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Notes -
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II
(c) Feb 19, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first four posts in the series were:
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II.
1 Introduction
The Nazi worldview, as definitively expressed in Hitler's Mein Kampf, has certain similarities with the pagan worldview, certain similarities with the Judeo-Christian worldview, and certain similarities with the woke worldview.
Like a pagan, Hitler is righteously proud of the conquests of other peoples by his people, and he credits these conquests to the greatness of his folk and their leaders. Hitler's glorification of Bismarck and the German military command in Vol 1 Ch 10 of Mein Kampf, for example, echoes the tribute to Shield Sheafson's mægen in the opening stanza of Beowulf.
However, unlike the pagans, but ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Nazism also posits a transcendent, universal moral order. This seems an odd conjunction, and it is an odd conjunction, but the Nazi rationale is as follows: (1) the fabric of Nature has a fixed moral compass, and (2) as it happens, that compass inexorably points toward the triumph of the German Volk and Reich [people and state].
This Nazi picture of the world entails a theory of social justice rife with double-standards, and this is where it comes to resemble wokeness. In the Nazi view, those people and nations who stand in the way of German imperialism, or who make convenient targets of opportunity for German imperialism, are stripped of their would-be human rights by the Law of Nature. On the other hand, when the shoe is on the other foot and Germany is defeated (in World War I) and imposed upon (by the Versailles treaty), Hitler wails with righteous indignation that would make Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates look like trifling wanna-be's in the arena of victim politics.
2 The Competing Mythologies of Nazism and Judaism
This section compares the grand narrative of Mein Kampf with that of the Hebrew Bible in terms of (1) a vision of transcendent purpose, (2) their respective views of conflict and conquest, and (3) where they place credit and blame for national victories and national catastrophes. It may seem strange on its face to compare the Bible with Mein Kampf, but I believe the comparison bears discussing. Both books are manifestos of sorts, and both lay out ideas that nations have felt were worth fighting over.
My interest here is not in questions of who were the Hebrews, or who were the interwar Germans, or who was better than whom. I am less interested in comparing groups of people than in comparing ideologies -- that is, in the effect the Hebrew Bible had on the Hebrews and their cultural descendants, and the effect that Nazism had on the Germans of the Weimar Republic and their cultural descendants. Before they became Jews, the Hebrews were bronze age barbarians; before they became Nazis, the Germans were Western Christians like me. I doubt that any ideology is going to come along and make people like me act like the Hebrews in the book of Joshua; moreover, if there is an ideology that could do that, it isn't in the Bible -- because I've already bought into that one and I am still not interested in launching wars of aggression in the Holy Land or anywhere else. On the other hand, an ideology did come along and turn people like me into genocidal Nazis. So evidently these two ideologies have very different effects on their adherents.
I submit that key features of the Nazi ideology include the following:
Transcendent Purpose
The pagan worldview is one of shameless conquest of the weak by the strong. The conquest is naturally shameless because in the pagan view, Heaven, like Earth, is a theater of war between separate sovereigns. For example, the Romans presumed their gods favored them in battle (so long as the Romans had been properly pious), but they also presumed that their enemies' gods favored their own worshipers. Thus, the best the Romans could hope for from those foreign gods, as they prayed for in the evocatio, was that they would sit things out.
The Greek view was similar. Homer's Iliad depicts forces of Heaven engaged on both sides of the war:
In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side. As Abraham Lincoln wrote,
While Hitler's Mein Kampf espouses an ethos of shameless conquest, Mein Kampf is decidedly not a pagan book. Ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Mein Kampf extolls a vision of a singular, transcendent Higher Purpose. The first section of Vol I, Ch X contains Hitler's founding myth of the German Reich. In this section, Hitler mentions Nature as a singular, grand force in almost every paragraph. Moreover, Hitler casts Nature as a personified force: one which has goals, and which takes action to achieve those goals. For example, he writes,
For Hitler -- as for a Hebrew but not for a pagan -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict. In Hitler's view it is the side of the strong,
and Hitler tells us precisely who the strong happen to be:
So, the Nazi worldview holds that there is a moral compass woven into the fabric of the universe -- but instead of pointing North, it always points to Nazi.
Conflict and Conquest
The Hebrew vision, in contrast with the Nazi vision, is not one of eternal victory by the strong over the weak, nor of themselves over anyone else. It is a vision of progress toward peace. The envisioned peace is not ruled by the strongest tribe, nor by the Hebrews themselves, but ruled impartially by God:
The Biblical vision of a Messianic age of peace on earth stands in stark contrast, of course, to the Hebrews' narrative of their own national founding. When confronting their neighboring tribes, the Israelites are commanded by God, through Moses, to make them an offer they can't refuse, largely in the mold of pagans like of Pompey or Shield Sheafson:
Moreover, in case of the previous residents of the Holy Land, the Israelites are to make no offer and give no quarter, even to women and children -- more reminiscent more of Genghis Kahn, or perhaps of Hitler himself, than of Shield or Pompey:
Lo!
The Biblical stories of conquest and slaughter by the Hebrews are gruesome even for the ancient world. One key thing about them, however, is that they probably never happened. The rough consensus of secular historians is that the tales of ruthless conquest in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua are legends and fables. The fact that that is the story the Israelites chose to tell about themselves tells us something about their culture -- but exactly what it tells us is subject to debate, and that debate should be constrained, first and foremost, by the facts of history. We know a lot about what the Nazis did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for their what they did in their founding mythos. We know a little about what the Hebrews did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for what they did in their founding mythos. What is not reasonable -- though it seems to be fairly popular -- is to speculate about the cultural impacts of those narratives without looking primarily at what their believers have done.
Unfortunately, we don't have copious records of what the ancient Hebrews did. However, if they had been conquistadors like the Assyrians or the Persians, we would know; ergo they weren't. The Hebrews may well have tried to subjugate their neighbors and failed in the endeavor. They probably would have if they could have. Why do I believe that? Because that is what everyone would have if they could have in the bronze age. We have no reason to think the Hebrews were different in this respect, Biblical or historical. But precisely because that was typical for the age, that tells us nothing about the effects of the Bible on Hebrew culture and morals, except that it didn't miraculously turn them into pacifists overnight. Surprise! The Bible didn't even turn the Hebrews into non-pagans overnight, and the Bible itself is clear about that.
What we do have records of, and very good records, is Hebrew law. Now if God came down from Heaven and cast a spell on the Hebrews to turn them all into superhuman moral geniuses, then we should expect them to have suddenly implemented a system of laws whose wisdom and insight meets or exceeds those of the most enlightened societies of today. That didn't happen (Surprise!). But the relevant control group against which to measure the ancient Hebrews is not the Kingdom of Heaven, or even the modern West; it is their contemporary neighbors. By that standard, I submit that Hebrew law was a deeply important and substantially unique departure in the direction of modern morality. I will make that argument at length in future posts, but here I will restrict the discussion to how the Biblical view of conflict and conquest differs from the Nazi vision.
In the Nazi story, as we saw above, the Reich was born in battle. In the Hebrews' account, their nation is born when God forms a covenant with Abraham (notably in direct contrast to Hitler's disdain for origins based on mere talk).
Having been brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is easy for us to overlook something in this passage, that to the pagan mind would have been quite puzzling: what's the point of blessing the families of the Earth? except maybe with the end of a spear, a la Pompey or Shield Sheafson?
To the point, the Nazis had no interest in being a blessing to all of the families of the Earth. Hitler's long-term vision, noted above, is eternal victory of the strong (viz., the German Volk and Reich) over the weak (viz., whomever is convenient to attack and exploit). In the short run, he has his sights set on the seizure of foreign lands, through wars of aggression, for the purpose of Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people. If there are others currently in that "living space" -- such as there were in the lands of the Soviet Union which he intended to seize and occupy -- Hitler held it is only right that they be killed or displaced to make room for better people.
Note that a pagan would not need a pretext for conquest, but a Nazi -- on the view of a transcendent moral order -- does. In service of this pretext, Hitler uniquely dignifies and uniquely and humanizes the Aryan race:
By contrast, he expresses relative disdain for the Slavic people of Russia and Eastern Europe, whom he intends to attack and kill or displace. Hitler's disdain for the Slavs takes on special significance in the context of an "eternal victory of the strong over the weak", and of Hitler's imminent plans for war:
And of course Hitler spews venomous hatred toward the Jews, whom he would like to extirpate from the Earth.
I am afraid many readers will have trouble stepping outside the Judeo-Christian moral waters in which they swim, whether they profess belief in God or not. So, at the risk of being redundant, I repeat that a pagan wouldn't need a pretext for conquest or slaughter; a pagan conqueror would not need to disparage his victims, and a pagan conqueror would have no need for Hitler's view that might makes right. For a true barbarian, might makes might, might is enough, and "right" need not enter the picture.
The Hebrew Bible has many verses that give Jews special status in their own country, which celebrate their victories (real or imagined) over foreigners, and which warn against mixing in marriage with foreigners. But none of that makes it unique. What makes it unique is that it contains verses that point toward equal human rights under Natural Law, with repeated emphasis on equal rights for non-Jews. For example,
Neither pagans nor Nazis entertain this idea of equal treatment under law for mere human beings dwelling among them, even as an aspiration.
The Hebrews are commanded to conquer the Holy Land and kill its inhabitants. That is bronze age business as usual. What is not business as usual is that they are specifically commanded not to attack their other neighbors, nor to take so much as a cup of water from them without paying for it, even though they have the power to do so. For example,
Pompey would just be befuddled by this, and so would Hitler.
In summary, Mein Kampf and the Hebrew Bible are both narratives of a transcendent purpose, but the consistent purposeful vision of Mein Kampf is domination by the strong of the weak, forever, the strong being Deutschland (uber alles). The Hebrew Bible has sprinkles of jingoism and chauvinism as well, and to expect otherwise would be ridiculous; but it also contains sprinkles of other things, that are mostly if not wholly missing from the pagan worldview and the Nazi worldview: equal treatment of mere human beings under law at home, and a far future vision of peace on Earth abroad. In the sweep of history, the fact that so many people even view these as good things is relatively new in the world -- but Germany consciously relapsed from those aspirations under the Nazi rule.
Credit and Blame
When the Germans win, Hitler credits this to the greatness of the German people and their leaders:
By contrast, in the Hebrew Bible, it is not the Hebrews who are said to be mighty, but their enemies:
Whereas the Nazi narrative credits their victories to the German Volk and Reich, the Hebrew story credits the victories to God:
Lest the Hebrews dare to think they earned God's favor because they are such good people, their Bible makes it clear that they did not and are not:
So the Nazi and Jewish views of who gets credit for their national victories are quite opposite. But so are their accounts of who gets the blame for their national defeats. On those occasions where the Hebrews are defeated or oppressed, the Hebrew bible -- particularly in the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- places the blame squarely and somberly on the Hebrews themselves. In a twisted sense, this is the one point of agreement between the two ideologies: Nazi mythology places the blame for the German national catastrophes on the Hebrews as well. I could quote Hitler ad nauseam on this, but I don't think the fact is in dispute, and I don't care to repeat Hitler's words on the subject.
Ѻ
To summarize, the Nazi ideology is distinguished by
3 Hitler and Plato
In Vol 1, Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the moral and economic decay of Germany that he believes led to its defeat in World War I. Echoing the narrative of Plato's Republic, Hitler describes a state which has regressed, in his view at least, from timarchy (military rule), to oligarchy (unrestrained greed and rule of the wealthy), to libertine, Marxist-leaning populism. The parallels between Mein Kampf and Plato's Republic Book VIII are too close to be ascribed to chance -- though Hitler doesn't mention Plato, and I do not know whether Hitler had read Plato's Republic, or whether he and Plato witnessed similar turns of events two thousand years apart, or both.
Like Plato, Hitler views the transition from timarchy to oligarchy to be driven by moral decay, and in particular by a cultural shift in what is held in esteem. He writes,
Both Plato and Hitler write that after the descent from timarchy to oligarchy, the greedy predation of the oligarchs gives birth to a class of ruined men, who then form a cohort of non-working poor. As Plato puts it,
Hitler tells a similar story of exploitation and inequality:
For Hitler as for Plato, the oligarchic state soon degenerates into one of class division, moral libertineness, anti-nationalism, anti-meritocracy, multiculturalism, and general half-heartedness in all attempts to keep order. It then further degenerates toward leftist populism of some form (communism for Hitler, and dimokratia for Plato).
