site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   29918 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats