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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   29920 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Curtis Yarvin wrote about this clusterfuck: Gaza and the nomos of the earth. It makes some humorous connections between American foreign policy and dog fighting pits, and visualizes a world where America stops trying to meddle and just lets "might makes right" rule:

But this is how might makes right. Now, picture this victory—the victory of force and order over turmoil and chaos—worldwide, cleaning up all the world’s open sores. You are picturing the fall of the American empire—and realizing that, like the USSR (if much better), the GAE can actually fall upward. Almost all the problems it supposedly exists to solve will rapidly solve themselves as soon as it is gone.

Curiously, he's arguing for the US cutting Israel loose, militarily and diplomatically, but that this would lead to Israel finally sorting out the Palestinian problem, through force. I say curious, because I'm not sure if Israel is actually strong enough to stand on its own without the US supplying weapons, but if they are, well, I say Israel is illegitimate, but so be it: I don't believe in wandering into a barbaric hinterland to impose one's sense of justice or civilization, which is a big point of agreement between me and Yarvin.

Definitely felt called out hard by this line:

Are you addicted to Anglo-American missionary imperialism? Test yourself with two easy checks. Do you genuinely, emotionally, care about the plight of the Palestinians? Do you know where Stepanakert is? If your answers are “yes” and “no,” you need help.

I need help I guess, except I don't believe in militarily intervening in favor of the Palestinians.

I wonder what is the proper relation of a civilization to the barbarians. Yarvin says:

The basic way for a country to be neutral in a war is, as Hamilton observes, to trade freely with both sides, but not sell weapons (“contraband of war”) to either.

And yet, so much of the world is barbaric. Kinda makes you hope Better Angels of our Nature is true.

Israel is certainly strong enough to kill every human in Gaza with few casualties to themselves without US aid. The only thing they need to do this is that the US and its allies don't engage in an organized boycott against them for doing it.

When Palestinians use force, that’s “turmoil”. The Israelis, though, aren’t going hard enough, and will surely set the region in “order” if they just stop hiding their power level. But God forbid the U.S. take an interest! That’d just be unreasonable!

The obvious answer to coordinated, state force is a larger, more coordinated one. Humans will go to great lengths to ensure that they’re on the winning side, up to and including making alliances. Bargaining. Silly things like promising to respect each others’ rights. Moldbug is asserting—from his position behind the biggest, most coordinated force of them all—that this time will be different. That this edifice is not a triumph of force, but a fluke which will surely crumble in the face of real men with a real taste for violence. Never mind who those men are, or whether they are any closer to his values than the degenerate elite he despises. Perhaps he forgets who it was that popularized the phrase:

“Political power springs from the barrel of a gun.”

Moldbug doesn’t despise the elite or even desire to replace them, he just thinks they need to be ideologically converted.

Really? Everything I’ve ever read by him, at least since moving to gray mirror, has absolutely dripped with spite. At his most charitable, he manages to affect a fascinated curiosity at these primitive savages living in nerd world. If he’s not calling for their replacement, it’s only because he asserts that they will find his “trad” ways eventually.

He doesn’t like nerds but he’s far more sympathetic to the Washington and Wall Street elite than most other DR types and believes they can be convinced against the current system/cathedral.

Can someone invent a Curtis Yarvin reading LLM so that I can finally make sense of this guy's massive wall of rambling texts full of unfinished sentences

You're assuming that there is much (if any) sense to be made.

The easiest way to understand Yarvin is to think of him as a LLM that's been handed the prompt "Defend a straw-man of monarchism in the style of a Berkley-educated Marxist".

More charitably he's a deeply progressive Jewish Academic in the same general mold as Scott Alexander or Scott Aaronson who noticed the same fundamental contradiction at the heart of Liberalism that Hobbes, Burke, and Smith did back in the day, but instead of turning away at the last second the way Scott would, or tying to deny it like the other Scott, he steered into it.

If the endstate of maximizing individual autonomy/social atomization is a world of might makes right than might must make right.

He's basically Bill W if the cause of Bill's downfall had been Liberalism instead of Alchohol, an ardent liberal who thinks that liberalism must be banned for it's own good and who seems to be unable to grasp the concept of moderation.

What would Yarvin’s thought look like if he was, by your standards, an “actual” conservative?

Hard to say, you might as well ask "what would your dog look like if he were a cat?" or vice versa.

I've written about this at length on the old site but the ultimate problem with Yarvin (and the wider NRx movement) from a traditionalist/right-wing perspective is that that their goals and methods of are those of a radical Marxist. He might try to wrap his philosophy in the superficial trappings of traditionalism, but at the end of the day he is more a revolutionary than he is a reactionary.

Were he to get his way all existing social norms/morality would be bulldozed to make way for a more explicitly materialist and inductive dialectic based on race class and education (not necessarily in that order). He pursues this course because he believes that instantiating a dictatorship of the proletariat Gnon is the shortest path to maximal freedom / personal autonomy.