There is one point, however, where Hitler and Plato part ways. For Plato it is all about values; for Hitler, it is all about race. Hitler's final assessment of the root of his country's problems is this:
On this score Hitler diverges from Plato, and more closely resembles another noted thinker of the Western canon.
4 Hitler and Ibram Kendi
A colleague of mine at a certain university (which will go unnamed) once described certain bureaucrats of that university's administration as Nazis. What he meant was that they were ruthless, tribal authoritarians -- which they were -- but something about the metaphor struck me as wrong. It took me a few seconds to put my finger on where the comparison broke down, after which I blurted out in protest, "Nazis were effective".
There are many disparaging charges that could be rightly leveled at Hitler, but pipsqueak is not among them. Ibram X. Kendi -- author of the woke manifesto How to be an Antiracist -- is, by contrast, a poster child of pipsqueak. For that reason among others, it feels strange to analogize Hitler to Kendi. Nevertheless, the calculus of ideological similarity puts these two on the same plane in several key respects.
For starters, both Hitler and Kendi hate capitalism. Hitler writes, for example,
and for Kendi:
There is some nuance to Hitler's views from the standpoint of terminology: he is both fanatically anti-capitalist and fanatically anti-Marxist. For many readers, "capitalism" and "Marxism" are ideological polar opposites, but Hitler's ideological emphasis is different from that of most readers. For him, both Marxism and capitalism are tools of an international Jewish conspiracy to exploit the Aryan people, with national socialism standing in direct opposition to both. What Marxism and capitalism have in common for Hitler, besides their association with Jewry, is their materialist, individualistic, and anti-nationalist character. In any case he uses "Jewish", "capitalist", and "Marxist" all as slurs, often together in reference to some tripartite conspiratorial hydra:
Both Hitler and Kendi identify predatory capitalist oligarchy as the immutable genetic characteristic of a certain race. Hitler of course identifies it with the Jews:
Kendi has a different race in mind:
The similarity is quite remarkable. Whites for Kendi, like Jews for Hitler, are a race of (1) genetically disposed (2) deceivers and (3) capitalist (4) exploiters. They just can't help it.
It must be pointed out that Kendi's statements here are beyond the pale even for woke pundits, and most notable SJW's would not follow as far in Hitler's ideological footsteps as Kendi does. It must also be pointed out, however, that Kendi's comments were well known for years, and he was seldom if ever denounced for them by the woke left -- so, while unusual, these statements were not particularly unwelcome. If a right winger had said any such thing, about any group of people, you can be sure that woke cancel-culture would have unearthed the offense and kicked into high gear over it.
Like Hitler, Kendi sees his people as the heirs of a glorious past with glorious leaders:
And he holds that it remained glorious until the capitalist exploiter race stepped in and ruined it all with their underhanded backstabbing:
Even Hitler doesn't blame the Jews entirely for the German defeat in WWI. He actually says the Germans brought it on themselves by.... wait for it... tolerating the Jews and their capitalist exploitation in their midst! Similarly, Kendi gives a nostra culpa [our fault] on behalf of his people, blacks. The problem with blacks, says Kendi, is that too many of them feel they are to blame, instead of whites, for their lagging outcomes:
5 Conclusion
Hitler claimed that the Jews had undermined the German war effort in World War I. In truth, there were probably a lot of people who contributed to Germany's loss in WWI and its subsequent economic collapse, and of course some of them were Jews. But in all likelihood, most of them were not Jews, and there was no massive program to exterminate those people, either as individuals or as members of any group they belonged to. On the other hand, around 30,000 Jews won medals for bravery fighting on the German side in the WWI -- and yet many of those very men, along with their families, perished in Nazi death camps under the pretext that they were somehow enemies of the Reich.
In particular, Hitler said he despised Jews because of their penchant for Marxism. It is true that Marxist leadership, in Germany and elsewhere, was populated disproportionately by Jews -- but if you want a litmus test for likely Marxists, current or former member of the Communist party is a pretty good one, and yet there was no systematic effort by the Nazis to exterminate them, of the sort that was directed against Jews (who merely might be Marxists). These obvious failures of the shoe-on-the-other-foot test, once we think to apply it, tell us that the stated reasons for the Nazi persecution of the Jews must have been quite different from the actual reasons. That is the nature of group guilt, aka social justice.
Hitler claimed that the Jews of Europe needed to be exterminated, war heroes and all, because they were a menace to his people. Alright then, Austria and Prussia had been a menace to their neighbors in Europe for hundreds of years, and their union in the German Empire was a greater menace after that. By Hitler's logic, the Allies would have been within their rights to implement a final solution to the German problem while they had Germany at their mercy following WWI. In hindsight that would have saved the allies a great deal of blood, toil, and tears. If the Treaty of Versailles were a Jewish conspiracy (as Hitler loudly charged), then Germany should have expected Old Testament justice out of the deal. But the Versailles treaty, while it caused significant hardship for the German people, was no Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport). And yet how did Hitler respond to it? Vae victis [woe to the vanquished] in the eternal triumph of the strong over the weak? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not really. He wailed that it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination against the Natural Order. Poor baby. That is the nature of double standards.
Group guilt and double standards: that is the nature victim identity politics.
What would you think of posting these in their own mega submission, instead of the CWR? Or separate individual submissions even.
I am not sure. The unifying theme of the posts is in the main theater of the culture war, but some of the essays don't have any visible connection to it as stand-alone posts. Any input would be welcome.
I'd personally appreciate it if you removed them from CWR one way or another (but feel free to put them elsewhere, like I said). To me, they're too long and single purpose for the amount of visibility in the CWR thread. But, you get engagement, so it's not at all obvious to me that others would agree.
As far as my imaginary vote goes, I prefer the ability to decide for myself what posts are interesting and what posts are not. Moreover, most of the utility of this place is in the discussions. I don't see the point in having to trust someone here to decide what post is likely to generate good discussion or not, when we can just wait and see.
To that extent I'd personally appreciate if you stopped asking posters to not post, and instead just clicked the - on the left.
I did not in fact ask that this poster not post. I asked their thoughts about posting outside of CWR.
This is...very much not the same as my intentionally ban-worthy douchebaggery from a bit ago.
Edit: hm, my "I'd personally appreciate" is closer to asking they not, but still better than than the consensus building antagonism I rightfully ate a ban for.
I think this is also essentially (or entirely? I don't care enough to read too much of their user history) single issue posting, which is against the rules. Iirc copy pasting in a whole substack is also frowned upon, and it's adjacent to that. So, I'll report - but I think discussing with someone about their posting is more direct and productive than just clicking report.
And, OP has -12.
I am doing exactly the same thing, minus the report. To that extent we agree.
I don't know what this means. I already see moderation here as way too user dominated. I'd prefer it if the mods weighed the quality and effort of the post put forth rather than buckling to dislikes and mass reports. Though that seems to be the opposite of what they are doing.
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While my criticism of your entire thesis from your last chapter applies to this one as well, probably even more so, one point I want to (again) make is that Slavs were considered Aryan according to Nazi racial theory and Nazi racial law.
Hitler's project was pan-Germanism, which he is delineating as exclusionary of Slavs. That does not mean Hitler did not consider Slavs to be Aryan. The Nazi hatred towards the Soviet Union was foremost driven by Communism and not any belief that Slavs are non-Aryan or sub-human.
In contrast, the Nazi racial theory on the Aryans has essentially been vindicated by recent genetic analysis showing all European cultures descend from a common Indo-European culture. They call that culture "Aryan", but all European cultures descend from it according to the theory, and that theory has been confirmed by more recent genetic and linguistic analysis.
Hitler's writing here is also cogent- rejecting the notion that "Germanization" means teaching an Arab or Chinese person the language and having him vote in a German election makes him German, which is the theory that has been forced onto Europe since the defeat of Hitler, to catastrophic consequences.
Aryan or not (and I'm skeptical of that pictographic source), Hitler considered the Russian people, aside from their aristocracy, to be congenitally inferior to Germans. Do you dispute this?
For example, in Mein Kampf he wrote,
That perspective has nothing to do with Hitler's political objectives or animosity towards the Soviet Union. Hitler acknowledged racial inequality even within the German people has well. I also think even many HBD-aware Russians would be sympathetic to the suggestion that the Russians seem to have less capacity for constructive politics... certainly the evidence is stacked against them on that question, with the eternal dysfunction of Russian politics and the bright spots being disproportionately associated with leaders of German ancestry...
Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union is not based on the Slavs it's based on Bolshevism. It's a dishonest reading of Mein Kampf to pretend otherwise. He could not possibly be more clear that he regarded Bolshevism as the ultimate enemy, but you somehow manage to entirely elide Hitler's self-stated reason for his animosity towards the Soviet Union in his own work, which is the traditional approach taken from the mainstream perspective. That animosity was not derived from his plausible claim that the Russians have less capacity for constructive statecraft, or some claim that the Slavs were not Aryan even though they were explicitly considered Aryan in German racial law.
It's worth pointing out that Hitler's theory he applies to the Russians here he applies to the Germans as well:
Hitler's theory on this front is also not related to his hostility towards the Soviet Union, it's Bolshevism which he makes abundantly clear.
Edit: i.e., from Mein Kampf:
But somehow, without fail, the mainstream seems to interpret Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union as being related to Aryan racial theory relegating Slavs as subhuman. It's an intentional lie to hide the actual reason he was hostile to Russia.
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No, none of that is in line with Nazi ideology. Hitler had no plans to exterminate the French despite them being a massive thorn in Germany's side. He wanted to weaken the French state significantly such that they'd not be able to contest German dominance of Europe but the French people had a place in the New Order. And he wanted an alliance with Britain the entire time. According to Hitler, Western Europeans were basically fine, just misguided. Western Europeans/Aryans were not supposed to be going around exterminating eachother.
It was in the East where peoples were going to be compulsorily removed from their land, enslaved and treated harshly in various ways. And even there there's room for moderation. The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.
The argument doesn't depend on Hitler wanting to exterminate the French. The Jews had no plans to exterminate the Germans; they were just a threat of some sort. Hitler's axiom is that threats to your national safety can be preempted by genocide. Germany was a threat of far greater magnitude to the Allies in 1919 than the Jews ever were to Germany, so by Nazi logic the allies were entitled to exterminate the Germans in 1919.
It would only be unhelpful if it didn't go far enough.
..are you trolling?
Morgenthau plan leaking led to the war taking a month more according to front line commanders.
The plan itself would have ensured a pro-Soviet revolt in Western Germany.
It was a remarkably idiotic idea, impractical, odious and worst of all a public policy.
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This just isn't how Nazism works. Why didn't they exterminate the French? Because they were not in favour of 'exterminating anyone who is a potential threat to your national safety'.
You can't generalize Nazi anti-semitism out like that. Jews were considered specially, different from every other people. They didn't launch a boycott of French shops in Germany, they didn't enforce various discriminatory laws against people who married French. They didn't mark out French people in public. Jews were seen as subversive and extremely dangerous, in part due to the revolutions that Jewish communist leaders launched in 1919. The Spartacists and the Bavarian Socialist Republic for instance.
You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology. Whenever Nazis looked out at the world, they saw a global network of Jewish financiers and media working against them. Paying off Churchill's debts: Henry Strakosch. Behind Roosevelt, Harry White and Morgenthau.
I think I understand that tolerably. The question remains what is the rationale for this antisemitism? My only assumption is that it rests on the alleged threat the Jews pose to Germany. Am I missing something? If it doesn't rest on that, what does it rest on?
There's a difference between an enemy-for-the-moment who might have been and might in the future be a friend and a straight-up defectbot who is permanently hostile regardless of context.
To take the debate to safer pastures, 40K Orks are bad. They are all bad. They are genetically programmed to be bloodthirsty killers and are inherently incapable of peaceful coexistence or advanced civilisation. They are not and can never be in a moral community with humanity, will always be dangerous regardless of social context, and as such they are djur in the Ender Quartet typology, the "dire beast that comes in the night with slavering jaws" and they should be exterminated down to the last gretchin because that is the only way to end the conflict with them while preserving humanity.
I don't know all that much about Hitlerian ideology, but if he considered Jews to be in a similar category to Orks and Frenchmen to not be so, well, there you go.
