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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27728 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

  • -24

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

For most things Wikipedia is good enough but there is obvious editing for culture war. As the first source for everyone for basic information it’s quite powerful.

Costs of running the site are negligible. Musks could personally fund it for pocket change. Or if they got even 10% market share and the same donation rate as Wikipedia it would be self sufficient.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

The world could use a second encyclopedia to be a check on the first.

editing for culture war.

Any particular examples?

There's conservapedia. Just nobody uses it.

Vox Day promoted InfoGalactic is another one.

For most things Wikipedia is good enough but there is obvious editing for culture war. As the first source for everyone for basic information it’s quite powerful.

Wikipedia is just a mirror in front of the cathedral. It doesn't do independent research or fact-checking. The cathedral leans left, so does Wikipedia. If it leant right like it did in the 50's, so would Wikipedia.

I wonder if Hebrew Wikipedia has a noticeably different lean.

Because there can only be one definitive undefinitive source and despite the bubble effect of sites like this one the Liberal opinion on (most) factual questions is the popular opinion.

Wikipidea is undefinitive because it is a democracy; you will never get conservative wins in an open platform because there are less conservatives than liberals.

I thought that Wikipedia was not a democracy. It is a cabal of power users asserting what truth is.

Yup; if by cabal you mean a random selection of people with enough time, energy, and autism to try to be a bona-fried wiki warrior: Upper middle class Americans/western Europeans mainly white mainly kinda vaguely agnostic non practicing.

Eg, liberals; like most people.

What would it even take to make a wiki “conservative”?

Option one is to get editors who share conservative biases. This is a stupid idea as far as making a useful wiki. Think of all the ways in which making Wikipedia more progressive would detract from it, then remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

We can maybe do a little better by vetting editors for (life) competence. Before you can edit this article, submit your last two pay stubs or a picture of a marriage certificate. Some similar poll tax evidence that you have your shit together. Unfortunately, this has the same problem as just paywalling the whole site: it’s not selective. Every barrier you add will prevent some number of useful edits. Even if those edits come from basement-dwelling channers.

What about cultural solutions? Stepping back from the ideological bent, I kind of like the idea of trying for a more deliberate institutional design. I’m not sure exactly how Wikipedia resolves conflicting edits and sources, but I’m sure you could make a process that favored existing, long-standing text over new revelations. Stare decisis. I suppose this would have conservative effects on everything from scandals to deadnames.

Consider banning secondary sources, to insulate from editorial slants and fear of missing out. Or perhaps no sources less than five years old; we don’t want hot-button issues. Hell, don’t bother making an article until a subject has been around for that five-year window. Keep your finger off the pulse of current events and avoid all that volatility. I’d suggest stopping articles at a fixed date, but I can’t decide on 2007, 1981, or 1955.

I conclude that the best option is just echoing Wikipedia, but running each page through GPT with the prompt “write this like Tucker Carlson.”

Option one is to get editors who share conservative biases. This is a stupid idea as far as making a useful wiki. Think of all the ways in which making Wikipedia more progressive would detract from it, then remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Reverse stupidity is not, superimposed stupidity is. If you get a bunch of rabid conservatives, and a bunch of rabid progressives, lock them in a room and tell them they can't get out until they agree on a common answer, you'll get a decent article. This process was working pretty well for a while on Wikipedia, and it's working pretty well on Twitter's Community Notes right now, so I see nothing stupid about the idea.

Unfortunately, this has the same problem as just paywalling the whole site: it’s not selective. Every barrier you add will prevent some number of useful edits. Even if those edits come from basement-dwelling channers.

You weren't against limiting the number of useful edits from basement-dwelling conservative channers, why worry about it now?

Ah, heck. I really should have included the word “only” in that first block. As in: only allowing editors with conservative biases.

I agree that not throwing out conservatives would result in a better wiki. I didn’t think that was what sliders was looking for.

They could at least TRY, you know. Right now there are editors on wikipedia that have bloody hammers and sickles on their profile bios. And nobody bats an eye when they edit some bullshit with their political bent.

Ah, you've figured it out. Just throw all the commie editors off the helicopter, right?

I don't care if a communard decides to fly the hammer and sickle on their bio. Not any more than I care about the Gadsden flag or an actual, national flag. There are probably catgirl-avatar editors who exclusively edit Wehrmacht articles, and I still don't care.

The problem arises when, as you say, they edit some bullshit. If that were trivially detected by looking at a profile picture, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. One side would have purged the other ages ago.

Ah, you've figured it out. Just throw all the commie editors off the helicopter, right?

How about: just stop throwing the conservative ones out.

There's Conservapedia. Founded by Phyllis Schlafly's son.

I went there years ago and it was unintentional comedy. The Charles Darwin page's first two images were photos of Hitler. It claimed that Darwin is responsible for inspiring the Holocaust, etc. It was unhinged.

They got rid of that silly stuff and now it is boring. Edit: I take that back. They've returned to looniness. I thought they went away from that, but they must have pivoted back.

Not unintentional comedy.

What happened AIUI is that a huge number of progressive trolls went there and started intentionally turning the place into a Colbert-style parody. Schlafly's ability to tell the difference between trolls and real conservatives was negative - because the trolls were lying, they could pretend to be more conservative than the real conservatives - so the trolls wound up in effective control of the content.

They got rid of that silly stuff and now it is boring.

Are you sure? https://www.conservapedia.com/Poland#NATO_mercenaries is hilarious.

https://www.conservapedia.com/Russia-Ukraine_war also has russiabot derangement.

But the first one has high concentration of deranged claims that I have not seen so far :)

If you think that Conservapedia has got rid of the silly stuff, just check their Joe Biden article.

Country: United States

Military service: 4-F

Highest rank attained: Junta leader

Political beliefs: Socialism with Chinese characteristics, Communism, Xi Jinping Thought, Fascism, Liberalism, White Supremacy[1], Kakistocracy

I thought they purged that stuff and purposefully became boring, but I didn't check recently.

Number of deaths attributed

33-40 Marxist color revolution[2] 10 Non-combatant drone killings[3] 200 Kabul airport bombing[4][5] 1,700 illegal migrant deaths,[6][7][8] plus the horrific 51 deaths in a truck found June 2022.[9] 715,385 Covid Death Tracker[10] 48,465 CMS Medicare Tracking System;[11] 40,097 reported to VAERS[12] 478,000 from experimental mRNA Covid vaccines[13] NATO aggression in Ukraine 320,000+ (civilian, military, and foreign mercenary fighters as of 10/16/23)

Looks like they're back on brand. I'll click around a bit when I get some time.

Was that not the intention behind Conservapedia?

why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia

Because it would immediately be labeled as racist and then most people wouldn't touch it.

This tactic is losing strength but it's been very effective over the past 10+ years.

Conservative Wikipedia existed as conservapedia, and racism was not the main criticism- the blatant agenda pushing and poor quality of article was the main one.

One problem, on top of what other people have already mentioned, is that an explicitly conservative version of Wikipedia would likely be more politically biased than the current officially-apolitical-but-left-leaning version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia started out fairly apolitical and certainly not obviously left-wing (the founders met on a forum for discussing Ayn Rand's philosophy!) but over time has drifted in a leftward direction. Despite this, most articles are still fairly objective and accurate. Part of this may be because lots of text on Wikipedia was just literally written years ago (before the political bias became noticeable) and part of it is due to the composition of the population of editors and the cultural norms that have developed, which both have a lot of momentum and don't go from apolitical to extreme far-left in a few years. Moreover, at least conservative people are not explicitly banned or discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia and so there are probably more conservative editors than there would be if that was not the case.

Actually we don't need to just imagine a hypothetical "Wikipedia, but conservative." We can look Conservapedia, which was founded with the goal of being a conservative version of Wikipedia. Comparing Wikipedia and Conservapedia, I think it is clear that Wikipedia is substantially better and more factual than conservapedia. Take, for example, their articles on Ronald Reagan. Conservapedia's article describes him as "one of the greatest American Presidents and part of the conservative movement since the late 1970s" whereas Wikipedia says he was "a member of the Republican Party, his presidency constituted the Reagan era, and he is considered one of the most prominent conservative figures in American history." I find the second to be much more objective than the first.

I think both description of Reagan are correct. “Greatest” doesn’t mean best or good. I’m reminded that I can’t go into a sub neoliberal without being banned shortly and Reagan was the politician who implemented neoliberalism. For 35 years (1/3 of a century) every major politician had to describe themselves as a neoliberal. I do think that qualifies as great. I hate FDR but I wouldn’t have an issue describing him as great.

