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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30631 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.

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

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.

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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