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I would quibble with this. Between the Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, great latitude was afforded to German soldiers to kill the political elements of the Soviet state. Certainly the default approach to any captured Soviet political agent was summary execution. General guidelines for troop conduct, as well as orders circulated by corps and army commanders, all emphasized that the goal of the war was the destruction of the Soviet state and the eradication of Bolshevik influence. Furthermore, the degree to which Nazi propaganda conflated communists and Jews meant that in practice they were often viewed as one and the same and treated accordingly.
Within Germany and other occupied countries, having been a former member of the communist party was plenty enough to secure your arrest, and very frequently your execution. (Ironically, during the Great Terror, it was also very bad to be a former KDP member if you were living in the Soviet Union.)
Thanks. I changed this to:
Upwards of 20% of the KDP (communist party of Germany) in Germany were killed by the Nazis so I think this is fair to say.
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You go from
to
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.
Yes that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out.
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
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Well, there is at least one book by the woke left denouncing those statements - "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi, where Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views and uses it as an example on how, in the course of being an antiracist, one should not be an anti-white racist, either.
Well, darn. I tried to piece the contents of that book together from snippets without reading it, because I don't want to buy it on principle and I couldn't find the full text online. Now I have to spend Saturday at the book store reading it in an easy chair.
Thanks for the info. I will make appropriate edits when I have time.
Thrift Books has preowned copies from $5.29.
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Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
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There's a short summary of the book's chapter, including chapter 10 that discusses the anti-white racism part, here
I'm sometimes convinced I'm the only person to have actually read this book or DiAngelo's White Fragility. The latter is complete empty-headed twaddle mixed with obvious bait for grifting (ie. not-so-subtle promotion of DiAngelo's course on this), the former, while not high lit, is at least interesting in the sense of being built around Kendi's personal narrative and continuous course of absolving himself of his past racism/sexism/homophobia etc. through the act of confession and self-contrition.
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I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?
He calls it a "fallacious idea" right there.
More to the point, though, it's best read within the context of the entire book which, as said, is Kendi using examples of his own life as examples of fallacious ideas in general in the process of confession and self-contrition.
Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:
and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?
This really sounds like nitpicking and goalpost moving, setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
Kendi's clear message in this chapter is that his youthful views are bad and it's bad to hold views like this. He could have very well chosen not to include a chapter on the book on why anti-white racism is bad, and yet he chose to include this. Furthermore, to my knowledge, it was only after this book that people even started to pay attention to what he said in 2003, so he was almost certainly the one doing the most to even publicize the fact that he had held these views in the first place - why would you manufacture plausible deniability to something you are promoting yourself?
So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?
You wrote:
My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:
Yes, especially within the context of the book, the chapter is indeed an act of self-flagellation over having held views of the described sort in his youth. I'm not sure what sort of a further retraction than what was described you're looking for here.
Imagine someone who had published an analogous article about blacks to what Kendi said about whites, that was part of a searchable public record. Now imagine they apologized by saying,
Now imagine that was their apology and they left it at that. Would that be OK with you?
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This is a somewhat one-dimensional interpretation of Ancient Judaism IMO. We have plenty of examples of Jews discriminating against groups of people seen as enemies, and excluding them much like the Nazis originally wanted to exclude Jews:
Deut 23:3: “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you."
Ezra 9: “After these things had been accomplished, the leaders approached me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations are like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. Indeed, the Israelites have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, so that the holy seed has been mixed with the people of the land. And the leaders and officials have taken the lead in this unfaithfulness! When I heard this report, I tore my tunic and cloak, pulled out some hair from my head and beard, and sat down in horror.”
Joshua 23: “ The LORD has driven out great and powerful nations before you, and to this day no one can stand against you. One of you can put a thousand to flight, because the LORD your God fights for you, just as He promised. Therefore watch yourselves carefully, that you love the LORD your God. For if you turn away and cling to the rest of these nations that remain among you, and if you intermarry and associate with them, know for sure that the LORD your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become for you a snare and a trap, a scourge in your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the LORD your God has given you.
We have examples of ethnic narcissism, similar to Nazi Germany:
We have a genocidal drive against the Amaleks, whose entire seed needs to be genocided because they attacked Israel when they were weak:
The punishment for belonging to a different religion in Ancient Israel was death, something considerably worse than camps before exportation to Madagascar:
Jews often blamed their troubles and defeats on allowing foreign people and their customs, or marrying foreigners. It’s not quite correct to say that ancient Jews did not attribute victories to themselves. The God is themselves, it is their own priestly class who sacrifices to God, it is the organization of their whole peoplehood. “Israel is rewarded for her faithfulness” is functionally identical to “we deserve this land for our righteousness”, it is just cloaked in religious language so that the priestly class and hierarchies are justified. If Ancient Israel had a group of foreigners with foreign customs living amongst them, God (by which I mean priest and prophet of the Israelite community) would command them to be slain, and probably their whole family, and all their animals as well. I suppose if they converted, they would be allowed to participate socially after the eleventh generation, depending on how a Rabbi wanted to interpret Deut 23:3. But when you read “God says these people need to be driven from the land because they are evil”, it’s a little silly to interpret this other than “the Jews believe they deserve the land for not being evil” — it is just rendered in a justifiable and humble way by the priests.
The Ancient Israelite “rendering” of their superiority is significantly better and more prosocial than Nazi Germany, and much more sophisticated. But IMO it is still identity politics. It reminds me of a Spanish Conquistador “compassionately” conquering Mexico for God, because God is their God too, and God wants them to be Christians and to be guided by God’s representative on Earth, the Spanish Crown. This is just poetic identity politics.
I edited the post, specifically the section called "Conflict and Conquests", to address this.
Basically I think you are comparing the Hebrews to perfect angels based on their mythology, whereas I am comparing them to Nazis and pagans based on their laws.
As you said,
What we disagree about is that I think that difference is exactly what is important, and that it is so large as to be rightly considered categorical, regardless of anecdotal counterexamples.
This part, however, I think is self-evidently incorrect:
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Did you intend this as a top-level post? Or was it supposed to be a reply to @Rosencrantz2’s post about the state of EU-USA relations?
Thanks, deleted and reposted!
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I’d like to bring up a comment by @ResoluteRaven from last week’s thread:
It's not the first time I see this line of reasoning getting brought up, usually in the narrower context of the terrible destruction of the 30 Years’ War which @Capital_Room brought up in the same comment chain.
I’m not much of a historian but still this doesn’t appear to hold water in my view. As far as I can tell, the era of European sectarian wars (mainly) between Catholics and Protestants wasn’t ended by classical liberalism but by monarchist absolutism i.e. a new order where sovereign authority is centralized and unrestrained, feudalism is gradually dismantled and the state supersedes the church in terms of power and influence. Local lords and religious leaders no longer had the means to start sectarian wars in the first place. There were no more peasant rebellions fueled by sectarian grievances (among other things). This doesn’t mean that the Catholic church wasn’t in a hegemonic position in various states or that Protestants weren’t in effect treated as second-class subjects, but that’s another issue.
Now I suppose one can argue that this all actually represented the birth of classical liberalism because reasons, but I find that rather far-fetched.
Tangentially, this is why the occasional narrative that Islam needs a reformation is insane; it's currently going through a reformation, that's why it's gotten so violent (like the 30 years war etc.)
I had a discussion last year with a rather elderly person who'd spent most of their career in the middle east, and one of the points that stuck out to me was the point made about how not regionally explosive the Gaza War had been amongst the Arabs, or even the Palestinians. Not only was there not a pan-Arab coalition, there wasn't even a pan-Palestinian intifada, despite the efforts of some.
There was debate about whether that was more due to a change of political Islam or the death of pan-arabism in the middle east, but I loosely recall an opinion poll survey from the early 2010s (right before / as ISIS was getting started) that showed how support for suicide bombing had dropped over time, corresponding loosely for when religious suicide bombings shifted from being a 'resistance against the outsider' to 'domestic civil war tactic' in Iraq.
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Absolutism was well underway before the thirty years war started, and Protestantism was the main reason it failed in the HRE.
This is a federalism issue, not a citizens' rights issue. The individual "princely" states in the post-Westphalia HRE were pretty absolutist. (Although the Peace of Westphalia included limited protection for religious minorities.)
The way I was taught about it was that there is an ongoing trend from a "medieval" model (strong territorial magnates, levy armies raised locally by said magnates, weak kings, self-governing towns with considerable privileges) to an "early modern" model (strong states, territorial nobility as a rent-drawing fossil, a royal government not run by the territorial nobility but whose members get ennobled and form a new court nobility, standing armies paid out of taxes, general drift towards centralisation and absolutism). The driving force is improvements in siege artillery, which changes the nature of warfare in a way which favours centralisation and professionalism in the military.
This process starts in the second half of the C15, with Edward IV and Henry VII renormalising England after the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1471-1509), Louis XI renormalising France after the French civil war that Henry V of England famously took advantage of to restart the Hundred Years' War, including bringing Burgundy and Brittany under royal control (1461-1483), and Ferdinand and Isabella unifying Spain (1474-1504). There is then a gradual process of consolidation (setting up increasingly bureaucratised royal governments, weeding out remaining territorial magnates who were strong enough in their areas to pose a threat, reforms to military and taxation systems). This process is interrupted by religious conflict during the Reformation (except in Spain which remains unified and Catholic, which is why Spain under the early Habsburgs is dominant despite being, well, Spain - they had higher state capacity) but continues afterwards. The first monarchs to complete this process are Louis XIII after he appoints Richelieu in 1624, Charles I during the personal rule after 1629 (and also Cromwell and his major-generals, after which the English decide to do something else which is not that, with long-term consequences for world history).
When you apply this logic to German-speaking Europe, the key point is that the weakening of the HRE (to the benefit of the major German "princes") is an orthogonal process to this kind of state-formation. The tl;dr is that the key points in the decine of the centralised HRE are the fall of the Hohenstauffen in 1254 and the Golden Bull in 1356 - well before the state-formation process we are talking about. The Henry VII/Louis XI style consolidation happens in the 1400s at the level of individual German states like Austria, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg. After the 30 Years' War, the second stage development of early modern absolutist states happens at that level as well - mostly in Brandenburg and Austria.
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In your version of events, the relationship between the monarchs still follows the classical liberalism narrative.
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The argument, AIUI, isn't that classical liberalism brought this about — as you note, that's ahistorical — but that it's the other way around: it was this that brought about classical liberalism later. Because, as you note, a new political order rose due to material, non-ideological reasons. Liberalism, the argument goes, was a later rationalization created post hoc to retroactively justify these, and other subsequent changes, ideologically.
Not to say I entirely buy that argument myself. But it's the one I see held forth most often. And if it's not post hoc rationalization of religious tolerance being argued as the source of liberalism, then the next most common position I see argued is that it was a post hoc rationalization for the rise of a mercantile/capitalist "bourgeoise" middle class ("middle" because they're somewhere between the traditional "noble" and "peasant" divisions) to increasing prominence.
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It appears to me that the death of "classical liberalism" has been greatly exaggerated.
It was legal to own slaves in the US up until the 1860s. Has the US been a classically liberal society since its inception? If no, then we have to establish the start and end dates we have in mind for "classical liberalism". If yes, then classical liberalism is compatible with slavery -- and if it's compatible with slavery, then it's surely compatible with SJWs and Trump and whatever else people are worried about now.
Let's also not forget that up until the early 20th century, many western nations took a much dimmer view of homosexuality, blasphemy, obscenity, etc. -- freedoms that would now be considered hallmarks of any "liberal" society.
I'm just really not sure what people are afraid of, or what they think has "ended". Do people think we're headed for another civil war? We already had one, and yet it's typical to say that the US was a "classically liberal" society both before and after. Do people think Trump is going to establish a dictatorship / one party rule? That's not going to happen, but even if he did, it's not clear to me that even that would be incompatible with classical liberalism, given how nebulous the term is.
The "peace treaty liberalism" of OP is compatible with all sorts of things, but that depends on the balance of power. A good example here is different understandings of religous freedom. Here in Austria, theres a bureaucratic process for becoming various levels of recognised as a religion, and it crucially involves the number of members. The rights you can claim soley based on your personal conscience are very limited - conversely, recognised religions have rights that in the US would immediately explode from satanic temple trolling. Our version is the peace treaty, the US is motivated by an abstract right.
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Yes, of course. I don't see how one could seriously argue that the US have been founded on anything else.
The thing is, it isn't. Which in part caused the Civil War after long and hard attempts to maintain a precarious pragmatic compromise. Because living up to those principles was incompatible with the survival of the original US but so was not doing so.
Yes.
I don't think that's likely, but yes, of course despotism is totally compatible with classical liberalism. So long as the despot is a classical liberal. Catherine the Great being the most well known example of this.
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A defense of... what, exactly? Haiti, Ukraine, and the Calculus of Sovereignty
Imagine that tomorrow, by some insane folly, Brazil decides to invade and annex Haiti. Brazil in general is... not great. Lots of poverty, questionable rule of law, wild swings in politics in recent years. But compared to Haiti, whose government is a strong contender for worst in the world? Living in a society merely as flawed as Brazil would be an incredible improvement. So okay, in our imagination, Brazil definitely annexed Haitian territory through unprovoked aggression. But would we encourage Haitians to resist? Put Haitian flags in our Twitter bios? Would we support a government that is failing its people? Or would we ask whether Brazilian rule, however illegitimate, might offer Haitians marginally better prospects? So there's the question: Under what conditions does a state's right to sovereignty outweigh its failure to secure the welfare of its people?
This is the question I keep trying to answer for myself on Ukraine. In 2022, I didn't know much about Ukraine but my stance aligned with the general consensus: Russia's invasion was a brazen violation of international law, and Ukraine's territorial integrity demanded defense. But after three years of stalemate, over 500,000 casualties reported, a failed counteroffensive, and no plausible path to Ukrainian victory, I'm asking "What's it all for?" The conflict will ultimately end in negotiated concessions. Crimea retained by Russia, Donbas partitioned, security guarantees exchanged. Why prolong a war of attrition that sacrifices a generation to marginally adjust the terms? Why fight for Ukraine at all?
Poland vs. Ukraine: Reform and Stagnation
For contrast, consider Poland, a nation that, like Ukraine, emerged from Soviet domination in 1991. Both inherited corrupt, centrally planned economies and oligarchic rot. Yet Poland since then has been growing like crazy and today boasts a GDP per capita around $21,000. Ukraine, by contrast, basically didn't advance at all, and was at $4,500 per capita pre-war. As I said, I was ignorant about the details before, and I am only slightly less ignorant now of the specifics of these two countries' trajectories, but as a big believer in Adam Smith's economics, I am convinced that a GDP of $4,500 indicates something really, really wrong with Ukrainian governance.
So if Poland were being invaded by Russia, I would see their post-Soviet trajectory as something worth dying for. I would feel like they were fighting to stay on the one true path, all that is good and right about liberal democracy. But Ukraine? "Fighting for all that's good and right" is definitely the vibe on Twitter, but where is the evidence that Ukraine is on the path to becoming Poland? Okay, they elected Zelenskyy in 2019, but what has he done? What have been the fruits of Ukrainian reforms?
Conclusion
Shouldn't the hypothetical Brazilians invading Haiti be greeted as liberators? It truly would be hard for Brazilian colonial rule to be any worse than the current government of Haiti. Ukraine isn't the basket case that Haiti is, but its pre-war stagnation, evidenced by a $4,500 GDP per capita, casts doubt on its claim to be a bastion of liberal democracy, an ideal actually worth dying for. I see no virtue in increasing this war's death toll merely to tweak an inevitable settlement's borders. Russia's aggression is unjust, but if Ukraine's fight preserves only a corrupt stasis rather than a transformative future, why are we supporting it? It used to be that more cynical people said the US supported Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, and it's good for us that their soldiers die. But now we just hear the idealistic case. Is the idealistic case strong?
I think what is causing some confusion here is that "sovereignty" is a bit of an innuendo in the Ukrainian context.
The contentious element of "Ukrainian sovereignty" is not the right of ethnic Ukrainians to rule themselves domestically, it's about Ukraine's right to join the Western block via institutions like the EU and NATO.
It's this element of foreign policy that Russia is concerned by and sees as a strategic threat - the loss of (somewhat) independent buffer states and Western domination of the Black Sea etc. Likewise, the Western block wants to pull Ukraine closer, and prevent it being dominated by Russia, for largely the same (mirrored) reasons.
So, when you see people talking about "Ukrainian sovereignty", remember that this is what we're really talking about. It has almost nothing to do with domestic rule, GDP growth or the welfare of the Ukrainian people. It's about Great Power politics and spheres of influence.
No, it isn't. Since the beginning of the war, Putin has been saying that he wants to "denazify" Ukraine, which in his language means changing the government to a pro-Russian one. There are four aims:
All these goals have something to do with the loss of sovereignty. This is obvious for (4), but also for (1) and (2). And anyway, the very concept of a sphere of influence is very anti-sovereignty: it means that a great power should have a say in what a lesser power does, so that lesser power is typically not sovereign.
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Yes, that's part and parcel of sovereignty. To be able to rule yourselves domestically but to have another power control your foreign relations means you are not sovereign.
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The U/R v.s. B/H comparison misses crucial details. E.g.:
1. U had several specific agreements with R about mutual recognition of sovereignty and territorial integrity: ([1] [2] [3] [4]), whereas B/H don't.
2. The U-R war destabilises EU (and the world in general) much more than what a B/H war would.
3. B wouldn't be on its way of becoming a superpower once it captured H, threatening the current superpowers and the status quo (more destabilisation, eventual return to cold-war era atrocities).
4.
One of the current superpowers hasn't specifically declared their recognition and support of H's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Essentially egging them on to do go ahead and resist the aggressor, knowing that they would have such a backup.
5. B hasn't been known to carry out extrajudicial murders / murder attempts on EU soil. And in a manner so grossly incompetent as to leave other people sick or dead from radiation poisoning. [2]
6. AFAIK, B is not currently carrying out a large hybrid warfare / psyop campaign vs. EU and US populations.
7. There's an unstated, unproven implication that, circa 2014, quality of life in R was significantly higher than in U.
8.
Same with this one.
Imo: severe, systemic violations of human rights, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature. Internal policies, which present a serious risk for the neighboring countries or planet as a whole -- e.g. incompetent handling of nuclear technology, failure to properly regulate and police weapon smuggling, and so on.
These should be proven to be taking place. Unfortunately, anything less than that will incentivise the invader to manufacture such violations to get themselves a casus belli, e.g. like R was doing with the supposed discrimination of R-speaking population in Ukraine.
This comparison is inaccurate also. E.g.: P was much further away from R's sphere of influence. Enjoyed a certain extent of protection from being a NATO member. Was not being controlled by an R puppet for a large chunk of its post-USSR existence.
U was not being given a chance to advance as much as it could. The ousting of -- a corrupt -- Russian puppet followed very closely by the Russian invasion and war, which pretty much has not stopped since then.
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I think the principle of ethnic national sovereignty is a bad idea. My questions would generally be “are people living there better off under whatever government happens to rule them?” And “Is the rest of the world more stable under the regime in question.” In such a light, assuming that Brazil could bring stability, rule of law, and resources for the reconstruction of Haiti, Haiti would be much better off under the Brazilian regime than as an independent state. Ukraine as well seems much better off split off from Crimea and Donbas but not at war, or in an alternative not offered, under a Russian puppet state but able to govern all of its territory. There are plenty of other cases proving this out. The Palestinians who accepted Israeli and gained citizenship are worlds better off than the ones who keep banging their heads against the IDF in hopes of an independent sovereign state. Add in for most of these failed states the loss of international stability as the people flood other countries to flee instability, criminal pirates or gangs trafficking drugs into other countries or simply rob shipping lanes. Is that really better than the bad old days of colonialism where these states that are basket cases full of drugs were modernized and crime was dealt with? If Haiti were French, is that terrible?
But Haiti was French, and Haiti being French is arguably the reason that Haiti is Haiti nowadays. If Haiti were never French (or Spanish either), then Haiti today might not be the Haiti we know. I imagine it's not like France just sheepishly gave up their colony for reasons of un-based-ness or whatever, there was a literal slave revolt. Perhaps the French thought they were slavedriving for the best interests of themselves and their slaves, but the Haitians/Taino clearly didn't see it that way.
Haiti was French 200+years ago, and Latin American societies under colonial domination for longer are significantly better off.
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In Haiti the life expectancy is currently 64 years on average. That’s about 60 years higher than the four year life expectancy of the slaves that were shipped to Haiti to work there. So yes, I would say Haiti is much better off as independent country than as a hellish French sugar gulag.
By this definition hospice homes are the worst hellholes on the planet.
(Or, to put it another way: this fails to take into account the mean age and health of said slaves that were shipped - it was not 'a representative sample of newborns from the population'.)
(I am well aware that even when taking this into account conditions were still hellish. Just making the point that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.)
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No. Ukraine is a corrupt country that has much more in common with Russia than with Western Europe or even Poland. Some, possibly even most, of the monetary aid we send is purloined by the leaders of Ukraine. Also they have suspended elections indefinitely.
That's not to say that Russia was right to invade or that they deserve to win. In my mind, Russia was wrong and remains in the wrong.
Justice would be Ukraine recapturing its lost territory and getting reparations. But that's not possible. Instead, all that happens is that the war grinds on with more and more Ukrainian men being rounded up, forced into the military, and killed for nothing. And the injustice against these men, whose lives are being thrown away for nothing, is far greater than the injustice being done to the nation of Ukraine, a theoretical concept, and not even a particularly great one at that.
In other news, a Labour politician in the UK yesterday suggested conscripting British men to go fight in Ukraine. Maybe warmongers like her should strap on some body armor and go fight instead.
What's the evidence for this?
It is eastern europe. That is evidence enough. Source - eastern european whose country has been busy misappropriating eurofunds for the better part of three decades.
Story of corruption on every level of the war effort - from people bribing their way out of the military service, p out of country, procurement or whatnot are many. The idea that the western aid will be exempt is naïve.
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/1047201.html
but here is a random link. Ukrainians themselves think that corruption is barely below the ongoing war as a country problem. That says a lot.
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Broadly speaking, I think the a state's right to sovereignty ranks very highly, as long as the way it expresses that largely aligns with the wishes of its citizens, and doesn't directly impose externalities on its neighbors (this is why I don't view Palestinian sovereignty as particularly sacrosanct, as it's pretty much entirely directed towards starting unprovoked wars with its neighbor).
I guess you could make a case for violating sovereignty on utilitarian grounds, such as in the example you gave of Brazil taking over Haiti, which would almost certainly involve a substantial increase in living standards for the Haitians (as long as they were absorbed as full citizens into the new Brazil++). When it comes to Ukraine, it's not entirely clear to me whether you're talking about the potentially higher welfare of current Ukrainians if Ukraine became part of Russia, or simply if Ukraine stopped the current war with Russia. I suspect the latter, although the latter corresponds more with your Brazil/Haiti analogy.
Isn’t that the ball of wax with Ukraine? It is far from clear the eastern provinces were okay with the Kiev crew. It was a nation state but one with a slow burn civil war.
If you define a foreign supported filibuster, supported by armed interventions, as a civil war, I suppose.
Don’t be cute. Of course Russia supported the eastern province just like the US supported Kiev. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t on going kinetic activity by Kiev against the eastern province
That's not being cute, that's being clear on what happened, including not making silly false equivalences on the nature or even timing of support.
The separatist republic conflicts weren't a result of there being an organic uprising, and then the Russians moved in forces. The totally-not-Russian-government-supported Russian paramilitaries using Russia military equipment moved in forces to seize control (the filibuster element), and then when those forces failed to instigate a popular uprising and were being systemically pushed back by the Russians sent the army to directly fight to preserve their seized enclaves. It was only after the Russian military intervention that the filibuster-installed governments began to mobilize / conscript the locals in appreciable number.
Calling it a civil war before that point would simply be obfuscating the nature and role of the Russian instigation of the conflict, and calling it a civil war after that point would be obfuscating the nature and the role of Russia in directly intervening to secure and preserve those republics, whose claim to local support was, shall we say, lacking in externally verifiable evidence.
For the American support of Kiev to be just like the Russian support for the separatists, the Americans would have needed to instigate an filibuster invasion of Ukraine from the border, and then sent in armored columns when said filibuster force was resisted. This, notably, never happened.
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I was hoping the American Grand Strategy in Ukraine was to bleed Russia dry, at the expense of Ukraine. I think it has basically worked, as beyond WMD, I think Russia has very little in their arsenal to threaten the West with. I am surprised, however, by the turn of events where Trump accuses Ukraine of having started the Russian invasion. My hope remains that Trump is playing 4D chess with Putin, softening him up for a triumphant blow, but my hope wavers. It seems clear that Ukraine would be a much more likely and loyal ally than Russia could ever be.
In my view, here are the American interests in the region:
American fears:
The Biden strategy seemed pretty reasonable if tepid in light of these points. I'm not sure what Trump would think of the above.
Russia is stronger now than they've been in decades; Russians currently possesses the best army in the world which has been battletested by what was likely the 2nd best army in the world. Because Europe and the US have drained their armories, Russia is now deeply acquainted with NATO weapons and has developed effective countermeasures (e.g., the success rate of HIMARS is less than 10%). There are only a few weapons which the US and NATO have held in reserve, but there is little reason to think they will perform much better. In fact, the war has exposed NATOs reliance on fewer more advanced weapon systems will not work against a peer adversary. Even if these weapons were impressive, and they're not, there are simply too few of them and too small an arms industry to produce them in numbers which will significantly affect a serious conflict. When Europe drained its armories with promises of (subsidized) replacements from the US, they're getting contract delivery dates (and these are already being pushed back) in the 2030s. Meanwhile, Russia has repeatedly demonstrated effective hypersonic missiles which the West has no counter against. Instead of a bled Russia, you have a resurgent and invigorated one.
This war should be a bat to the side of the head of the US military and defense industrial complex and its satrapies that what they're doing is the wrong direction, but it's currently not even being perceived as a stiff wind.
Your hope is misplaced. Trump is pivoting towards the Pacific and a Great Powers game between China, Russia, and the US, with Europe being irrelevant because they are. Trump is abandoning the tut-tutting moralism empire and reestablishing sovereignty over core interests. IMO, Trump is going to use Ukraine to get a deal with Russia to counter Chinese influence. Putin will get additional land he's currently not occupying, Ukraine never in NATO, an end to the sanctions regime, some other concessions, and if I had to guess both the US and Russia will get some reparations from Ukraine in the form of mineral or other rights/payments. Ukraine is gone, destroyed, finished. It's a husk of a country only propped up by authoritarianism and foreign money.
I can see why Ukraine is in the Europeans' interests, and they can put-up or shut-up about it. The US should have never signed onto or encouraged this idiocy nor in expanding NATO past its sell-by date which was decades ago. The West got a gift when Putin took power; a person who could end the deracinated chaos which had befallen post-Soviet Russia but who was so pro-West he was almost a Europhile and wanted to integrate Russia into the market economies of Europe. Putin-lead Russia repeatedly attempted
reproachrapprochement with Europe from trying to get into NATO to willingly and seriously participating in any European organization it was allowed to enter for years and years. They sidestepped the US to build infrastructure to strengthen ties with Europe (especially Germany). Instead of genuinely working with Russia, the Americans and Europeans constantly took advantage of their weakness and rapprochement attempts.A greatly weakened Russia is not in the United States' interests because the United States should want Russia to counterbalance the Chinese in the coming multipolar world.
Joe Biden's (or really the faction of the US regime he was the puppet of) strategy of pissing off Russia and making them turn to China is catastrophically stupid politics. What's worse is it was entirely predictable that Russia was going to win the war from the word "go," that the Europeans were never going to do what was necessary to stop that, and instead Ukraine and Europe would repeatedly try to get the US into direct conflict with Russia which the US would bear the brunt of. What we saw was a laughably incorrect view of the situation and the world; it is sadly humorous listening to American and European statements about this war and predictions of it over the last few years.
So not only were mountains of treasure and weapons now burned in a giant heap of trash (or stolen), but NATO and the US lost badly and embarrassingly. The Biden admin has already burned through so much of the US's advantages which would have enabled a far better negotiated outcome. This whole endeavor was catastrophically stupid and costly and totally unnecessary. It's not as stupid and costly as the 2nd Iraq War and Afghan War, but when all is said and done it won't be far off. Here are predictions I made months ago about how this would play out.
Very interesting, but Russia seems much weaker now than in 2022. Heavily sanctioned, big stagflation, and fielding laughable armor deployments and infantry tactics. Quads, donkeys, motorcycles, and "camels". We've been assured that the 3 day Special Military Operation is still going according to plan. They've evacuated Syria, Wagner is a shadow of its former self, and are they still conscripting and fielding prisoners or is that well too running dry?
If Russia was going to roll into Poland, what do you think that force composition looks like?
who "assured" you of the "3 day" SMO? shucks, that would have been nice because then Russia wouldn't have run out of ammunition after two weeks and resorted to human wave attacks using shovels for weapons
one of us it going to have reality smash through our perception of it on the ground in Ukraine and hopefully we'll both think harder about where we consume information and why we believed it in error when it does
I'm referring to Putin's statements after the disaster at Hostomel and the decimation of the armor columns rolling towards Kiev in the first few days of the war.
Here is a video analysis of the SMO in that regard:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ji7KqqEqg?si=r1-39lGmPvkNgM3l
Putin assured you the SMO would last 3 days? Or did you get that from somewhere else?
this didn't happen; although one of the funnier parts of the war was Ukraine announcing they destroyed the VDV at Hostomel only for an American journalist to walk up to a group of soldiers asking them where the Russians were to find out they were Russians and an entire intact, organized, and fighting unit of VDV at Hostomel
I'm not sure if I've seen that video, but I recognize the youtube channel and his twitter account and I'll just say if your sources are the war archive, Oryx, ISW, and "journalists" at bellingcat, I can see why we have such different perceptions of the war
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Agreed, this seems pure fantasy. A battletested army? Well if it's a test it's pretty clear they have failed spectacularly.
I have no idea what Trump thinks, but I'd say the US military and other 3 letter agencies will be largely very pleased with the outcomes of this.
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Can you please explain the contextual framework which can make "Russia currently possesses the best army in the world" appear true?
E.g. China, India have much large numbers to brute force their attacks with. USA has much more advanced tech, most of the prominent AI developing companies, control over chip producers, control over a world-spanning satellite internet system. To some degree this applies to China too. Israel has decades of war experience, and has shown hypercompetent achievements in its last stage as well.
What does the Russian army have, or done, to merit being classified as the best one among them?
How can you know what he truly wanted or didn't want?
(to prevent misunderstandings, I am guessing you meant "reapproach")
And if we judged by his actions, then he started sabotaging Europe almost as soon as he more or less concentrated power and built up his authoritarian regime. Most prominent of all by invading Ukraine in 2014.
Infrastructure-related ties are not necessarily a good thing, if other conditions are not being met. As we've seen with how Russia has been blackmailing the same Europe when the latter was reliant on it for fuel imports.
How did they constantly take advantage of Russia? Please rely on concrete and valid sources when answering this question, rather than on hearsay.
How do you know this? Wouldn't the true capabilities and stocks be classified info?
Same with this.
Similarly, that the truly bleeding edge technology and capabilities would not have been shared with Ukraine to be exposed to rivals and potential enemies?
I'll be honest, I'm pretty hesitant to write an effort post in response to a user who will delete half the dialogue later especially when their comment is 90% questions.
Did you read that article you linked? Which part was the hearsay? The author admits exactly what Putin is accusing American (and NATO) officials of doing in the first few paragraphs, then writes it wasn't written down in a treaty which means it doesn't matter, and then throws a bunch of confetti in the air about the Soviet Union not being entirely dissolved at the time, and also NATO talked about enlargement in 1995 years later when Eastern block countries asked, and then Russia signed a document which in no way, shape, or form, endorses or acquiesces to NATO enlargement in 1997, but NATO enlargement didn't happen until 1999 (I suppose that the Russians opposing and protesting this at the time using the previous assurances wasn't important enough for this gem of an article). And also, like there was some intra-NATO debate about adding new members which undermines the "myth of betrayal" except this fact is irrelevant to the Russian's claims about betrayal of the assurances the author already admitted in the sixth paragraph. Wow, that's a great example of European media. Hopefully something significant was lost in translation.
And I meant "rapprochement," I'll correct the message and thank you.
Not the dialogue, but the user account. On this engine it should make the posts themselves remain, AFAIK.
And is it really an effort post? Mostly I'm just asking for you to back up the multiple claims that you've made in your original one. Which I think should be expected by default, no? And if you did back them up previously, I can't know that either, because 1) there are no references to those supporting comments in your current one and 2) your comment history is private, so I can't be Ctrl+F-ing through it to try finding the relevant parts.
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This comment is high up in sort-by-controversial, yet seems eminently reasonable to me. Can some of the downvoters explain their disagreement please?
Note that I don’t think the sort functions work until the scores are published a day later. I did some experiments and it just sorts by new.
Not sure. Do you mean sort-by-new and sort-by-controversial are the same for comments posted within 24h? There's a clear difference for me.
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As you've pointed out, there are clear cases where more or less everyone either agrees that an invasion was justified e.g. the Vietnamese invading Cambodia to end Pol Pot's reign of terror or clearly unjust e.g. Iraq invading Kuwait, with a large grey area in the middle. Personally, I would say that for a place like Haiti anything would be an improvement over the current situation (if Haitians weren't black someone would have probably done something by now, but they hold back out of fear of being seen as racist/colonialist, and so I think progressive ideology deserves some amount of blame for the continued dysfunction there, but I digress), but that past a certain level of basic economic development where people aren't starving or completely lacking in basic healthcare or infrastructure that being merely poor (by first world standards) is not sufficient grounds for someone to overthrow your government, whatever their economic policies may be. That is, the US has no right to take over Cuba by force even if by doing so we could raise their GDP per capita to the level of Florida's. This isn't because I wish to consign the people of Cuba to poverty or believe in some absolute form of ethnic self-determination, but because I don't trust governments to make judgements about whether the citizens of neighboring countries would be better off under their own stewardship in good faith, and would rather they avoid doing this outside of edge cases like people being herded into death camps or cannibal gangs overrunning the capital, where either the government in question will ask for help directly or some multinational deliberative body can agree on an intervention.
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They were by the Novorussians.
I think this largely depends if you view this conflict as an unprovoked war of Russian aggression or a Russian intervention in a Ukrainian civil war on behalf of ethnic Russians experiencing persecution by Ukrainian nationalists.
Eh, that might explain intervention in Donbas but it wouldn't have justified attempting to march on Kiev well away from that civil war.
If you're hunting nazis you have to go where the nazis and their leadership are.
That would no longer be, as you claim, intervening in the civil war.
You can claim Russia started the war to hunt nazis, just don’t dissemble about it.
If they're persecuting the Novorussians in the civil war it's part of the intervention, especially so after Novorussian became part of the federation.
The attempt to take Kyiv was on the 3rd day of the war! At that point none of the eastern provinces were part of the federation.
3rd day of the Russian intervention, this was not the start.
The eastern provinces had already been fighting by the time Russia finally intervened. They were already Russian they made it official later.
So they were not actually part of the federation till later. Which is what I wrote.
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Perhaps. Alternatively Russia may have believed it was necessary to kill the head of the snake to Citrix the Donbas.
Ultimately, I think Russia was motivated by a few things (protecting the Russian people in Eastern Ukraine, land greed, slowing nato expansion, and strategic goals relating to Crimea). Some of these things could be described as Ukrainian complicity and some of them not. The whole war is somewhat more complex than the standard description but even accounting for the nuance doesn’t make Russia an angel; the nuance merely reveals that Ukraine isn’t an angel either.
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Isn't one potential argument here that Ukraine was wanting to take the same route as Poland, but didn't have time to really do that before 2014? I think even Kulak made that argument early in the war, that Ukraine saw what happened to Poland and were like "Orthodox Jesus, I've seen what you done for the Poles and I want that for myself."
If the invasion were put off by like 5 years, maybe we'd see some actual progress towards EU-ification.
Minor nitpick, but pre-EuroMaidan the prowestern faction in Ukrainian politics had its support base in the tradCath west of the country, the Orthodox regions were pro-Russian.
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Indeed. You can actually see the rising Ukrainian GDP per capita figures drop as a consequence of each Russian invasion, so it is ironic to cite their low GDP as a reason Russian occupation would be helpful to their GDP.