I get your point on adding a superlative that you didn’t need to.

I think the bias on Wikipedia shows up in this random paragraph in Obamas Wikipedia.

“The acquittal of George Zimmerman following the killing of Trayvon Martin sparked national outrage, leading to Obama giving a speech in which he noted that "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago."

How would we rewrite this paragraph in a neutral or conservative way. Some of it is information not included.

Here is my attempt: “The acquittal of George Zimmerman on the grounds of self defense in the death of Trayvon Martin sparked outrage in some communities. Leading the Obama administration to govern under BLM protest.”

Adding the reason for acquittal “self defense” seems more neutral to me instead of leading the reader to assume it was just racism. Took away the national part because it seemed to imply everyone agrees with that assessment. Took out the Obama quote because it implies the kid did nothing wrong (unless we should assume Obama picked fights like that). The use of the word “killing” to me implies a lot more guilt of criminal murder so I removed that.

The Wikipedia article is accurate on this point but the information you include or exclude would lead the reader to make much different conclusions.

I think most people would consider "greatest" to be a pretty subjective judgement and usually one with significant positive valence.

Also, I tried comparing the Obama article on Wikipedia and on Conservapedia and I think it's again clear that Conservapedia is considerably more biased and subjective. Literally the second sentence in the Conservapedia article is "Elected as America's first "post-racial" president according to mainstream fake news media, Obama exacerbated racial tensions and left a dismal legacy of a divided America along Marxist class, racial, and "gender normative" lines." That seems substantially more biased to me than the Wikipedia sentence about Obama that you quoted. Just the phrase "fake news media alone" is extremely heavy-handed. The bias in Wikipedia, when it exists, is usually much more subtle (except for a handful of topics and even then I think it's much better than comparable topics in Conservapedia).

I agree the conservative ones are more blatantly biased. I quoted the Wikipedia one to show how it has implicit bias in it.

For 35 years (1/3 of a century) every major politician had to describe themselves as a neoliberal.

Hasn't neoliberal almost exclusively been used as an insult? To describe a politician as an elite in the pocket of massive international corporations?

Began after Trump. Bill Clinton was forced to take it on. It’s an insult from the left to the center left (Americans lines) and Trump is probably the first GOP post-neolib POTUS. I’d draw the line around 2015-2016 as the time it became an insult. Establishment is still mostly some form of neolib.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

I was under the impression that any right wingers who try to edit Wikipedia have their changes reverted almost instantly, and lose their edit privileges to boot.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

Because if it managed to get any notable traction it would be instantly banned from payment processors, deranked/delisted from search engines, blackholed by internet routing and banished from app stores if it existed.

Look at everything that happens to kiwifarms.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

No it wasn't. They actually tracked down the SWATters, and several of those SWAT attacks were meant to discredit and attack the Kiwifarms (especially the MTG one). The site isn't particularly nice but they don't actually facilitate actual crimes. They also aren't responsible for anyone dying/committing suicide, either.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

Any expansion on or evidence for this, or is this the tired old debunked "linked to suicides" smear again?

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

There's been a pretty serious wave of debanking, specifically, aimed at the right wing gun culture world, well short of Defense Distributed-level weirdos. While not specifically a bank, GiveSendGo lost Discover as a payment option back in the Rittenhouse era.

Which isn't different from what you said, in some perspectives, but the line where 'edgelord' get drawn controls quite a lot. There might have once been enough institutional trust to think that this could stop at just the KF-grade assholes in the same way that I once believed 'punch a Nazi' could actually mean just punching actual nazis; in practice the leftist doxxing leagues get support from Harvard University and credit card companies get Blue Tribe calls to drop Red Tribe sales as a category.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

And Twitter was used to facilitate riots that caused billions of dollars in damage and a bunch of murders in the 2 weeks that passed between approximately May and November 2020.

I didn't see pre-Elon Twitter getting debanked, delisted from app stores, or facing advertiser boycotts.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked.

Controlled opposition is controlled.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

So basically the left decides how conservative a conservative may be before they can be considered an "edgelord" and debanked. Meanwhile, hammer-and-sickle sporting communists have nothing to worry about.

I don’t know that kiwifarms is a good analogue. What service were they providing that didn’t fall under social media?

What service were they providing that didn’t fall under social media?

Well... exactly. See how much fury they generated, and imagine if they were doing something meaningful instead of just being a chat board.

Call me naive, but I think kiwifarms drew all that ire because it was so damn useless. It had no goal other than dunking, and it was really, really low-effort. That raises hackles more than actual hate groups. After all, it's a commitment to join the WBC and go picket funerals. It costs nothing to make an alt.

Is lolcow news a service? If there was an ongoing internet kerfuffle there would be updates there. Often from primary sources and people directly or peripherally involved.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

This question comes up fairly often - "there's a leftist X, so why isn't there a conservative X"?

At least part of the reason is that the right is simply less interested in conservative X's than the left is in leftist X's. I personally wouldn't be interested in reading a "conservative Wikipedia". I just want Wikipedia, with as little bias and censorship as possible.

This question comes up fairly often - "there's a leftist X, so why isn't there a conservative X"?

At least part of the reason is that the right is simply less interested in conservative X's than the left is in leftist X's.

Nah... the premise of the question is simply wrong. There are rightwing alternatives to most social media platforms, and I think they're usually bigger than their explicitly left-wing counterparts.

Examples? Truthsocial has less activity than Twitter. Voat or whatever that was shutdown a while back. What's the conservative version of FB?

I did say explicitly left-wing, Twitter / FB / Youtube etc., are trying / pretending to be neutral, no? I think Locals is the closest thing to FB, but their structure is a bit whack. It's not quite Twitter, not quite Facebook, not quite Substack.

The problem is that you have to be VERY ideologically motivated to feel that Wikipedia is too liberal. It's generally neutral/accurate enough that only people with serious axe grinding chops will notice.

As a result, conservative alternatives become skewed SO conservative that the negative impact on accuracy is immediately noticeable.

This is where Moldbug's dream of the antiversity runs aground, it needs to be MORE accurate than the liberal/neutral version not less, and that improvement needs to be immediately noticeable to all involved. Which is a really tough percentage to squeeze, actually, if you aren't reading Wikipedia articles about transgender athletes or historical controversies. Most of the time on most of the topics people read about, vanilla Wikipedia is good enough, which is exactly why the ideological bias is so insidious.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

I think the distribution of ‘free time for activist projects’ between right and left wingers is functionally bimodal. Right wingers with abundant free time prioritize church and family, or legitimate actual charities, over boring culture war grunt work, and this is in large part because conservative communities largely have access to churches with actual things to do, legitimate actual charities, and families with help to give in a way that’s atypical for hardcore left wingers.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

There is! More precisely, there are two.

Normie boomer conservative Conservapedia that began as creationist intelligent design project during the noughties and Infogalactic, alt right flagship project by Vox Day.

Why you never heard about them, you are asking? Because they are not Wikipedia. Everyone uses Wikipedia because everyone uses Wikipedia, because Wikipedia link comes first in every search. Even if Elon started heavily shilling one of these sites, I cannot see how he could singlehandedly change it.

I looked up the page for "evolution" on both of these sites, then looked up "Gamergate", "Gaza," and "Trump" on Infogalactic vs. Wikipedia.

Conservapedia goes ad hominem in the second paragraph of "Evolution", stating that the majority of the vocal proponents are atheists and agnostics, and proceeds to go into 12 paragraphs of skepticism, including in there the whopper that "The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution." (Sources: "creation.com" and "annointed-one.net"). Combined with the failure to properly explain what evolution is, this bias makes it useless as an information source.

Infogalactic, in contrast, takes the text for the "Evolution" and "Gaza" articles straight from Wikipedia. Gamergate, as one may imagine given the Vox Day connection, is a completely different article from that of Wikipedia: the Wikipedia article emphasizes the "harrassment campaign". The Infogalactic article emphasizes the revealed corruption in journalism, but does touch on harrassment allegations.

Finally, the "Donald Trump" article: Infogalactic auto-redirects from "Trump" to "Donald Trump". Wikipedia redirects to "Trump (disambiguation)". The intro to the Wikipedia article injects POV in where it doesn't seem appropriate (differences with Infogalactic emphasized):

Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.[a] During the campaign, his political positions were described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. He was the first U.S. president with no prior military or government experience. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation established that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to favor Trump's campaign. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic.