In short, both his methods and his goals are those of the adversary.

You know, I can understand him just fine with my paltry 115 IQ (as estimated by the Wonderlic). I once wrote something that it seems @naraburns, who is much smarter than me, didn't understand (others did though), so I'm wondering if there is some writing that is meant to be apprehended by faculties other than reason.

Yeah, it’s called “propaganda.”

Or, as someone said on this board, it’s a vibes-based world. Moldbug’s writing speaks to a certain vibe of intellectual disaffection. An apocalyptic tenor for people too clever to buy a Biblical apocalypse. Paeans to an era recent enough to be well-documented, but old enough to be rose-tinted. It’s the latest version of a classic appeal to the good ‘ol days.

For me it’s mostly just valuing my time. I know from past experience that vast majority of his essays can be reduced to one paragraph of plain English if you are familiar with his ideas. So I can’t be bothered with skimming through 20 mins of reading material and keeping my focus enough while doing so when he stops rambling I don’t miss it.

I have written things people much smarter than me did not understand. Mostly while drunk though.

But did anyone understand those is the real question? Because there were quite a few people who understood what I wrote.

I think you can literally ask LLM's to summarize. Though I recall someone mentioning that Hegel broke Bing AI's brain, so maybe Yarvin will be the same.

This is what Bing told me about this essay:

Here is a summary of the article you requested:

The article is about the conflict between Israel and Gaza, and how it relates to the concept of nomos, or the order of the world

The author argues that the current nomos is based on the Westphalian system of nation-states, which is incompatible with the reality of non-state actors like Hamas

The author suggests that the Westphalian system is collapsing, and that a new nomos is emerging, based on the principle of sovereignty as responsibility

The author claims that Israel is acting as a responsible sovereign, by defending its citizens and territory from Hamas’s rockets and tunnels

The author criticizes the international community for applying double standards to Israel, and for failing to uphold its own responsibility to prevent terrorism and human rights violations

The author concludes that the conflict in Gaza is a symptom of a larger crisis of the nomos, and that the world needs to embrace a new order that recognizes the rights and duties of all actors

After the Dark Elves article I just lack the ability to convince my brain that reading Moldbug articles and thinking about them seriously is worthwhile at all.

You can’t make sense out of Hegel because Hegel doesn’t make any sense. It’s like asking AI to explain gibberish. It’s impossible. There is no information there.

Oppressors Bad, Oppressed Good, Oppressor and Oppressed classes exist in a quantum supposition largely based on the sympathies of the observer/whoever's assigning the labels.

That might sound flippant and low-effort (it honestly kind of is) but it's still pretty close to his genuine thesis near as I can tell.

That's just one of his ideas to be fair. I'm really not a fan of that one, but Hegel's contribution to philosophy, whilst esoteric, is not this empty.

Chiefly the one thing that's often (though debatably) attributed to him is dialectic and the alchemical view of history as the distillation of the perfect society, and though I don't like that one either, it's massively influential and makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

Dialectic isn't really that impressive, smart, or original though. It's basically just "Conflict between thesis (feudalism, capital, whatever) and antithesis (labor unions, whatever) result in new synthesis (communism, whatever)."

Most landmarks of philosophy can be described in this reductionist way, it makes them no less significant.

I'm a bit torn on this question. On one hand I do want to show respect to philosophy, and artistically analyzing all the things it analyzes, but on the other I can't escape the impression that a lot of what it does is formalizing what people were already saying, thinking, and doing, adding a layer of obscurantism, and pretending you invented the thing yourself.

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FTA

Actually, less than a month ago as I write, in a “type 1 conflict” in which America had no dog, two hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed.

Sorry, what? Can I have a link? I can't even find a Wikipedia article.

This sentence confused me as well, I knew he was referring to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as voxelvexillologist notes below but the 200k figure surprised me. The wikipedia entry states that 230k ethnic Armenians have been displaced by the conflict. I assume moldbug was using "ethnically cleansed" to mean "displaced" while I imagined he meant that there were 200 thousand casualties.

He uses the dictionary meaning of the term. The way everyone else conflates ethnic cleansing per se and genocide is, uh, atrocious.

Technically speaking no ethnic cleansing has happened though- the Armenians left on their own(and tbf, I would have too) without any coercion from Azeri forces except Armenia losing some battles.

I wonder why they decided this is the time to go.

They cleansed the same region of the Azeri population a while ago, did they not? The fear that what goes around comes around is hardly new.

The majority of colonial Europeans who left places that didn’t have extremely violent anti-white pogroms like Algeria left because they expected that there would be nothing for them if they remained, and they might get purged. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes less so, at least in the short term - the Europeans who held onto their property in 1997 in Hong Kong (many fled in the early 90s) made huge returns in the 2000s and 2010s. Similarly in Africa, some Europeans left at the ‘smart time’, on the eve of decolonisation, but others who held on in some countries (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia to some extent) often did pretty well. Even in Kenya, where Addio Africa shows British fire sales before the troops leave, the ~50,000 whites who held their nerve are often still there and still pretty rich.