Yes, and while I don't want to bring them into these arguments because it might be seen as lazy, we have the Holodomor and Chernobyl to look at as prior examples of how Russian control ended up working out for Ukraine. Starving populations and irradiated no-go zones are probably pretty bad for GDP, you have to admit!
Russian outlying provinces(which is what the conquered portions of Ukraine would be) in general are pretty bad, right? Like their GDP per capita is bid up substantially by Moscow and St. Petersburg, because it’s an empire.
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Incidental quibble that if anything supports your main point: Haiti isn't just poor because of bad institutions. It's just a standard-issue West African country but it's in the Americas. The demographic base of the country is West African, the economy is West African, society is pretty West African with bizarre superstitions, political dysfunction, coups and gangs of comically vicious criminals with very silly names (remember the cannibal named Barbecue who was strongest man in the country?). Brazil can't fix West Africans, it has a significant amount of West Africa syndrome as well and associated dysfunction. So if they tried occupying Haiti it would ultimately be pointless. The US occupied Haiti and built infrastructure, ran the place properly in the 1920s when colonialism was fashionable. It doesn't work. Haiti is West African.
Ukraine has real proven potential, it's a fairly well-developed region with industry. They make tanks. They made that gigantic Antonov plane for moving the Soviet Space Shuttle around. They exported military equipment, including an aircraft carrier to China. I saw an anecdote of Ukrainian kids coming to a French school and were bemused by how the French were years behind in terms of maths. They fight like Europeans. They are Europeans.
But Ukrainian governance has been truly terrible, the country has been trapped in this ongoing, spiralling crisis of weakness and foreign influence. The whole sordid affair with Hunter Biden being on the board of a Ukrainian gas firm is indicative of serious problems and excessive US influence. There are ultranationalists running around who really want to get stuck into Russia. There are a bunch of Russians who wanted to get back into Russia. There was the entire USAID/NED/Soros/deep state goon squad taking great interest in the country, their corrosive effect in a poor country is immense particularly when there's lots of highly exploitable history to draw upon. In terms of 'splitting Russia and Europe' - mission accomplished! But as usual there's a lot of blowback and complications that make the whole thing into a net-negative for everything.
In what normal country does a comedian who played the piano with his penis become national leader because he pretended to be an honest politician on television? It's a broken country that really needed someone vaguely authoritarian to crack down on the worst of the corruption and implement sane foreign policy. Alas the US would've probably found ways to suppress a Ukrainian Lukashenko.
Haiti's problems aren't solely attributable to its demographic base- Jamaica, the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, etc are black Caribbean societies doing much, much better.
You mean Yanukovich? Yeah, about that...
The Dominican Republic is significantly whiter than Haiti, as is Jamaica. Even the Bahamas is only 90% black and relies heavily on tax fiddles for its economy. Wikipedia notes also that white and brown men ran Jamaica:
Yanukyovich is a good example of a suppressed politician IMO.
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Haiti's problem is human capital, in that it has none to speak of.
Ukraine's problem is its a poorly partitioned state. You have ethnic and cultural Russians in the east and south and the ultranationalist Ukrainians to the west and central, then some other lesser groups like random Hungarian communities or Romanian in the west as well. It's torn between two groups pushing in polar opposite directions. It's not Russian enough to fully join Russia's orbit, and not Ukrainian enough to join the west (though arguably Ukrainians aren't western enough to join the west) not in it's entirety at least. Solution would be to just give the Russia speaking parts in the south and east, from Odessa to Kharkiv to Russia. Then integrate what is left with Europe.
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Penn is rescinding some PhD offers as part of cuts to graduate programs in light of DOGE funding changes. Vandy, USC, and Pitt are pausing PhD admissions for now, which feels slightly more reasonable than rescinding.
It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends. Rescinding is still a big move, though, when Penn could cut administrative bloat or decrease the full funding such that potential candidates decide not to join the program in the first place. The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.
I am also wondering how they're deciding who to rescind from. Are any international future students getting the boot? Are there DEI level decisions being made after the fact, as a way of getting around affirmative action? Are they going to change their minds if funding frees up if lawsuits throw down or the DOGE pause ends?
I'm a law student, and firms talk a lot about lessons learned from the financial crisis. An entire "generation" of talent was lost from cutting start classes during the crisis, and firms really feel it now - it had longer term impacts down the road to not just take the financial hit of having a few new associates bumbling around. I wonder if academia is about to undergo the same learning experience?
Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds. The influence of private interests in nonprofits/educational institutions is an old culture war argument, but one that might start playing out among graduate programs.
It's also interesting that undergraduate programs, for now, aren't getting hit. Maybe they're more lucrative/cash cows, although many are moving to full need-based funding. Maybe it's the demographic cliff.
I'm having trouble understanding what this means. Are you saying that colleges cut down on law students during the financial crisis? This wouldn't seem to make sense because law schools are the biggest moneymakers for universities. Maybe fewer law students matriculated because they couldn't afford the tuition?
On a larger level, what can be done to prevent "malicious compliance", otherwise known as Washington Monument Syndrome or "firefighters first"? If anti-Trump organizations see a funding cut, they often immediately axe the programs that people want the most. They never seem to cut administration overhead, conference travel, DEI, or other frivolities. There was a story yesterday about Yosemite National Park firing the only person who had keys to the bathrooms, which they apparently had to do because of the Trump cuts.
I'm not sure that's what's going on here, but I think it's possible.
How do you distinguish malicious compliance from regular compliance? The orders themselves are malicious. They are designed to destroy the bureaucracy. This has both good effects and bad effects. Cremieux on Twitter passionately believes that the National Science Foundation firing its contract worker "experts" is compliance of such maliciousness that it warrents jail time. I looked into the details of the DOGE executive orders and the statutory authorization for NSF "experts", and I think this is a pretty straightforward execution of section 3(c) of Executive Order 14210.
I can't find anywhere in the NSF statute that mandates the use of contract "experts". 42 U.S.C. § 1873(a) authorizes the hiring of contract "experts", but does not mandate them. I also highly doubt that these "experts" are designated as "essential" during a lapse in appropriations. Additionally, contract "experts" do not get civil service protections, so they can be fired without going through the extensive prescribed RIF process. This isn't malicious compliance. This is a dispassionate execution of the President's order. You always fire the people who are easiest to fire first. Trump could have put in an exception for science like he did for immigration and law enforcement, but he didn't.
"If only the Tsar knew."
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DOGE seems to be doing better at that than anything I've seen before: Cut 100% of it, then reinstate funding for the good parts (this half is forthcoming from elsewhere?? Hopefully?).
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Big law firms basically froze hiring for a few years, smaller firms weren't doing great, jobs were hard to come by, those you could get didn't pay any better than other jobs, and huge percentage of law school graduates more or less gave up. So right now there's a huge demographic gap where you have partners in their 50s and associates in their 20s and early 30s and few people in between to do all the senior associate stuff. It's not exactly catastrophic, but it's not a position the firms want to be in again if they can help it.
Ah, that makes more sense. I've heard similar complaints from friends at Boeing about a lack of employees between 30 and 60 years old.
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.
One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.
This is the sort of thing that - if one is canny - can be very lucrative. Find something that was in a glut and get into it as early as you can afford to, hoping that you'll make bank in the latter portion of your career (...preferably, and retire before it goes bust again).
Of course, it can also be a trainwreck if you time it wrong or if the market goes under. Such things are never without risk.
I'm kind of there right now. I had a successful gig in food delivery (owner's crony/right hand man at a small company) for a long time before the market got oversaturated/our customers got broken by post-covid inflation and the company I worked for had the bottom fall out and blundered into the draft beer industry, which is also facing rough times (or, at least, my company is; I'm apparently the top grossing service technician in the company for this month right now and that's insane because I'm A. straight out of half-assed training and barely/not competent at my job and B. have been so slow that I haven't hit 40 hours in three consecutive weeks).
I loathe my job and can't afford to live on what I'm making, but I have enjoyed working on glycol refrigeration units (They're the closest thing to working on cars in this job, and that's the vocational area I have past experience/strength in.) so I'm thinking that I should look into working on refrigerators.
I've heard (from a refrigeration/AC tech) that refrigeration/AC techs are in high demand pretty well everywhere, make great money and can do as many hours as they want. I think there's some certification/apprenticeship thing involved (jurisdiction dependent, probably) but you seem resourceful.
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This isn't in any way specific to "anti-Trump organizations" but how almost all such bureaucracies work. A while ago the Finnish Heritage Agency had to face some fairly minor (non-political) cost cuts. They promptly announced that this would "force" them to shut down some of the most popular museums and outdoor sites in an effort to artificially make those cuts seem worse and make them less popular instead of cutting some non-essential niche operations that the public cares little about.
Iron law of institutions remains undefeated
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Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.
May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.
Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.
If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.
Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.
There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.
Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.
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Naturally, universities like Penn, Vanderbilt, USC, and Pitt would rather take out cost-cutting on graduate students and faculty than administration and staff. A combination of malicious compliance and self-interest—it reminds me of those graphs that show the growth in number of administration and staff far outpacing the growth in faculty and students over the past few decades.
It makes for a good sob story that Orange Man is rug-pulling the next generation of young scientists, each of whom would surely had gone on to do great things like finding the cure for cancer or implementing Star Trek's replicator (as opposed to the typical path(s) of eking out some marginal publications in graduate school to graduate before falling out of academia, or moving on to continue the publish-or-perish flailing with marginal publications as a postdoc, young faculty member, tenure-track faculty member, etc.). A better sob story than dismissing administrators en masse, where any news articles might cause even normies to ask "wait, why were there so many of these people working or ‘working’ there in the first place?" along the lines of the Claudine Gay resignation.
The status of American universities is like a dark comedy out in the open, where the parasite has taken over the host. Supposed institutes of higher learning, research, and teaching serve as daycares for young adults first (there's even bread—mealplans! and circuses—colleges sports!), make-work for administrators second, research a distant third, and teaching a fourth from there.
Came here to post this. Rescinding PhD offers is throwing-toys-out-of-the-pram tier malicious compliance: and their decisions of who to cut will likely be based on which student they think can most convincingly cry in a CNN interview about how Trump crushed their family’s dreams of escaping poverty through studying hard.
It’ll damage the university in the long run and it would be much easier for them to cut administrators, but there’s a Principal-Agent-Problem here where the it’s the Admin department who decides what cuts to make and they’re sure as hell not going to be making them in the Admin department.
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If someone would just yank student loans, they'd be restricted to their core purpose. Unfortunately, nobody can.
What/who currently guarantees student loans in the US anyway?
The federal government. Disparate impact probably makes it impossible to have only private loans available.
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Absolutely none of this is surprising to me whatsoever. In my opinion and definition, the “median voter” is split into two camps; those who voted for Harris, and those who voted for anything else/didn’t vote. Furthering my opinionated answer to your question, the former group already cares and anticipated these developments and so does the latter group, it’s just the latter group doesn’t believe it’s happening, and I don’t think they’ll believe it until a serious, serious recession hits the economy and tanks their income.
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
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I think this is how voters would take it if there is a recession (which seems at least plausible, IMO, but certainly not guaranteed). On the other hand, I've seen a lot of ink spilled about how "essential" all these roles are, and if there isn't a recession, or worse, there is a period of perceived prosperity, it'll hurt the credibility of the left's messaging with those voters going forward. I'm thinking about how many said Twitter would fall apart without half its employees, and despite a few extra "fail whale" pages it's still online, at least. Or how Reagan effectively won the standoff with the ATC strike.
I don't know if it's "the left's" messaging. I've seen plenty of folks online get fired from the National Park service, for example, which as far as I know is a fairly bi-partisan group of folks.
We're not going to agree about Twitter. Twitter was THE global platform, once such a vital and reliable source of communication health and safety departments of various countries relied on it; now the bar is set to "still online", since Musk's suspension of journalists' accounts, measures like labeling media outlets as "state-affiliated" and restricting their visibility, viral misinformation, hate speech, and antisemitism, statements without evidence such as that Community Notes "is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media" thus he is going to "fix" Community Notes, has completely driven out everyone but reactionary conservatives. Hardly a win in my book.
We might, actually. The doom-selling I remember that I'm calling out as inaccurate was from the technical side regarding site reliability. The cultural side, whether it can maintain relevance and cachet as X, I think you're correct still remains to be seen, and isn't trending great for them (although I think it was previously on a different course, if perhaps slower, for irrelevance by losing the political zeitgeist in the other direction).
