere, making family or people you know about happier. I mean if they don't have anyone like that they could at least look towards their local communities? From what I've seen of the bay area it could use it.
tl;dr Boo Outgroup
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