The corresponding infogalactic paragraphs:

Trump won the general election on November 8, 2016, in a surprise victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and commenced his presidency on January 20, 2017. He became the oldest person to assume the presidency (surpassing Ronald Reagan), until Joe Biden in 2021, the wealthiest person ever to assume the presidency, and the fifth to have won election while losing the popular vote, though his supporters claimed there were irregularities.[1] His political positions have been described by scholars and commentators as populist, protectionist, and nationalist. In the first year of Trump's presidency, the economy improved significantly[2], but progressive opponents strongly criticized his direct and plain-spoken personal style. With no significant scandals or international events to report, the democrat media focused on unsubstantiated allegations that Trump's election campaign team had colluded with Russian intelligence agencies to influence public opinion[3][4]. The official investigation was eventually closed, with no evidence of the conspiracy theory[5].

Infogalactic definitely has a bias, but it isn't leaving as many details out selectively. I might start preferring Infogalactic now. However, from the change log it looks like there is only one active contributor?!

Yeah infogalactic started as a straight fork of Wikipedia with the planned killer app of replacing edit wars with something showing multiple views. I think it died from lack of use.

Most people using wikipedia are not looking for high-profile political topics. As Encyclopedia Dramatica famously put it when launching a vandalism campaign, you can't have a free-to-edit encyclopedia without editors who are willing to periodically check in on the article on fourth-order Runge-Kutta numerical integration to make sure it hasn't succumbed to vandalism, linkrot, or onward progress in computer languages used to implement the algorithm. What ED learned was that Wikipedia does, in fact, have editors willing to do that.

Vox Day thought that gamergaters and puppies would give him the basis of editors he needed to do this on Infogalactic. It didn't. It didn't help that he was dividing his time between too many projects at the time.

It makes you realize what an incredible coup flipping Twitter from far-left to neutral was.

Once networks become entrenched they become almost impossible to dislodge. Despite the truly epic level of whining after losing their playground, progressives journalists and celebrities can't break their Twitter addiction and still use it. Even a new product with the backing of a trillion dollar corporation couldn't dislodge Twitter.

If progressives can't create a left-wing Twitter alternative, then creating a conservative Wikipedia is a doomed project from the start. The only hope is that Wikipedia is disrupted by new technology or there is a slow march through the institution.

Because the world doesn't want politically motivated encyclopedias, it wants accurate, unbiaised, apolitical ones. Of course, Wikipedia isn't that, but that is current only known to the extremely online centrists and conservatives/right-wingers. The move is not to make an explicitely political one as it will be rightfully ignored, it's to continue to raise awareness that Wikipedia is not accurate, unbiaised and apolitical.

This is not enough effort, and too much heat (and "boo outgroup," assuming you are not a midwit on Reddit). Don't post like this please.

FYI I clicked on the link in your post and it brought me to a Reddit post about Lady Gaga wearing a funny hat.

It's fixed.

Looks like the auto-flip to old.reddit might have fucked with it, will try to fix when I get a minute.

Should work now.

Here's an honest question: many people in the comments here are saying that Wikipedia could be run for about 5-10% of the donations it receives each year. Given that, it would only take a couple years for Wikipedia to collect enough donations to set up an endowment that would pay their costs in perpetuity without ever needing to do any fundraising again (usually one can expect to withdraw 4-5% of an endowment each year without eating into the principal). Is the Wikimedia foundation already doing something like this? If not, has anyone proposed it and has the Wikimedia foundation explained why it's not doing it?

Wikipedia is so valuable as a resource that they know they’ll always be able to get funding. At worst they can get the UN or a few rich people to fund it, or even a university with a large endowment that wants the prestige. So there’s no reason to take any steps toward fiscal sustainability. It’s too big to fail.

That's an interesting point though it raises the question of why Wikipedia never tried in a serious way to become a profit-oriented enterprise. Once it got big enough it probably wouldn't have been hard to monetize. Perhaps some of what's happening here is that people in the Wikimedia Foundation are just picking up $100 million bills left on the ground by Wikipedia's failure to try to make money off of its product. People won't ignore that kind of money-making opportunity forever.

Wikipedia depends on the editor community to keep the encyclopedia current (and the Pareto distribution of editor activity means that the part of the community that matters is quite small) - the community increasingly see the WMF as a parasite using their encyclopedia to raise donations under false pretenses. The Wikimedia software and the text of the encyclopedia are open source - the only thing that the WMF actually controls is the IP and domain names (which would use value fast if they pointed to an "encyclopedia" that was full of rubbish).

The Fram ban incident was the point at which the community and the WMF became actively hostile - and the community won by getting Fram's ban overturned and an in-principle agreement from the WMF that wikis with active communities would remain primarily responsible for policing their own users. But the community now know that the self-perpetuating woke oligarchy that control the WMF think of them as unwashed white male neanderthals who are only one step removed from gamergaters, or something like that. My read was that both the WMF and the community realised that either side could destroy the social value of the encyclopedia, and neither wanted to do so.

When Jimbo (who had much more goodwill in the editor community than the current WMF leadership) launched the for-profit Wikia in 2004, the threat of an editor revolt meant that he had to keep it entirely separate from Wikipedia. If the WMF tried the same thing, there would be an editor strike.

Wait, Jimbo's the reason why Fandom exists???

This is an interesting story, but it seems hard to square the "Wikipedia's editors resent being seen as Deplorables by the WMF" with the "Wikipedia has a community of power editors who are proud Commies" thing alleged elsewhere in this thread.

I agree, but wokestupid insanity is fractal.

The background to the Fram ban was that the WMF were proposing to change their ToS to incorporate the usual vaguely worded Code of Conduct that people expect to be selectively enforced against conservatives but is actually selectively enforced against spergy men who are more focussed on improving the product than playing politics. And as part of the ToS to use the server, this would be enforced by the WMF and not the community. There were the usual complaints by the WMF that the sex ratio in the community (which is male-dominated for the obvious reasons) must be due to Deplorable behaviour chasing women away.

Most of the evidence in the case is not public, but it looks like a woman who was friends with the WMF CEO was adding articles on Spanish Paralympians that were sufficiently badly translated that the community thought they were making the encyclopedia worse. Fram tried to make her stop, and she tattled on him.

What is public is that when the MSM picked up the story, the WMF leadership briefed that Fram was banned for being mean to female contributors and that the row was about the WMF trying to crack down on endemic sexism in the editor community.

There are a lot of proud Commies who really are sexist (the sex scandals in the UK Socialist Workers' Party were hilarious), and even more who are victims of bad-faith allegations of sexism by the establishment left. The "Berniebro" meme is the canonical example.

Yes and no. You don't need to keep the WMF to keep Wikipedia - not even legally, because Wikipedia's content is CC-BY-SA and thus anyone with the money to handle the load can make a WP mirror.

It would be hard to get people to use a new, mirrored version of Wikipedia while the Wikimedia Foundation exists.

Yes, but 2rafa was saying the WMF would get bailed out if it somehow did go bankrupt.

I'm saying that in that specific highly-unlikely situation the existence of the mirrors would avoid the need for that.

They're not doing it because if the service was funded they would lose their excuse to beg for more money for causes.

You have a website everybody uses and is part of the bedrock infrastructure of everyone's lives. People either extract money and power from controlling it or they will quickly get replaced by people who do so. Such is the nature of power.

They already did that; there's a $100 million Wikimedia Endowment. But WMF keeps asking for money and then figuring out things to do with it (in many cases, re-donating it).

Might be a fun graph to see where those donations go.

Probably would, but I think the accounting's divided by location in their official stats; to get the really-fun one you'd want to break it up into individual items and then re-aggregate by cause.

Good point. Actually, after making my comment I tried looking at the Wikimedia Foundation's financial statements and noticed they listed about $5 million per year in returns on investments, which is about in line with a $100 million endowment. Arguably $5 million per year is not quite enough to keep Wikipedia running but it's probably close.

It is enough, you can look up their financial reports. They spend more money on donation processing than on actually hosting the website, true story.

I don't think it's obvious that $5 million per year is enough to support Wikipedia. Certainly it is enough for web hosting, but presumably they need at least a few employees (e.g. sysadmins, a few programmers and web developers) and it also seems like a good idea to retain some legal counsel and some people to manage the other employees, do the accounting, etc. This does not cost a huge amount of money, but could easily be a few million.

But if you have a detailed argument that Wikipedia could be run for $5 million per year I would be interested in hearing it (I mean this sincerely, it seems like an interesting topic).

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

Musk isn’t running a charity. If Redditors want to convince companies that launching satellites on SpaceX rockets into space is a bad deal financially, they can make that argument.

Why does Twitter cost money? It's just other people providing content...

The irony of trying to own Elon on Twitter costs when he successfully ruthlessly shrank a huge amount of bloat there.

He's pretty clearly being sarcastic about how the majority of Wikipedia spend seems to be on bloat and random political efforts.

Wikipedia could run the entity with about 10% of it's incoming cash and everything else is a bureaucracy and progressive fundraisers. Whilst they shake down users for donations like their $10 is going to be the difference between a 404 error and Wikipedia next year.

In fact, if you look at @EverythingIsFine's post, you're not sufficiently cynical. If you take the hosting cost, and double it for overhead, it's still less than 5% of the yearly donations.

The first time I heard about the alleged mismatch between Wikipedia's operating expenses and how much they raise every year was here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer, but I don't know how relevant it still is.

Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!

You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.

Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.

Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk?

A Hacker News thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? Not that HN isn't just another subreddit, of course, but it's a bit worse since a more tech-industry-focused version should naturally be full of people who should know better yet the threads are exactly the same.

I think you’re describing Reddit in general. If you read a general news discussion on almost any topic, they’re smugly wrong most of the time. They don’t know how the things they’re discussing actually work, don’t understand the power dynamics of politics at all, and still think that they can run whatever it is better than people who have decades of experience doing that thing.

Of course I think that’s to be expected when most of the user base are college students with minimal work experience and post graduates who have yet to build a solid career. Almost everyone thinks they know how to run things at 18-25 because they are taught all the theoretical stuff about the subject and have never dealt with trying to actually build something.

Elon does draw this more than most because he loves to troll and get attention for himself and put on a show. If he did the same stuff but without the fanfare and trolling, I don’t think most people follow business pages well enough to know about how other CEOs are making very similar decisions.

I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.

Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.

This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.

I think the forward in your face way that both Trump and Musk do things matters a lot here. There are thousands of tech companies out there doing very similar work to what Musk does. There were certainly hybrid and I think electric cars made by other companies that don’t get the same attention Tesla does. Even outside of tech, lots of companies have moved plants to locations with less regulation. There have been companies that have had massive layoffs and major retooling that don’t get the same attention that Musk gets, and that’s in part because he’s doing these things in very loud public ways.

Trump was the same way. If you’d have put his actual agenda up against any Republican of the last generation, he’s not that unusual. If you took him back to 1992, he’s a democrat. The difference again tends to be that he’s loud, proud and extremely in your face abouT what he’s doing.

I think there are a lot of reasons that that style is seen as stupid. Most people have been taught by culture to see thinkers as quiet unassuming people who don’t have emotions and don’t really market themselves or their ideas. The persona of Spock is the archetypal “deep thinker” in American culture. Trump and Musk are not like that. I don’t think it’s grifting in the normal sense of things. They actually believe in the things they say, but they also understand that a persona full of confidence and a bit of showmanship are needed to make the changes they need to make. But if you’re used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, showmen aren’t going to come off as smart. Then add in that they’ve been in university where they’ve been taught that smart people are the ones with the right opinions and thus once Musk starts saying the wrong opinions he gets seen as obviously stupid because if he were smart he’d agree with the phds in the university.

It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.

You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.

My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.

Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did.

There is no damn way he had more than a surface level understanding of any of it.

I think the Onion article was correct, he just wants to be liked. Right-coded midwits are desperate for some really well-known person to like them, so they are easy to cater to this way, and Musk is one of the most famous men on the planet.

Which is one of the reasons I think we might see him, and his companies, faceplant soon-ish. There's no way someone in his position doesn't know these aren't the people you're supposed to court if you want to stay on the good side of the establishment. It's either "I gotta found someone to rally around me when the chickens come home to roost" or it (and here I mean everything he's doing with Twitter rather than just signal boosting the right) is a parting FU on his way down.

So 'roll hard right and die'?

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Or maybe he knows more about physics than other topics he’s tweeting about. Most people have a single or at best a set of very closely related domains that they really truly understand on a deep level. Musk is really scary good at technical stuff, he knows a lot about mechanical and software engineering. He knows less about politics and whatever conventual wisdom he’s tweeting about.

Not only am I used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, I'm used to thinking of loud confident people being full of shit.

I've spent many hours discussing this exact line of thought with several people, and no, they insist he's a "failson" who's just short of being literally retarded and his entire business model is a matter of burning daddy's money and causing unmitigated destruction in every field he's active in.

In other words, Musk Derangement Syndrome.

"But apartheid emerald mine." I think there's obvious criticism to be made about Musk. But instead nonsense like that is endlessly repeated.

The worst is that people are somehow convinced that Elon grew up rich when it's the furthest thing from the truth.

Elon grew up middle class with almost no connections to important people. More than that, his father was absent and abusive, often giving Elon's mother no money while she worked multiple jobs to support her family.

Elon is the embodiment of a self-made person. I think that's one reason that people have EDS (Elon Derangement Syndrome). They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort. Therefore, anyone who succeeds must have had an unfair advantage.

They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort.

There's more than that there. Musk is the equivalent of Michael Jordan; for every one of him, there's a hundred others that were just as brave and worked just as hard, but didn't win the genetic lottery or were unlucky.

My understanding is that Elon got a bit of money from his family as seed capital - but not a particularly large amount, and probably not that much more than the amount to open a restaurant or any other small business, which is done every year by thousands of people. In some ways he did have an advantage - if he came from total destitution, he might not have had the same success. But I think that's a little bit ungenerous. Lots of people in the US could scrape together 50k of seed capital, but most of them don't become megabillionaires.

I don't think that's even true. His dad, an abusive shithead, gave him $20k at one point but it had zero impact.

His Dad was somewhat wealthy at times but by the late 1980s the emerald business (which he bought for $50,000) had failed. Later, his father relied on Elon for handouts. After early childhood, Elon lived with his mother, who worked to take care of the family with little to no monetary assistance from his father.

Compared to a typical PMC class American, Elon was in fact quite disadvantaged, though never destitute.

No they dislike Elon because they see him as a traitor to the left.

Something happened to Elon in the Ukraine war situation. After helping out Ukraine greatly with Starlink he had some sort of bad encounter with the State Department / National Security types.

Despite being a loyal tech lefty for years none of his friends would do anything and he realized he needed friends on the right to balance things and protect himself.

That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.

That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.

Should he buy Reddit as well, then?

Huh? I’m pretty sure the mass Elon hate dates back to at least the early Tesla years. The blue/grey tribe tension isn’t unique to him, either. I don’t think “word on Reddit” made the difference.

The Starlink thing certainly didn't help, but leftists and liberals have hated Musk for years prior to the Ukraine invasion. See these Onion articles about him which predate the war:

"Fetid, Shit-Covered Elon Musk Announces Plan To Revolutionize Nation's Sewage System"

Speaking of once-great institutions, wtf happened to the Onion? They used to be genuinely funny, and apparently it's all just hate clapter stuff now.

A lot of it moved to clickhole, and then because most of the stuff left was politics, TDS slipped it a Mickey and had its way with it.

They got bought by the owner of Telemundo around the time of the Trump VS Hilldawg election. It's been churning out unfunny democrat agitprop ever since. The old writers were absolute masters absurdist comedy.

I think it goes back a little farther than Ukraine. For a long time he was viewed somewhat favorably on the left because of Tesla. Electric and hybrid cards used to be strongly left coded, or at least hippy environmentalist coded. There was a whole South Park episode about people who drive Priuses huffing their own farts. And in Stephen King's Under the Dome he had the one journalist who was a Republican but also, shockingly, a good person which was demonstrated by her driving a Prius and not having any conservative viewpoints. Now it's just a normal car that anyone might drive. More recently environmentalists have shifted away from "gas cars bad, electric cars good" to "all cars bad, trains and bikes good" so he doesn't get brownie points for that any more.

Anyway, in 2016 after Trump was elected he met with a bunch of business leaders including Musk. Musk wasn't a Trump supporter and I'm having trouble googling his exact wording now but my impression at the time was that he was moderately more willing to work with Trump than any of the other CEOs and that's when I remember the tone on reddit and other left wing spaces starting to turn against him. I think it culminated in 2018 with the Taiwanese cave kids rescue where he tried to build a submarine for them and then accused one of the rescue divers of being a pedophile. Since then he's consistently been a bad guy to the left and has been seen more and more favorably by the right.

It's probably also conflated in that tech CEOs in general used to be seen a lot more favorably than they are now. In 2010ish Google and Apple were seen as the good guys in contrast to Microsoft being the evil corporation. Now every large tech company is hated so I think that would have affected Musk even if nothing else had changed.

It's probably also conflated in that tech CEOs in general used to be seen a lot more favorably than they are now.

Are there any other tech CEOs that have been turned on to a similar degree? It seems like the others are mostly positive.

Gates(yes, I know he’s retired, but how many people can name his replacement), Bezos, and Zuckerberg are all widely disliked.

Zuckerberg and Bezos are widely disliked in the same places Musk is, Zuck for privacy stuff and Bezos for being a monopoly and Amazon working conditions. I don't see as much hate for Nadella or whoever runs Netflix but I think that's just because they're less well known. Actually Nadella does get some praise for Microsoft's open source contributions so he's probably the most popular of the bunch.

Taiwanese cave kids

Thai, not Taiwanese

For me personally, "Paedo guy" and "Funding secured" were enough to push me from "Hooray for the eccentric genius" to "This guy may be smart, but he is not a fit and proper person to be CEO of a strategically important company". That applies for different reasons whether he was on drugs at the time or not.

At the time, this combined with the obviously dishonest SolarCity deal and the rapid turnover of Tesla CFO's to make me suspect that Tesla was the next Enron. I'm happy to admit that I was wrong there.

At the end of the day, I have to ask why Musk was able to make loads of money off of Paypal, then Tesla, then Space X when these were all industries with established and extremely smart players and he went from the bottom of those barrels.

They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort.

I wouldn't even go that far - I agree that Musk works insanely hard, but he's also really smart. It's not like the only reason I'm not as rich as Musk is that I don't work as hard as him.

Having now read his biography, I'd say he's smart but not genius level. He got a 1400 on his SAT, for example, which is average around these parts.

The main reason for his success seems to be an extreme appetite for risk and zero social desirability bias. That enables him to do things which are possible but which most people wouldn't even consider - such as firing 80% of the workers at Twitter for example.

I also get the impression he has an unusual facility of being able to obsessively fixate on a specific topic or task for hours or days at a time, without getting distracted, breaking his concentration or seeing any significant fall-off in productivity.

That’s 1400 in the 1980s, when it was considerably more difficult.

It's still lower than a good chunk of the people here. It's not like a 1400 then was harder to get than a 1600 now

Fair enough. I'll concede that he's probably top 1% intelligence which puts him in the top 80 million smartest people in the world.

But Terrance Tao he is not.

Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?

Only a handful who have extremely impressive academic performance, like Gates. Even for those who do, it's questionable - Zuck wasn't a highly impressive Harvard student even though he got a perfect 1600 on the SAT, which many more impressive students don't have. It's hard to say whether Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even modern tycoons like Larry Ellison are comparable.

Jeff Bezos was at DE Shaw before he founded Amazon, and was successful there. DE Shaw are like Jane Street in that they recruit primarily for raw IQ and can afford to be extremely selective on it. 146 IQ (top 0.1%) doesn't cut it. 155 IQ (top 0.01%) probably does. Top 0.01% is also around the level where other smart people start using the word "genius" to describe you.

175 IQ is 1 in 3 million, and even the people who care about ultra-high IQs think that the distinction between very smart and very, very smart ceases to matter around the 1 in 1 million point. Re. the various comments on high SAT scores, the Prometheus Society considers 1560 on the old SAT to be 1 in 30,000 which corresponds to a 160 IQ on the current standard scale. There are no longer any publically available IQ tests which are accurate at that level.

SBF was above-average IQ for Jane Street, which also qualifies him as a legit genius.

If we treat "implausible polymathic success in a wide range of IQ-loaded fields" as a sign of genius-level IQ, then Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon are probably the smartest world leaders in history.

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Unsure if a “tychoon”, but the Renaissance Technology founder Jim Simmons. He isn’t Terrance Tap either, however.

Bill Gates is probably the go-to answer, but I also say Steve Ballmer. Unsure if either is at the 175 genius level, though.

harder to judge the older generations. Rockefeller had to be smart, but a lot of his success is hard work and ruthlessness. I guess pioneering new things that the government hates does take creativity.

Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?

Bill gates is the obvious one. I’d probably point to John mcafee as the mentally ill version of the same thing, maybe some of the enron people, possibly Thomas Edison. Deeper in history you get into ‘who is a tycoon, really’, but the wealthiest men in history are I think Mansa musa and Francisco Pizarro, neither of whom seem likely to be geniuses. John Rockefeller strikes me as probably the smartest of the original robber barons, but probably not to genius level.

1400 in the 1980s would be 1400-1480 in the late 1990s after the famous recentering. There's been another recent jump with the addition and removal of the New Coke Writing portion, but even at the median it was tens of points, not hundreds. For an older SAT supposedly a 1400 correlates with a ~140IQ. His intelligence is at that 1-in-200 "got accepted into a STEM PhD program" level; his work habits are what are at the literally 1-in-a-million "sleep on the office couch while working hundred hour weeks, then after selling that company for tens of millions do it again with the next company ad infinitum" level. A "normal" workaholic would have relaxed a little after the first multi-millionaire payout, and probably would have ended up happier and saner but wouldn't have ended up a multi-billionaire.

He's also been very lucky, but that's partly down to personality too: he's won a bunch of high-variance gambles that most people wouldn't have risked making in the first place.

his work habits are what are at the literally 1-in-a-million "sleep on the office couch while working hundred hour weeks, then after selling that company for tens of millions do it again with the next company ad infinitum" level.

I think that's a good deal closer to 1/10,000. Consider the work ethic of the average Navy SEAL for example, and then consider that there's a bunch of people with SEAL tier willpower that don't become SEALs.

Or maybe he's asking "what is all the begging about, where is the money actually going?"

Which is a question I'd like answered myself. I regularly get the begging headers on the Wikipedia pages and mostly ignore them. Then I read that there's a Foundation supposedly in charge of the thing. Okay, fine, need some kind of management.

And then I read that the Foundation has, to use a technical term, a metric fuckton of money (allegedly).

So yeah - where's all the money in the begging campaigns going, then? Jannies do it for free, after all.

A lot of it appears to be featherbedding. But it's also re-donation. Wikimedia is part of a vast group of linked leftish non-profits which pass money around between them, and their main purpose is likely to serve as a source of money (since they look like a clearly worthy cause).

So Musk is right, and it's not "hur-dur servers cost money you dimwit", it's "Paul pays Peter, and Peter pays Paul, and then everyone goes out to an agreeable dinner".

A few years ago I looked at the budget, and Wikipedia was spending more on travel and conferences than they were on servers.

The costs have ballooned enormously since.

The money is quite simply being wasted. Wikipedia worked perfectly well (better even!) ten years ago when the budget was a small fraction of its current bloated state.

The interface also wasn't complete trash like it currently is. Some of the older barely web 2.0 with very sparing use of js versions were way better.

It's all bull shit jobs and lobbying for Left Inc. Giving them money is giving money to left wing failsons and faildaughters to "raise awareness". It bothers me so much that they can run this scam and nobody cares (see the reddit thread).

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money,

I'm the resident Musk-skeptic here who called him a fraud, and expects SpaceX and Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term. I don't think he's wrong here. The disproportion between the funding they're raising and the funding they need to run the site is massive and insane. I think someone back on Reddit mentioned it was literally running out of some guys closet for many years, until it became a Respectable Nonprofit, and they started looking for things to spend money on.

So while it doesn't literally cost no money, you can more or less round it down to it costing no money, and that's without attempting further optimizations like P2P hosting.

Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term

Yeah, decent prediction. At the very least a crash in market cap. And generally just being displaced by other car manufacturers making electric cars.

SpaceX ... to crash and burn in the middle-term

Nope. No way.

Can you define your motte-and-bailey for Musks crashing and burning?

I can see Tesla stock falling 70% and car production tripling. Happens all the time in stocks. Car companies usually aren’t valued that high.

SpaceX valuation I actually believe a lot more. Starlink looks like it could be one of those tech platforms (like say the cable company) that pisses off economic rents for decades.

And SpaceX really did change our rocket technology. Calling him a fraud just seems way off as there is some very real hard tech he created out of nowhere. And I don’t think you should get a victory lap if someday financial markets and their fickle nature drop his networth a large percentage.

Can you define your motte-and-bailey for Musks crashing and burning?

I don't do motte-and-bailey's or at least I try not to. My terms would be:

  • Starship does not make it to orbit. I already have 2 bets on this, feel free to join. You can pick the timeline as long as you keep track of the bet (though preferably pick one before our hairs turn grey)

  • Neither company makes it through the next major recession, sans bailouts or change of ownership and massive restructuring.

Calling him a fraud just seems way off as there is some very real hard tech he created out of nowhere.

To the extent that he did, I think it's way overhyped. I may be proven wrong on the fraud thing, but I fully expect there to be some voodoo accounting in SpaceX in particular, and for the changes he brought to the industry to turn out to be a mirage.

And I don’t think you should get a victory lap if someday financial markets and their fickle nature drop his networth a large percentage.

Well, now I feel you're the one bracing to do a motte-and-bailey. I'm making a serious accusation here, and would not consider victory laps if he merely has a slip on some deadlines, makes less money than expected, etc. I believe his companies run on almost raw hype, and the price of his stocks is sustained by memes. "Drop his net worth by a large percentage" sounds like exactly what would happen under those circumstances, and I don't want you to do a victory lap if he happens to get a bailout through his political connections.

Thing is I think you’ve already lost by your metrics.

Tsla created an entirely new car category. People spent $23 billion on their cars last quarter. Still retains 50% US market share. About $1 billion in fcf last quarter. Assume they continue to grow but in a mature market it’s on about $10 billion in fcf at a terminal rate. I could see that company only being worth 100-150 billion. Tsla market cap today is almost 700 billion. So yes I could see the stock collapsing 70-80%. And the meme stuff gives it a huge premium. But I still consider inventing a new car category and doing $100 billion a year in revenue as falsifying your thesis.

Starlink

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23872244/spacex-starlink-revenue-customer-base-elon-musk

I don’t disagree he overhypes but doing a billion plus in revenue last year and I’m guessing 2-3X this year in an entirely new category is a huge accomplishment. Long term I think this is his best business. And it’s already shown military capabilities. Perhaps to the extent of causing Russia to lose the Ukraine War.

SpaceX itself has shown huge price cuts versus incumbents. It’s also an enabling technology for things like Starlink and some start ups like Varda Space.

No idea if his rockets make it to orbit. I don’t believe in recessions so tough for me to bet on a recession scenerio, but looking on seekingalpha Tsla has enterprise value 15 billion below market cap which means they have net cash. Tough to go bankrupt in that situation unless you have other operational leverage (union contracts for example can do that).

The reason I asked for a motte-and-Bailey is because yes Musks sets crazy projections and I agree he usually fails though. But his underlying what he actually accomplished dwarfs any “hard tech” accomplishments I’ve seen from any other human in my lifetime.

Personally, I get some of the Musks hate. I do think he’s committed security regulation violations that would put anyone else in jail.

Thing is I think you’ve already lost by your metrics.

Come on, my metrics was Starship making it to orbit, and Tesla not bankrupting / needing a bailout in the future.

Tsla created an entirely new car category

I don't think this is accurate. People have been playing around with electric cars for decades. You might say they're the first "commercially viable" electric cars, but this is exactly what I'm questioning. IMO he generated enough hype to produce these cars, but the investment does not make financial sense.

Starlink

There was a leaked email where he was screaming at his coworkers to get Starhip done or Starlink won't make any real money for the company. Maybe the leak was fake (though never heard of it getting deboonked), or maybe it was just Elon cracking the whip, and they'll be fine even without Starhip, but it's something to consider.

SpaceX itself has shown huge price cuts versus incumbents

Again, as far as accusations of fraud goes, this is where I'd paint the target. I think there's some financial juggling going on that allows him to pretend the launch price is cheaper than it is in reality. If 5 years from now he'll upload a video to X where he's driving a remote-controlled Tesla on the moon to the applause of his investors, I'll eat crow.

No idea if his rockets make it to orbit.

Well, that's lame. Starship is supposed to be the big cost-cutting thing. It's supposed to take us to the moon, and Mars. If it never makes it to orbit, surely that will be a big disappointment?

But his underlying what he actually accomplished dwarfs any “hard tech” accomplishments I’ve seen from any other human in my lifetime.

What tech of his impressed you so much?

Personally, I get some of the Musks hate. I do think he’s committed security regulation violations that would put anyone else in jail.

Counterpoint: The SEC is stark raving mad. But I actually agree, I don't think he's doing anything jailworthy.

Your rhetoric and your standard for “Musks isn’t a fraud” do not seem to align.

You make accusations of huge accounting fraud. Bigger than Enron to be perfectly honest and then fall back on he has to go the moon to be proven wrong. I feel like this is the definition of motte-and-baily.

And the thing on electronic cars it’s a gigantically huge accomplishment to go from some hobbyist thing to a $200 billion a year auto manufacturer and the first privately funded auto manufacturer since basically Ford (Hyundai I believe had state funding; one could quibble that tax rebates on electronics helped him a lot). Steve Jobs didn’t even accomplish that feat with the smart phone. We had commercialized blackberries before him.

As far as investment in Tesla being justified - if you look at his actual fundraising for it then $4 billion in yearly fcf is a good investment. It’s current 200x fcf multiple seems expensive to me.

The costs cuts per kg launch to space is one of the biggest technological breakthroughs I’ve seen. Is this chart all fake numbers

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/

If you want to not be in Motte-Bailey land you need to establish that these numbers are fake. We had no improvements in decades and then Musks came along and prices collapsed. Same with cars you negate all his Tesla accomplishments because we had hobbyist.

I’m actually disagreeing with you on whether Musks committed criminal offenses that result in jail time. I think that is 100% yes. But he’s politically protected because he’s too important because his engineering accomplishments are the greatest thing since atleast WW2.

Your rhetoric and your standard for “Musks isn’t a fraud” do not seem to align.

You make accusations of huge accounting fraud. Bigger than Enron to be perfectly honest and then fall back on he has to go the moon to be proven wrong. I feel like this is the definition of motte-and-baily.

I think they align pretty well. For one making it back to the moon is what Musk was contracted to do. He's literally giving away tickets to the moon to youtubers, surely, if nothing else, giving away tickets for what is, charitably, a fake-it-till-you-make-it venture can be described as fraudulent?

Secondly, you're misrepresenting what I'm saying re: accounting. While I think SpaceX is not running at a profit, I believe the investors have an accurate financial picture of what is going on. I think the company is going to crash because the massive profits they are expecting in the future are not going to show up, not because there's a giant gaping hole where the profits are supposed to be right now. The accounting fraud I'm expecting to come out is it turning out that the government paid a lot more per launch than the headline numbers are saying, but it's hidden under "miscellaneous" expenditures, or something.

And the thing on electronic cars it’s a gigantically huge accomplishment to go from some hobbyist thing to a $200 billion a year auto manufacturer and the first privately funded auto manufacturer since basically Ford

As far as investment in Tesla being justified - if you look at his actual fundraising for it then $4 billion in yearly fcf is a good investment. It’s current 200x fcf multiple seems expensive to me.

Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

It would be impressive to set up a brand new auto manufacturer, if it wasn't at risk of falling apart when it runs out of hype. The reason there were no privately funded auto manfucaturers since basically Ford wasn't because there's some uncrackable mystery about building cars, it's because the established automakers have such a massive infrastructure, that they'd eat you for breakfast if you tried to compete with them. Musk managed to generate enough hype, to get enough money, to set up competing factories, but that doesn't mean the hype was justified. If the company can't stand on it's own two feet, and will end up needing a bailout, or getting sold at a garage sale to it's competitors, then I feel my statement about it crashing and burning is entirely justified.

Is this chart all fake numbers

Very likely manipulated to an extent that makes them effectively useless. For example the Shuttle number is derived by taking the cost of the entire program, and dividing it by the amount of launches. The SpaceX numbers, I believe, is what they charge other private companies. We have no insight into their accounting, and we don't know how much it actually costs to put a kilogram of payload to orbit with a SpaceX rocket, that would make it apples to apples with the Shuttle.

If you want to not be in Motte-Bailey land you need to establish that these numbers are fake.

On one hand that's fair, on the other hand you know that I have no way of doing that unless I can look at their accounting. As a compromise I offer to plant my flag here, if I'm right it's bound to come up sooner or later.

But he’s politically protected because he’s too important because his engineering accomplishments are the greatest thing since atleast WW2.

I have to once again ask what is the marvel of engineering he created that has you so impressed? If his companies end up successful, I'll agree he's a brilliant executive, but from a tech point of view nothing he did seems all that impressive?

Musks does usually fail. And he sets goals that he is likely to fail. No complaint there. If you judge Musks by the goals he sets them he is a loser.

For the record I’ve shorted Tesla before and have never owned it. The goals he set are 10-100x what the rest of society is trying to achieve. He ends up doing 5x. A .200 hitter in baseball when the rest of the world is batting .03.

I don’t know if he will get to the moon. I do know no one else on earth even has a plan to go to the moon. We have sclerosis in hard tech.

I’ve said what I think he’s done that are huge advancements. All modern tech is built on the shoulders of giants to an extent so your always going to have a whataboutism that some other guy was doing something similar. But his achievements went much farther than that other guy. You’ve disagreed these are big achievements and quite frankly I think you are wrong.

And I’ve been wrong on Musks in the past. I always doubted it. Then a few years later he had all these companies humming and produce great products at lower costs and greater scale.

I do agree his hype and promotion are a big reason why he achieves things. It’s why he’s a great boss. He inspires his workers to accomplish goals they didn’t think possible. He’s no doubt a very talented engineer. His real ability is being the greatest coach we’ve ever seen at getting his teams to achieve things we don’t think we can accomplish.

For one making it back to the moon is what Musk was contracted to do. He's literally giving away tickets to the moon to youtubers, surely, if nothing else, giving away tickets for what is, charitably, a fake-it-till-you-make-it venture can be described as fraudulent?

what makes it 'fraud'? lots of space companies have sold launches for rockets that have never gone up yet.

I have to once again ask what is the marvel of engineering he created that has you so impressed? If his companies end up successful, I'll agree he's a brilliant executive, but from a tech point of view nothing he did seems all that impressive?

reusable rockets aren't impressive? even if you think the cost savings are all faked, the sheer volume of launches that they enable is an incredible achievement in their own right.

This is completely correct. It's not even up for debate, really: You can find the 2021-22 financial statment here and scroll to Page 4. In ONE YEAR, they (Wikimedia) received 160 million dollars in donations and in the SAME YEAR spent literally twice as much money (6.2 million dollars) in just processing those same donations than they did on internet hosting itself (what people assume the money is spent on) -- which was only 2.7 million dollars. Look at those two numbers. 160 vs 3 million. They aren't even in the same ballpark. 15 million dollars they literally just gave away in grants and 88 million dollars in salaries and 18 million on "professional services", which is odd for an organization that primarily (as far as I assume most donors are concerned) simply runs Wikipedia and literally prohibits (most) paid editing...

Agreed. Wikimedia is a hugely profitable business, operated on a pay-what-you-want business model. It is impossible to tell just how profitable because the published accounts don't distinguish between spending that supports the encyclopedia and community (paying the salaries of the Wikimedia software developers, subsidising conference attendance for Wikipedia editors from poor countries etc.) and spending which is actually distributing profits to the pro-establishment leftist causes that Wikipedia's stakeholders like.

Per this 80,000 hours article, fundraising for ineffective charities (or for-profits masquerading as charities) is one of the most destructive things you can legally do because it reduces donations to effective charities. The Wikimedia Foundation know that their appeals are deceptive and that their marginal grantee is ineffective, so I have no qualms about calling them an evil organisation. (This is despite the fact that, unlike most Motteposters, I do not consider the pro-establishment left to be per se evil).

The English Wikipedia community who are actually editing the encyclopedia are eccentric but not evil, and produce a pretty good encyclopedia.

There's a reason why I advise people to avoid donating money to Wikipedia if at all possible. Wikipedia does not need the money, and at this point reducing the income stream is the only way they might change.

I'm not optimistic that they will, of course, but at the very least we stop rewarding irresponsible behaviour.

I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money

The link goes to a screenshot of Musk's Tweet, whose first sentence is (emphasis added):

Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia foundation wants so much money?

Note the bolded "so much," which was not "any." As such, it actually isn't the most charitable read here that Musk thinks Wikimedia deserves less money, not no money, it's the obvious and straightforward read. And it's a highly uncharitable, to such an extent as to be just plain wrong read to say that this indicates a failure to understand that Wikipedia costs any money to provide.

To address the actual question of the post, I think it's notable that even midwits (I hate this term, but whatever, it's the original term used here and it conveys the meaning well enough) tend to look down on people who infer the broad competence of someone in some general endeavor based on a highly uncharitable and downright twisted interpretation of a single Tweet made by that person. Such an inference is so obviously unjustified and so obviously reflective of the interpreter's mentality rather than that of the person making the Tweet that it takes very little intelligence to understand that.

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

Wikipedia receives money via fundraising campaigns which appeal to end users to donate. The copy these campaigns use is notorious for being misleading or deceptive about the company's financial position, something that people (even seasoned members of the Wikipedia community) have been complaining about for years. As others below me have noted, only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's operating expenses go towards keeping the site online, and most of the editing done on the website is done pro bono rather than by its hired staff. I, personally, think it's dishonest for a nonprofit to misrepresent itself as being on the precipice of going under without an immediate influx of charitable donations, and to imply that said charitable donations are going directly towards keeping the site online (when in truth, for every dollar you donate, something like 6 cents are going towards server costs).

Elon's companies receive money either by selling products or by soliciting investments. If you think his products are shoddy or overpriced, say so (I can't comment, having never sat in a Tesla and barely using Twitter, before or since Musk's takeover). If you think he's only securing investments by knowingly misleading investors, say so. Otherwise I'm not even sure what "Elon, I think you deserve less money" really means.

The vast majority of the Wikipedia Foundation's money goes to supporting political causes, not runnign Wikipedia. Wikipedia is relatively cheap to run for a major global site. Musk is correct, and the critics nipping at his heals are midwits.

"Midwit" is exceedingly generous for the people piling on this specific Musk criticism. It takes about 2 minutes of internet research to check how much Wikimedia Foundation spending actually goes towards providing Wikipedia.

Some serious stones and glass houses imo. By those standards 99% of the Internet is dumber than “midwit”.

Can we just say “they don’t seem to know much about Wikipedia’s finances”?

It's not "don't seem to know much"; that's fine for everybody not joining the pile-on. It's "joining the pile-on without bothering to find out". Nescience vs ignorance.

If not midtwit than what?

My guess would be people wanting to culture war that don’t care much about the facts. It’s prefereble to hate on Elon (plays for wrong team) than figure out he’s factually correct quickly.

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money

That's not the most charitable read, that's the obvious straight-forward read. Do you really think it's possible that Elon Musk doesn't know that servers cost some amount of money?

As others have noted below, Wikipedia doesn't need the money it raises to run itself, and hasn't needed it for years. Wikipedia could put it's assets / raised capital in a safe financial vehicle and run its servers forever on the profit. Elon Musk is 100% correct Wikipedia simply doesn't need a large yearly donation campaign to run itself as a website.

Musk is in an even better position to make this argument as he just massively cut the operational waste of a major website to prove the ridiculousness of the actual costs to bloat ratio. He is the only person who has ever done this at this scale, and thus is the best person in the world to listen to about wasted operating expenses.

I am not an Elon stan, but this is a willfully anti-Elon take that requires squinting his comment into absurdity just to prove how stupid he must be.

If you have been tricked into thinking Wikipedia needs your individual donation to keep the lights on, that's on you and on Wikipedia for lying to you, not on Elon.

It's funny when the musk hate gets so strong, that an obvious interpretation is considered the most charitable read :marseyfacepalm:

The cool rocket stuff aside, I have no love for the billionaire... but can we apply some of this scrutiny to everyone? Or at least other billionaires and major politicians?

Musk is in an even better position to make this argument as he just massively cut the operational waste of a major website to prove the ridiculousness of the actual costs to bloat ratio.

Ding ding ding.

Maybe it was not worth 44 Billion, but he proved that an operation that was cruising off of VC money and staffed up as if they were expecting to repel an invasion could fire most of their personnel and operate on a relative shoestring with minimal degradation in service.

Seems plausible something similar could be said of Wiki.

Below, there is a discussion of the civil war due to Robert E Lee statute being torn down. The other main event of the day is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I would say as a general matter the biggest supporters of Palestine in the US are progressives. Progressives also hate the confederacy.

Question is can you separate them? The south was arguing for their right of self determination? Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).

So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination. But that claim is bloodied by what those people would do with such right and at least in the confederacy context that “bad thing” was enough to invalidate their right to self determination.

My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right? If so, it seems at best it is a contingent right. If it is a contingent right, what contingencies are unimportant enough to “trump” the right?

The south was arguing for their right of self determination?

The South didn't want self determination. It wanted slavery. This is indicated by the fact that there's no meaningful concept of self-determination for southern states once slavery becomes moot in politics. Without the slavery before or after there is no state "nationalism." That's not the same and it's not sympathetic.

Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).

I don't know what to say to this. It's such a bizarre straight face statement of propagandized narrative as fact. First of all let's be clear about something, Israel invaded the Palestinian's lands. And they're the ones that have a ethnostate based around preserving and expanding their ethno-purity at the expense of the natives. Israel is also the one violently expanding. I don't know if people are just not aware of this or they elide over it for propaganda reasons. It's Israel forcing violence into the situation.