Even the technical side isn't great. I've been locked out of my account on desktop for a while now since every time I try to log in I get into some kind of loop where it keeps asking for my login information. I never really used it much, so now I just don't use it at all. I imagine for people who are into it they've figured out all its quirks, but for a casual user like me it just isn't worth it.
That's not so uncommon on other platforms either.
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Musk's? All of those that ngs predate him.
His statement is, of course, cope, but he's the one that set up the Community Notes system to start with, I'd say he deserves credit for that.
Progressives got so used to total control of speech, that not having it will always look like "everyone but reactionary conservatives being driven out".
Can you show me evidence that previous Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal did those things? Because I can show you evidence that Musk did all of those things. And what do you mean, exactly, by "progressives got so used to total control of speech"? Who are the progressives, what are the parameters of total control, and by speech are you including verbal?
Wait, you were talking about what a given CEO did on the platform, rather than it's hat was happening under their reign? Why?
That speech that would go against their preferred narrative would be reliably removed or throttled.
What are you asking here? The ideological of what qualifies and disqualifies one as progressive?
Mostly what I stated previously - that stating an alternative viewpoint would get one reliably banned, their content taken down, and/or their reach throttled
Until Spaces, Twitter wasn't much of a verbal communications platform, so no.
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It's actually stupid how easy it is to find inflation of savings by DOGE. You can do it yourself! This thread walks through an example showing that a claimed savings of $120M at DHS is actually $0. And I was able to find another example of this myself!
There is unfortunately not a way I can find to link directly to a row in the stupid DOGE table of savings so I have to be more rounbdabout. If you go to the main DOGE savings page here and click on the "see more" row at the end of the Contracts page you get a much longer list of contracts cancelled. Pop down to the Department of Commerce section and you'll see a few contracts for $20M to various firms with the description "BLANKET PURCHASE AGREEMENT TO CREATE HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATIONAL AGENCY VIDEO(S)". From either the screenshots or FPDS link copy the "Procurement Identifier" field. Then head over to the contract search on usaspending.gov. Scroll down to the "Award ID" filter and put in the Procurement Identifier from above. Hit "Submit" and you should see 1 result for your ID. Here is one such contract, I see three on the DOGE site.
If you look at these contracts above you can see that all three were awarded Jan 22 2024. That they all have the same potential award amount ($20M) and that no money has actually been spent (Combined Outlayed/Obligated Amounts are 0). The contracts are also still listed as "Open", meaning they have not even been cancelled! $60M dollars in purported savings at the Department of Commerce are for awards that are not actually cancelled and for which no money has been spent in the first ~year. Is it really correct to say all this money was "saved"? It took minutes to find this. Just look for any suspiciously large/round number and you're going to uncover something like this.
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Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
It's interesting to ponder the selection effects, if that's true. We'd be keeping the "so obviously capable that we can't imagine undoing their promotion" employees, but also the "so obviously incapable that we wouldn't even offer a probationary promotion" ones, while hollowing out the middle a bit.
It was their union that negotiated the contracts to set up these incentives.
If you’re looking to cut budgets and have one class of employees that will be difficult to terminate and another class that are essentially at-will, of course you will focus on the latter group.
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In the government, you are typically in a probationary status in three situations:
When you are first hired. Most agencies have a probationary period of 1 year (some are 2). The reason for this being that it's statutorily harder to fire civil servants who have tenure, so you want to make sure someone is a suitable employee before making them permanent. In theory, probationary employees can be let go at any time for substandard performance, though most agencies have rules about how much notification and opportunity to improve probies must be given. (Even more so than with private companies, the onboarding and training period is expensive so it's really not cost effective to be casually churning employees.) DOGE is discarding the "theory" and just mandating that all probationary (i.e, can be legally fired at will) employees be cut.
When you switch agencies. This is what's biting a lot of long-term government employees. You might have 15 years in civil service, but for whatever reason you switch from one agency to another. You are once again in a probationary period in your new agency. Usually this is a formality, but suddenly people who recently switched agencies are being cut just like new employees.
When you are elevated to the Senior Executive Service. This isn't a regular promotion in the GS levels; SESs are division chiefs or VP equivalents. They're senior decision makers, and again, they are put in a probationary period in their new position. Previously, a senior who failed probation for whatever reason (which is, unsurprisingly, rare) would just be returned to a GS15 position, but now DOGE is taking advantage of their "probationary" status to summarily fire them too.
I'm barely following this whole DOGE saga, but you make it sound like they're purely trying to maximize the number of people fired, with no consideration for merit or political allegiance. Is this the case?
Sort of yes. They think with technology they can make enough efficiency gains that even if they fire the more competent people the efficiency gains will offset the productivity lost from the fired employees. So basically the thesis is we can cut government costs (eg payroll) without cutting government productivity.
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That appears to be the case, yes. What they want to do is simply fire everyone from every agency they don't think should exist. The law doesn't actually allow them to do that, so instead they're firing all the employees they believe can be legally terminated without process.
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Musk has no authority except what the President gives him, and the President cannot simply say "Everything Elon Musk says is a lawful order."
The President also cannot sack federal employees with tenure like this. For probationary employees it's... debatable whether what they are doing right now will hold up in court. But the civil service reforms that ended the patronage system explicitly prohibit the executive branch from simply firing civil servants at will. Congress can withhold funding and the President can perhaps abolish certain programs, but federal agencies have to follow a prescribed RIF procedure. They can't just arbitrarily fire people without cause like this.
Elon Musk sending an email saying "If you don't reply, you're fired" is absurd to the extreme. And how will that even work? Who is going to be reading the hundreds of thousands of emails federal employees send in reply? Are they going to do this every week?
It is unworkable and makes no sense. There is no way this can withstand any legal scrutiny.
That said, it appears the administration is operating on the principle of "legal is what you can get away with." Many people here seem to like this, so I can only assume those who do are operating on the assumption that Trump and his successors will never lose power again.
We are operating under the assumption that the executive controls the executive and the idea for example that the president cannot send emails to his subordinates or fire them is absurd. Government sector unions should be per se illegal.
You may feel that the idea that the executive cannot arbitrarily fire any civil servant he wants to is absurd, but that is actually the law right now. Likewise, government sector unions are legal. Change the law if you don't like it. Schoolhouse Rock told me that's what Congress is supposed to do, but apparently we don't care about that anymore, so uncharted waters ahoy. My point was that the wheel turns.
Let’s challenge that in the courts. The executive power cannot be vested in the president if he cannot fire people who attempt to block his exercise of the executive power.
There might be statutes but that doesn’t make them law. Maybe you need a refund from schoolhouse rock
So your argument is that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional, and Trump should simply ignore it and do an Andrew Johnson? I mean, that's a coherent argument, but I'll return to my question about whether you are okay with the next (Democratic) president doing the same thing?
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It was sent out Saturday night and has a deadline on Monday night. There could be people who work Saturdays and have Mondays off who will not see it until too late.
I can get behind the idea of explaining what you do and how it serves a specific directive from Congress (everyone should be able to explain this much). I have to send my boss a similar missive every week. But the way Musk is doing this seems solely for the purpose of upsetting people without thinking it through.
Doing it for your boss who you know is one thing, the point here is that you're doing it for someone a million levels above you with no context or two-way communication whatsoever. I would find it absurd to reply at all, whether I was a high or low functioning employee, so I agree with you the manner Musk is doing this is likely intended just to annoy people.
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Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies"
TwitterX drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
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I mean yeah, this is just more of the 2020 "X claimed without evidence, where the evidence was hidden just enough to have plausible deniability and the debunkers made no attempt to ask questions."
The whole nonprofit ecosystem is a scam that needs to be shut down and rebooted with different people in charge
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It has Elon’s fingerprints all over it. This is his style after all, like when he bought Twitter. Just come in like a wrecking ball, fire fast and loose, and deal with the fallout later. It’s an approach that works very successfully in business but government is a different beast so we will see how things shake out
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I’m confused by the contradictions coming in fast from the DOGE critics. On one hand, they argue that no money is really being saved or it’s just a paltry amount. On the other hand, the cuts are severe and devestating and will send us into recession
Clearly only one can be true, but which is it? Who is being dishonest?
I don't see the contradiction. Some of the cuts (NIH indirect costs, firing thousands of employees) are real and likely to be devastating. Other cuts (a purported $8B DHS contact) are fake or wildly overstated. There is only a contradiction if one is talking about the same cut.
Even then, the same thing can be inexpensive (as government programs go) and worth keeping. Dropping such a thing wouldn't be likely to cause a recession, but barring cases where they specifically say that, there's nothing wrong with that logic.
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it is possible for something to be very cheap and at the same time bad to get rid of
Give an example of something like that doge cut
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It's not a contradiction; there are plenty of things like this. Just last night, a friend of mine's temperature light went on. She was low on coolant. $5 worth of coolant later she was back on the road, no harm done. Had she not spent this five dollars, she could have overheated her engine, rendering a $20,000 car unrepairably useless and leaving her without transportation indefinitely. Deciding against spending the $5 would have been saving a paltry amount and risking severe and devastating consequences.
What in your opinion will have the most devastating effects on the economy (from the cuts - not other trumpian policies like tariffs/foreign policy)
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These aren't contradictions to me. All things considered, DOGE is cutting peanuts from the federal budget and is unlikely to make even a small dent in the annual deficit. They big leagues don't start until they start cutting Social Security, Medicare, and the defense budget.
At the same time, these cuts may end up being fairly devastating. I don't know that they will be devastating enough to send us into a recession, but they may really gum up the works for people who truly rely on government services. The other thing is with all these cuts to the IRS, it seems likely to me that tax receipts will be much lower this year than in years past, thus contributing even more to the deficit.
That’s not what the critics are claiming though. They say we are headed towards economic catastrophe because welfare recipients may miss a cheque or two
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They're just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks. For instance there was some post on dailykos proclaiming that the 150-year-olds on Social Security were there because that's how a missing birthdate was represented in COBOL -- 20 May 1875, the beginning of the international Gregorian Epoch. The article contains howlers like "Early versions [of COBOL] used the standards set in ISO 8601:2004." LOL; that 2004 is a year. That would be a very recent version of COBOL (which dates back to around 1959) indeed. The first version of ISO 8601 was from 1988, still far too new for Social Security. A little Internet research revealed that versions of COBOL which had an epoch usually used January 1, 1601. And if the epoch was a custom one, they sure would have picked something before 1875, since when Social Security was computerized, people older than that were still alive. And then data was released showing no, the records of very old living people didn't all have the same birthdate.
Did anyone change their mind? No, they just found other reasons Elon was "obviously" wrong.
Okay, but the cobol bullshit notwithstanding, there aren't any 150 year olds on SS, to say nothing of the table Elon posted claiming 1.3M of them.
That's a long and excellent post. The executive summary is...
Being marked "alive" in the data doesn't mean they're collecting benefits. It just means they have no evidence that this person is dead.
Though nowadays funeral homes outright report deaths to SSA which immediately terminates benefits.
There are separate processes to follow up on people that are long lived and collecting benefits. One kicks in at 100 and a more aggressive one at 115. There's also periodic audits that kick in if someone does things like draws benefits but hasn't used their Medicare benefits in awhile (since dead people don't go to the doctor).
There's lots of garbage data in the database due to migrations over the years and some records are unfixable due to layers of kludges, but separate systems exist to stop them from getting payments.
There have been proposals to fix all of the records but they've determined the cost outweighs the benefits, which sounds plausible for a government to say (not that I would agree).
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Grok 3.0 apparently can listen to music and integrate the results with the rest of its knowledge.
Twitter released their newest iteration on AI, it's fun, clever, and noticeably less lobotomized than basically everything before it. It's currently free with a basic twitter account. But I accidentally discovered a thing that kinda blew my mind. I got into a silly argument with it, as one does, about whether you can legitimately pronounce "gambler" with three syllables. As one of my arguments I brought up a Johnny Cash song where he, to my ear, does it. The robot responded:
I disagree obviously, but notice the timestamp!!! I'm reasonably sure that nobody in the history of the internet had this exact argument before and mentioned the exact timestamp in that exact song. Moreover, before that I asked it about "House of the Raising Sun" (because I misremembered the vocalist drawling "gambling" there) and the robot also timestamped the place in the recording where it was said.
