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14hr ago
My main exposure to mainstream messaging on the topic nowadays is German news media + administrative mailing lists from various universities including US ones that I have managed to accumulate subscriptions to over the years, but a common thread to all of them is a pretty unabashed tendency to have cut out the usual conflation with "antisemitism" and directly talk about anti-Israel sentiment as something that is or should be illegal and punished to the maximum extent the framework allows (expulsions, blacklisting, using discretionary hate speech/symbolism statutes). In the German news media, I mostly see war reporting spin techniques deployed to a level that comes across as comical - on one hand you get articles reporting about Israel losing 10 soldiers in an actual ground offensive in a tone as if they were kids murdered by terrorists on a shopping trip, and on the other claims of Palestinian deaths or suffering are presented as flat statistics with no contextualisation or attempt to give emotional colour, and couched in a wall of reminders that figures could not be verified independently and notes that "according to the Israeli MoD, they were actually Hamas militants" (no reminders that this could not be verified independently). The contrast not just between the reporting on the two sides but also this and the reporting on Russia/Ukraine is stark to the point of feeling like a flex ("Yes, this is propaganda. Dare to call it out? No? Good, so you know your place").
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1d ago
I haven't lived in England in over a decade now so any respect for bus stop queues has atrophied. I regularly "jump queue" just by standing closer to the kerbcurb than the other aspiring passengers, thus reaping the rewards for my lower risk aversion.
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1d ago
Stumbled upon this unreasonably catchy parody of a Cheburashka (famous Soviet cartoon series) song on Youtube. Like most of the best Russian memes, apparently the lyrics themselves are way older than the rendition (70s? 80s?).
This made me think - I seem to know a disproportionate number of political songs, grassroots parodies (this one is about siphoning off ethanol rocket fuel to get wasted) and snowclones from Russia. Do other cultures make much of those? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is "Napalm Sticks to Kids".
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4d ago
The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
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5d ago
I don't know if it's a resume line item checklist - "getting arrested for social justice ❤️💙" might play well for a political career? - or just people making reckless decisions.
There might be an element of that, but I figure that "soandsomany people got arrested at protests for X" also is a necessary item for any media narrative about X being oppressed by the authorities. Note how no report of protests (say, Navalny-related ones) inside Russia is complete without some mention of hundreds of protesters taken away in prepared police vans, and most Westerners are also quite happy to read that and nod along about how brutal the regime is. Other protests such as climate activists gluing themselves to roads are also designed to elicit a violent-looking police response, and the overall effect of any well-crafted report incorporating such footage tends to be that genuine fence-sitters and normies conclude that the response was excessive. If you have any sort of sympathetic media that knows its craft and participants willing to sacrifice themselves, you would be foolish as a protest organiser to not make use of the opportunity; if you are a participant who cares more about the cause than about the expected adverse effects of being arrested, you would be foolish to not volunteer.
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8d ago
The analogy only holds weight if you buy into the argument that Israel/people of Jewish ethnic and religious background have as much right to stay on the Middle Eastern clay as the Syrians do, which I doubt is the case for the protesters or most of those who sympathise with them. The communicative strategy of the pro-Israel powers regarding its legitimacy seems to continue being limited to "all polite people in the room will gasp and assert that you just did something beyond the pale if you deny Israel's right to existence", but this is clearly fragile and dependent on an unbroken chain of respect for the opinion for "polite people", which evidently broke at some point upstream from the pro-Palestine left.
The commitment to this strategy to the exclusion of all others boggles my mind - at least come up with some apologia involving how Palestinians are really also culpable for the Holocaust because Hitler admired Islam, or some body of Foucaldian jargon-laden papers churned out by a network of Jewish Studies departments which purport to present a critical theory of how occupying the Holy Land was just. Most successful movements in history that depend on a claim (such as an assertion of morality) that can't be strictly proven seemed to recognize that you need to maintain multiple lines of persuasion to cover different audiences - Christianity had the social censure for those who think judgement by the elites makes right, charitable organizations for those who thought displays of altruism do, tales of miracles for those who thought a God better have godlike powers, theological faculties for those who were most impressed by the trappings of scholarship, and smoke-filled community rituals for those who were most swayed by gut feeling and dissolving the self in a crowd.
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9d ago
Again, how would the state prove that this happened, against a claim by a gay couple that they didn't do that? My understanding is that anal penetration as the sine qua non of gay sex is largely a product of the imagination of homophobes in a narrow sense, as it lives at some sweet spot of triggering their disgust reflex and being easy to describe.
But approximately nobody wants to ban the penis-in-vagina conduct, and generally nature conspired to make the straight option the one that has the most unique options available. To get a purely conduct-based rule that prevents same-sex activity, you'd have to write something tortured like "you must not let two penises come in contact", and this would not only give lawmakers the vapours just having to put these words to paper but would also only capture some subset of same-sex activity (and the state would struggle to dispute a claim by a gay couple that they fastidiously avoided that particular act).
Maybe you could criminalise all sexual conduct that is also possible for same-sex couples; good luck with convincing a majority to make that sacrifice just to get at those pesky gays at last, or else to convince the higher courts that any selective enforcement is purely accidental.
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11d ago
It seems manifestly the case that the majority of whites most everywhere are against WN and reject their ideas, including ones that I imagine you include in the "truthful" category. Is the campaign of persuasion and reeducation that WNs would have to run to overcome this not adequately described as "brainwashing", in the original, unironic sense of the term (like, removing the taint of dirty ideas)? And hey, famously the Third Reich had a "ministry for propaganda" with no negative connotations intended; I think it is very fair game to let modern WNs inherit that tradition whether they want it not, seeing how any modern negative connotations are largely creditable to their non-disowned ancestors.
Sure, that would be sufficient (though the first half of your statement has to be extended to cover groups that want to seize a role that I expect to speak in my name and/or fight for my interests, such as the government of a country I live in). Having that black on white would make it easy, since then there would be no debate that I can treat them as enemies with all that entails. "Either you owe me some clarity regarding whether I'm in your circle of care and to what extent, or you can direct further inquiries to the business end of the police/military representing me" is a binary choice I'm happy to offer.
You might want to protest that BLM-like groups also want to govern, but there the uncertainty that matters for me is fundamentally different. They would presumably claim that they want a government for all, and only intend to stop unfairness that black people currently experience. There is no sense in which fluctuations in their definition of black could become relevant for me; I would only doubt that the "government for all" part would be executed in earnest. On the other hand, the WNs leave no doubt that they do not want "government for all", but the exact boundaries of the set of "whites" for whom they intend to govern would have a great deal of impact on me and things I care about.
To be very concrete, I believe that WNs understand that most whites are against them, but think that given sufficient power and time they could brainwash most of them to support the WN agenda, and kick the remaining ones out as race traitors. The real definition of the "whites" they fight for is therefore "Caucasian + will be persuaded by our propaganda". This is not a very good pitch to those in this set who have not yet been persuaded by the propaganda, and therefore they want to remain coy about it.
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12d ago
No, but I seek to/am part of states that WNs want to make into white ethnostates. (Ignoring the part that I no longer live in the US nor was ever a citizen) I don't think that BLM ever wanted to make the US into a black ethnostate, or split off a part to form one, either; and even if they did, I for sure would not meet the definition for inclusion, nor would anyone I know or have care for beyond of the level I have for the generic stranger (as I somehow managed to spend my $many years in the US completely insulated from the African-American community).
To the extent to which they do want to seize control of things that I or those in my circle of care currently have (possibly shared) access to to hand to those outside of my circle, BLM would be a straight-up enemy to me, but how they define their membership in detail is then not so relevant to me. Unlike in the case of WN, they would presumably not try to lure me or anyone in my circles with a dubious promise that they are fighting for our benefit; it would be beyond any doubt that it is not so.
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12d ago
I hold any ethno-identity interest group that seeks control over a larger group I want to be a member of to this standard. If I sought to be part of a black community, I would apply the standard to BLM; if I sought to be Ukrainian, I would apply it to Ukrainian Nationalists (and indeed, part of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians trying to apply this standard to Ukrainian Nationalists is a nontrivial component of the civil war!); if I were or sought to be a citizen of Israel, I would apply the standard to Zionists, and so on.