This is a reference to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in which Azerbaijan recently (despite the presence of Russian CSTO peacekeepers) took control of the area militarily, followed by a large-scale emigration of ethnic Armenians from the area. Beyond that, it's complicated: I'm told the area's Azeri population faced a similar expulsion the 1990s, and there are various entangling foreign alliances (Armenia nominally with Russia, Azerbaijan with Turkey).

The Azeri-Armenian conflict goes back even further than that. Pretty much as soon as the Russian empire collapsed the two groups were fighting each other and didn't stop until the USSR regained control of the Caucuses.

Huh. The world's kind of scary when the US doesn't care about your conflict.

In some ways it's even scarier when it does.

I think the argument that "US military and foreign influence completely withdrawing from the world would make it more peaceful and reduce overall deaths" that he makes in general is, both in the short term and long term, "obviously wrong". It's plausible that it'd force Israel specifically to finally conquer palestine and end the conflict, which would probably be good, but that'd be compensated by instability in other parts of Asia, Africa, the middle east, etc. The time before the liberal international order, with monarchs and very right-wing philosophies by current standards, was not particularly peaceful. A more accurate statement in the yarvin worldview is probably "the US withdrawing from the world would significantly hurt the power of currently-existing liberals, which is very good". Going off the arguments in From Cromer To Romer And Back Again, the most peaceful long-term solution is probably the US significantly its formal power i.e. sovereignty internationally, not decreasing it.

Are you addicted to Anglo-American missionary imperialism? Test yourself with two easy checks. Do you genuinely, emotionally, care about the plight of the Palestinians? Do you know where Stepanakert is? If your answers are “yes” and “no,” you need help.

It's a nice gotcha. The population of Nagorno-Karabakh for the past decade was around 150k. Apparently, 100k of those have already fled to Armenia. The population of Palestine is 5M. They do not, at present, have anywhere to flee to. I agree that the way most pro-palestine americans relate to palestine is very confused and stupid. And it's hypocritical to not care. But that doesn't impeach the general approach. I think most smart liberals are aware of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Ignore the conspiracy theory that Israel is controlled by the Jews! Idiot. Israel is like everywhere else. Israel is controlled by the State Department. From an Israeli paper: Secretary of State Anthony Blinken sat last night with the [Israeli] war cabinet and and dictated that humanitarian concessions be made to Gaza. Blinken remained in the Kirya IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, and waited for the cabinet to approve his demands. The cabinet discussed the exact wording of the decision for hours, while each time drafts were passed between the cabinet room and Blinken’s room, just a few meters away, at the Kirya.

This is, directionally, very true! But it's worth considering what some of the 'humanitarian concessions' the US has coerced are, when evaluating if the US should leave.

Israel said on Sunday it was restarting the supply of water to parts of the Gaza Strip after shutting it off following Hamas’s devastating terrorist infiltration on October 7, in which over 1,300 Israelis were killed. Energy Minister Israel Katz confirmed the news in a statement, saying that water would begin to flow again to the southern portion of the narrow enclave — where Israel has urged residents to flee to in recent days. “The decision to restart water to the south of the Gaza Strip was agreed upon between Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and US President [Joe] Biden, and will push the civilian population to the southern [part of the] Strip,” Katz said.

In response to:

GAZA, Oct 16 (Reuters) - As Israeli air strikes pounded the Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground offensive, the enclave's residents were getting more desperate by the hour as water runs out, garbage piles up, explosions flatten homes and hospitals struggle to cope. Desperate to get some drinking water, some people began digging wells in areas adjacent to the sea or were relying on salty tap water from Gaza's only aquifer, which is contaminated with sewage and seawater. Two residents in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, volunteered to fill plastic containers with water to distribute among displaced families.

Which makes that statement feel different!

A taste of how Classical International Law will go wrong is present in Moldbug's followers! I searched his substack on twitter, clicked on the first person to post it, and scrolled a bit. Within six posts, a Hitler meme. Scroll a bit more, several posts hinting at how awesome war and racism are. Hmm.

Since the Jews also feel that the land belongs to them, a lawsuit is necessary. In a world where the “United Nations” was not a thing, and America had zero dogs in the fight instead of two, this lawsuit would take the form of a war. And the Jews, being stronger, would win this war—even against the whole Arab and Muslim world. Since this is clear to everyone, no violence at all is necessary.

Haha! Weird how so many wars occurred before the United Nations existed, then.

Kinda makes you hope Better Angels of our Nature is true.

I've read a few solid refutations of it at this point that I am pretty confident that it likely is not.

We've lived in the Dream Time for not quite the last century.

If we as a species were better at large scale coordination/cooperation then we'd be able to capitalize on this. But forces in motion since our species emerged are going to make it very hard to achieve such cooperaton.

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