So I don't know. It's possible that this is a result of an unsophisticated hack, give the AI a database of timestamped subtitles for youtube videos (something they already have generated), then it bullshits its way through the argument about what was actually said and how. That's totally possible, it's really good at bullshitting!
The other possibility is that it actually listens to videos/audios and analyses them on the fly or during training, whatever. What's super interesting about is that, look, we started with LLMs that literally had not a single real world reference, nothing that could remotely qualify as a qualia of say seeing an apple. They were trained entirely on people talking about their perceptions of apples, and somehow they managed to learn what apples are pretty well, without ever seeing one (which all philosophers agreed should be impossible, seeing apples must come first, and yet here we were). And now, if it's not just a subtitle hack, then we have quietly passed another milestone, the robots now can hear and see and correlate that with their knowledge bases.
Also, I asked the robot directly:
(timestamped subtitles followed)
Idk, it responded pretty much instantly, so it could be lying. Or maybe it has preprocessed subtitles for popular videos.
If you mean The Animals' version, I think there's a slide during the first syllable that probably threw you, but it's still only one syllable.
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I don't see how it could possibly generate subtitles instantly on the fly for a music video with a runtime of three minutes? Also, listening to the track it seems like a pretty good example of the pronounciation that you are referring to -- so it's clearly not 'listening' to the video in any meaningful way.
"AI lies and confidently misrepresents evidence in order to advance it's chosen position" is... not too surprising considering that it's been trained on decades of internet fora conversations, but probably not the kind of alignment we are looking for.
It certainly has access to the subtitles so they are probably cached at least. That video has like 10 million views, while I can't believe that I was not the first person questioning the number of syllables in "gambeler", it definitely could have pre-subtitled it.
Thank you!
Yeah, after showing this to people and thinking about it, I lean heavily towards Grok having been fed a bunch of autogenerated subtitles (with timestamps). Which is very cool but not all as cool as if it actually listened to stuff. Also, then it keeps hallucinating stuff.
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I think your explanation about the AI lying and confidently misrepresenting evidence in this case is almost certainly true. But I don't see how the runtime of the music video would matter for this. If the AI were analyzing the music video - which I don't think it did - it would be analyzing the bits that make up a video file after downloading it from wherever it is, in which case it just needs to process the bits that make up the file, and the speed of that would be dependent on many factors, but certainly not limited by how long the video is. A human might be limited to maybe half the time at the shortest if they watched the video at 2x speed, but I don't see any reason why an AI couldn't transcribe, say, all recorded audio in human history within a second, just by going through the bits fast enough.
Any of this would need a pretty specialized video analysis module though, which AFAIK doesn't really exist period, much less built into Grok -- plus the ability to download the video directly rather than look at a stream of it, which Youtube doesn't really provide. So if the AI were literally accessing the video through that link, 3:00/2x is indeed the fastest it would be able to provide the transcript.
(it would not be instant in any case; downloading the video takes X seconds, analyzing it Y -- X + Y might be less than three minutes, but it's not less than one second)
You can make YouTube videos go at arbitrarily high speeds just using a Chrome extension. I actually had an issue recently where an extension was causing the videos to default to 10x speed, which was both amusing and annoying. In any case, anyone with a link to a YouTube video has the ability to just download the video using basic non-AI tools, so the AI wouldn't be limited by the UI that YouTube presents human users.
True (and interesting about the Chrome extension; what is the usecase for 10x browser playback of youtube videos, I wonder?) but I'm quite sure Grok is not currently programmed with anything like this.
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No it wouldn't, you just need the codec specification to extract the audio from the video at which point it becomes a reasonably straight forward speech-to-text problem, which is something we've been doing since the 90s.
OK, then you need an audio analysis model -- this is not a thing that is integrated into LLMs.
The first practical LLMs were developed as tools to automatically generate transcripts and sub-titles. My point above is that even if we assume that Grok is not pulling a previouse parse from some database, generating a fresh parse is well within its basic capabilities.
Interesting assertion, but it doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not Grok can do this -- it takes text input from the user, and generates a text response. What makes you think it even has an interface to bring in audio inputs? (on the training end, they might -- given the hunger for data -- but it seems like an odd thing to include in a chatbot. Even for training, it would probably be better to do something like, oh, IDK -- run a transcripting algo on as much YouTube content as you can grab and then feed the text from that into your training set. You might even include some timestamps!)
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You don't even need that; as anyone who's looked at the unauthorized youtube downloader tools out there will know, youtube's protocols allow access to the audio-only and video-only portions of a recording as separate stream. All Grok would have to do is request the audio-only stream.
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Remember that the algorithm is not processing physical vibrations in the atmospheric medium, it's parsing bits in an audio file. The relavent metric here is not the runtime but the file size, and a 3 minute song is unlikely to be more than a few Mb.
I do understand this -- just the same, 'parsing bits' from a video file does not happen instantly. Indeed, just starting a stream on youtube is typically not what I would call 'instant'.
No, parsing bits from a video file does happen practically instantly. Download a video file to your local disk, and play it from there, you’ll see. Even on YouTube, if you rewind back, it will have to represent the bytes again.
The reason it takes a while for YouTube stream to start is that this is what it takes for YouTube to locate the bytes you asked for and start streaming them to you.
Yes, and for the LLM to parse these bits, first youtube needs to locate them, then serve them to the llm. If the llm can convince youtube to serve the bits as fast as bandwidth will allow, it still needs to run those bits through some transcription algo -- which typically are borderline on lagging at 1x speed.
In the instant case, it would also need that algo to make some sort of judgement on the accent with which some of the words are being pronounced -- which is not a thing that I've seen. The fact that it goes ahead and gets this wrong (Cash pretty clearly says gam-bel-er in the video) makes it much more likely that the llm is looking at some timestamped transcript to pick up the word "gambler" in the context of country songs, and hallucinating a pronunciation.
That's just not true. You see them running at 1x speed, because they only ever need to run at 1x speed. Running them faster is a waste of resources: what's the point of transcribing video in its entirety, if you are going to close the tab before it ends?
This is running on my home PC:
That's 2.5x transcription speed, and it's just running on CPU, not even using GPU.
Look, guys, processing your stupid-ass text questions on a frontier LLM takes way more resources than speech transcription. Whisper on my CPU can do 400 GFLOPS, so the above 67 seconds run used something like 26,000 GFLOPs. For comparison, running a transformer model on a single token requires something like twice the number of parameters of the model worth of flops. So, for example, GPT-3, a junk tier model by today's standards, has 175B parameters, so just feeding it the lyrics of Cash's song would need 150,000+ GFLOPs, and that's before it even produces any output.
Modern speech transcription models not only make judgements on accents as a normal course of operations, they actually understand the speech they are transcribing to some (limited) extent in the same sense as more general LLMs understand the text fed into them. It would actually be a pretty cool project for a deep learning class to take something like OpenAI Whisper, and fine tune it to make it into accent detection tool. It's all there inside the models already, you'd just need to get it out.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Grok 3.0 does in fact do all of this with the Johnny Cash song. All I'm saying is that it could. The frontier LLMs are all multimodal, which usually means that they can process and generate image tokens in addition to text tokens. There's literally no technical reason why they couldn't add audio token type, and some of them probably already do that.
OK? 67 seconds is not instant -- like, at all. Even 6.7s (assuming the resources assigned to this task were as you suggest) is not instant.
Of course it could! But it doesn't, and the fact that it responded instantly is evidence of that. Do you really think Grok is spending resources (mostly dev time, really) to add features allowing the model to answer weird questions about song lyrics?
LLMs lie man -- we should get used to it I guess.
In case it wasn’t clear: it took 67 seconds to transcribe an entire 171 seconds long song on my home CPU. You don’t have to wait for it to finish either: it produces output as it goes. It takes less than 20 seconds to process the entire song on my 9 year old gamer GPU. It would take less than half a second on a single H100. On 5 H100s, transcribing the entire song would take less time that it would take you to blink an eye. X AI reportedly has 100,000 of H100s.
How is it any evidence? Responding to the question is at least an order of magnitude more computationally demanding task than transcribing the entire song.
That’s the amazing thing about multimodal LLMs: they wouldn’t even have to add any special feature, with multimodality you get it for free. For a multimodal LLM model that is trained on sound tokens as well as on text tokens, understanding the words in a song, and analyzing accents etc is literally the same task as answering text questions. When you ask Grok a question, it searches web, fetches websites, and processes the contents. Fetching and processing song is, again, exactly the same task to the multimodal LLM as processing text.
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Nothing happens instantly, but lots of things happen quickly enough that they might as well be instantaneous from the perspective of an unaugmented human.
Yes, but serving and parsing videos from youtube is not one of those things.
Let's agree to disagree.
I don't think so -- you are wrong on this one.
I don't think i am, see @veqq's comment above.
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yt-dlpwill download and transform a 20 minute youtube video in under a second, including subtitles if you want.OK, but will Grok? I guess it would be pretty easy to try, but it might refuse on copyright grounds or something.
The point is youtube will serve all necessary files at the same time, you're not limited to a slow data stream. This is what we would call 'instant'.
I don't think it will -- have you interacted with the youtube API at all?
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The Grok and GPT are both largely derived from tools originally developed to generate automated transcripts and sub-titles.
You dont need to give the computer a database of timestamped lyrics when you can generate them. That the LLM can generate subtitles, or that it defaults to the common US english/dictionary pronunciation of the word (which is naturally going to be far more central to the training corpus) rather than the four-beat tempo of the actual audio (the ram-bull-er, the gam-bull-er, the back bite-er) should not be surprising to anyone. In fact, i find your example highly illustrative of both the capabilities and common failure modes of such models.
As an aside, surely you must have more intelligent things to do with your time than arguing with chatbots.
Like reading replies like this? Arguing with a chatbot was more productive tbhwyf.
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Even if it did have preprocessed subtitles, presumably "gambler" just appears like that regardless of pronunciation?
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I don't know exactly what's is going on here but LLMs often respond like that. I'm not sure that "lying" is the correct term or if it's more accurate to say that they frequently don't "perceive themselves" as having the literal knowledge that they're trained on and with some prompting can reproduce.
IMO this is roughly the right way to think about it. LLMs probably don't even have the capability to know what they know; it's just not what they're trained to do. A lot of people confuse the LLM's simulation of a chatbot with the LLM itself, but they're not the same. (e.g. we can't settle the question of whether an LLM is conscious by asking it "are you conscious?". The answer will just depend on what it thinks the chatbot would say.) From the LLM's perspective it's perfectly reasonable to extend a conversation with "the answer is" even when the word after that is undetermined. Hence hallucinations.
(I think RLHF helps a bit with this, allowing it to recognize "hard questions" that it's likely to get wrong, but that's not the same as introspection.)
RLHF tends to make a model less calibrated. Substantially so.
By "calibration" I assume you mean having low confidence when it's wrong. It's counter-intuitive to me, but some quick Googling suggests that you're right about that. Good correction. I guess that's part of why fixing hallucinations has proven so intractable so far.
It's worse than you think.
Look at figure 8 of the GPT4 'technical report'. Or figure 9 of this paper on mode collapse. It's all across the calibration scale that gets messed up, not just the low extreme.
If you, say, ask a LLM for the result of a fair d4 roll (1-4), with sufficient formatting/etc such that with overwhelming probability it will output just the tokens '1', '2', '3', or '4', a properly calibrated model "should" result in the following output probabilities:
'1': 0.25 '2': 0.25 '3': 0.25 '4': 0.25And many base models are pretty close. Not perfect, but reasonable.
With RLHF, however, you'll often see something like, say:
'1': 0.02 '2': 0.07 '3': 0.90 '4': 0.01Why? Short answer:
Consider the case of a slightly weighted coin tossed once per training session, that flips heads 60% of the time. A base model will result in the highest training score if it flips heads 60% of the time.
But a RLHF'd model will result in the highest training score if it flips heads 100% of the time. Because when the user sees "which is a more likely answer: heads or tails" - they will answer "heads". And so the model will be trained to answer "heads".
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Some of them, most notably ChatGPT, are explicitly trained and prompted not to reproduce potentially copyrighted work like song lyrics. Though OAI's recent model spec has been updated to standards where the LLM is suppose to decline politely rather than lie and say it's incapable of reproducing them.
I've had this happen to me with many things not copywrited but I suppose such "instructions" perhaps could bleed over into other areas.
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