I am generally pro-whataboutism, but in this particular case it's really silly to insinuate that being concerned with the exact definition of the WN ingroup and the ingroup of, say, Zionists are at all comparable. WNs want control of countries that I live in, or at least to split off parts of them. Of course it concerns me to know whether I, and other people I care about, will be inside their circle of concern, in a way that is orders of magnitude apart from what happens in some enclave across the world. I doubt that you do not understand that, so what exactly is it you are trying to say? Simply that WNs are under no obligation to answer the question because they will do what is in their own interest and that's their god-given right? Fine, but then I'm under no obligation to stop asking questions or concern-trolling in a way that will make WNs look bad to prospective allies either, because I find that to be in my own interest and then surely that's my god-given right too. Once you commit to that level of conflict theory, there is generally little point in hosting a debate at all anyway, unless you stand to benefit from seeing one of the sides humiliated and expect to be able to railroad the debate to make that happen.
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12d ago
Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.
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13d ago
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
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13d ago
I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.
If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.
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17d ago
How does it not? There is a bounded amount of things of value, and everything available for the use and consumption of Elon Musk is not available for the use and consumption of J. Random Janitor. Whether we directly confiscate Elon's land and redistribute it among the Janitor family, or reduce the number in Elon's bank account so that Elon's ability to bid and win in implicit or explicit auctions for things that the janitor also wants, making Elon poorer helps the janitor in expectation.
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17d ago
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
What do you think was the reason, then?
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
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17d ago
What's the evidence that absolute poverty is what matters, rather than inequality? Many uprisings happened in societies where the 5th-percentile poorest person was better off than the 5th-percentile richest person in some historical society that remained stable. It seems to be a common belief in many circles that humans are mostly motivated by relative status.
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17d ago
For the same reason as why you want to cut the top off your power economy by having rule of law and a constitution, presumably.
More pragmatically, historical precedent shows that if you don't the plebs eventually rebel and you have to spend a lot more resources on suppressing them, or actually just wind up being hung from the lampposts.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
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17d ago
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
Medvedev
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries?
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
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17d ago
Eh, my sense is that we have maybe one-digit number of hardline American jingoist posters who overwhelm any remotely Ukraine-related thread by participation and effort, and many more people who just generally lower the sanity waterline by seeing it as yet another metaphorical battleground for the US culture war where the only thing that matters is Hunter Biden and which side is more (fake and) gay. This seems to be about what to expect for a topic that attracts agenda posters but lies outside of the specialisation of anyone producing the sort of deep dives that tend to cause productive discussion around here.
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18d ago
Has it? Americans understand Japanese culture far less than any European one, and conventional wisdom says that by V-J day the cold war was already going full steam ahead, so the Americans largely decided to leave the system that at least was manifestly not communist alone, rather than trying to impose some sweeping changes, fat-fingering them and risking another North Korea or China.
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23d ago
hack the US
What does that even mean? I don't think Manning hacked anything, let alone "the US".
I have also heard the part where Assange helped Manning with the commands to run to exfiltrate the data, but I wouldn't be so confident that to ban this would define a test that normal journalists would generally pass. Have none of them provided their sources with some kind of technical support, like "here's how you use this camera you asked us to lend you"? What about interviewers that help their interviewees tweak the formulation of a statement that winds up becoming the linchpin of the latter's violation of some confidentiality law, like "S: So what I'm saying is the US r... rev... - J: reverse engineered? - S: ... reverse engineered alien technology, right."?
"Resign immediately" seems like the (morally+personally) least fraught option. It's not quite the trolley problem, because if you redirect the trolley the lone person gets to beat you up or worse before they get run over (or just elect a different switch operator).
What would you have done differently if you were elected leader of Germany at some point in the WWI/WWII interregnum, perhaps on 1932-12-03 for a maximum sense of historical inevitability? (...in 1944? ...of North Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam war, for opposite political valence and ultimate outcome?) Nations and polities and the whole web of human interactions have enough momentum that at some point, their only available choices might indeed be surrender (wronging themselves) and villainy (wronging others). That Israel's population and Netanyahu in particular had no better options after the Hamas attack does not absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions, since decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.
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