There's no reason to project some certainty that anyone saying free Palestine or whatever wants to kill all Israelis. Least of all on to "progressives." I'm not aware of a single person that believes that. At the most extreme you'll get people suggesting Israelis should leave and go back from where they came from (Europe), or rather their forefathers at this point (this would be very difficult for Mizrahi).

There isn't any real similarity here.

Israel is also the one violently expanding.

Palestinians are the ones who are murdering civilians whenever they can, despite that being rather counterproductive to their cause because the more Israelis see them as rabid animals, the more justification is there for casting them out and taking their land.

Palestinians are the ones who are murdering civilians whenever they can

Israeli dead: 1,400

Palestinian: 8,000

And rising for the Palestinians. Scuttlebutt is the only thing keeping the Israelis from murdering much greater amounts is the U.S. and maybe some saner military officials fighting the government in backrooms.

I've said it before appealing to dead bodies is such a weird strategy for Israeli apologists. Anything you can say about the Palestinians you can say about the Israelis. The killed more people ratio has always been in favor of Israel, before current events.

And again I say, Israel did start this. Their demands of: "let us come in, steal your land, and ethnically cleanse you for our ethnostate" have never been reasonable or would lead to anything but conflict. It's just they won. But peaceful good boys who dindu nuffin? Never.

When Palestinians are doing prisoner exchanges, they want tens to hundreds of their own for one prisoner.

This suggests that they consider the value of their own people to be rather low. So, more like 1400 Israelis, 80 Palestinians.

I don't think that suggests that they consider their own people to be of low value, otherwise, why bargain for so many? Rather, I think that's just them being greedy.

They also admit to not caring a shit about civilian deaths.

All points to them assigning a low value to their own lives, high value to winning. So people who are out there teary eyed over dead kids are just being idiots.

And they're the ones that have a ethnostate based around preserving and expanding their ethno-purity at the expense of the natives.

Are you safer as an Arab in Israel or as a Jew in Gaza?

The former, almost assuredly. Doesn't change any of the truth of what I said.

Yes it does. Unless you mean the following: Jews are unsafe in Gaza. But if Hamas were to take over Israel, they would change their behavior.

I think if you're going to start waving around the "ethnostate" label it's kind of relevant to also note that there's one of these two places that is ethnically homogenous and kills people for being the wrong race, and it's not Israel.

There was no discussion of self determination after because the South lost. The point is that the South believed they had the right to change their form of government and the North said “no you don’t.” That is a violation of self determination. Of course, the reason the South wanted that right was to brutally oppress a minority. But that implies the right to self determination is at best contingent based upon what you will do with it.

As for propaganda, when you read Hamas’ charter which cites to the (apparently happy) day when even trees will call out to Muslims that a Jew is hiding behind them and it is time to kill the Jew do you believe Hamas has zero desire to wipe out Jews? Why disregard their stated intention?

Is your idea that the British solution was somehow wrong? Keep in mind it wasn’t the Israelis who fucked up the British solution but a number of Arabs who couldn’t dare imagine a Jewish state.

Please also inform us how the Jews have been invading Gaza. In 2005 Israel pulled their citizens forcibly out of Gaza. Gaza then attack Israel. I’m sure I will hear something about the disputed West Bank but of course that isn’t Gaza.

Finally you talk about propaganda and then cite to an ethnostate? Really hard argument when Israel is surrounded by theocratic authoritarian governments (including Hamas which hasn’t held an election since 2006). Hell even Arabs have a party in the Knesset. Do Arabs have a bit of a second class right in Israel? Yeah. But funny enough those second class rights are often better than rights in other Arab countries and far better than the rights Jews have in those autocratic countries they are surrounded by. There is a clear difference between Israel and the non-Israelis in the Middle East. It isn’t a hard choice to say which one is better (even if none are perfect).

PS — part of my point was that right of self determination conflicts a lot with other supposed rights. For example, could France choose to keep France for the French by refusing to take in any immigration? I’m sure NGOs would claim that violates immigrants’ rights even if that conflicts with the French supposed right of self determination. So is there a right to self determination?

As for propaganda, when you read Hamas’ charter which cites to the (apparently happy) day when even trees will call out to Muslims that a Jew is hiding behind them and it is time to kill the Jew do you believe Hamas has zero desire to wipe out Jews? Why disregard their stated intention?

Not saying they aren't real pieces of work, but they adopted a new charter back in 2017 that abandoned such language and states their war is specifically with the Zionists occupying Palestine rather than Judaism. I would also caution against conflating the organization Hamas with Palestinians as an ethnicity/nationality.

16.Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

17.Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.

Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis

That's not 'likewise', though.

It's pretty normal for both sides of a war to say they want to kill the people on the other side. That's sort of what war is. Many Israelis express the inverse sentiment.

Modern US wars are supposed to be more 'humanitarian' than that and it's tacky for us to express such sentiments, but. It's pretty normal war rhetoric, and war is about hating the other country you're fighting.

Whereas horrible oppressing and torturing your own citizens, in fact rather than in rhetoric, as a matter of course and a matter of enduring policy rather than as a temporary contingent reaction to an ongoing event like a war, is a qualitatively different thing.

First of all, war rhetoric tends to end after the war; policy like this may be permanent.

Second, even if the most bleeding-heart of liberals would like a world without borders where morality doesn't depend on nationality, the standard reality is that governments have duties and obligations towards the proper treatment of their own citizens that trump how they treat the citizens of other nations (to say nothing of the citizens of enemy nations during war). It's still nice for governments to not commit too many war crimes against enemy citizens, the UN will call them meanies if they do it a lot, but they're inherently a bad government if they do the same to their own citizens who they have authority over and obligations towards.

My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right?

For people? Sure, it's one right among many, depending of course on what you even mean y the vague term.

For governments? Governments aren't people, they don't have rights.

There's a sense in which, even if 49% of the people in your democracy disagree with a policy, it is still interfering with their freedoms for some foreign country to come in and change that policy to what they would want instead. Yes, in a democracy, there is some connection between the self-determination of the state and the self-determination of the people.

But it's a tenuous link at best. Just gesturing at the individual's right to self-determination is not sufficient to justify states doing anything they want as an absolute right.

Especially when what that state is doing is taking away the right to self-determination form many of it's own people! At that point the link isn't just tenuous, it's basically just rhetorical.

It's pretty normal for both sides of a war to say they want to kill the people on the other side. That's sort of what war is. Many Israelis express the inverse sentiment.

Not really. There's a difference between saying you want to kill enemy combatants and saying your objective is to literally exterminate the other side. Very few modern wars have genocide as either an explicit or implicit goal.

Is there a lot of ugly rhetoric during a war? Yes. But most people still understand that the objective is to defeat the enemy, not eradicate them. Even Russia isn't claiming they want to exterminate Ukrainians (and indeed, that isn't their goal). Israelis do not want to exterminate the Palestinians, notwithstanding ugly rhetoric that might come from a few extremists.

The Palestinians, unfortunately, by and large, really do want to wipe out the Israelis. Not all of them, and many would probably grudgingly settle into a peaceful coexistence if that were presented to them as a living situation they'd find tolerable, and in future generations the genocidal hatred might fade.

But I think your equivocation here is just outright false.

Even Russia isn't claiming they want to exterminate Ukrainians (and indeed, that isn't their goal).

Russia is led by boomers who heavily promote (and probably earnestly believe in) something called druzhba narodov. This is a kind of lame civnat narrative similar to GOP’s fawning over baste blacks and LEGAL immigrants, i.e. people who are content with not totally disempowering the majority population. The Ukrainians/Kleinrussen are a brother people being liberated from ebil Banderite Nazis who hate puppies and sunshine. The enemy is ideological, he has, strictly speaking, no nationality, just like crime has no color. Like America, Russia too is an idea defined by a vague adherence to Eastern Orthodoxy, but also baste traditional Islam and who knows what else, loving Stalin and hating homosexuals. This is, for example, why the Ukrainian language remains official in Crimea and the new oblasts (not that this has any real consequences, but it does show the kind of picture Russia’s leadership is trying to paint).

By contrast, Ukrainians are much more realistic and an order of magnitude more bloodthirsty, to the point where mocking the idea that not all Russians deserve death has become a national pastime akin to mocking #notallmen. Their enemy is not Putinism, Tsarism or neo-Bolshevism or cleptocracy or authoritarianism or whatever; it is Russia, the ancestral enemy of Rus-Ukrainians. It is almost unimaginable that Russian will be allowed in any state capacity should Ukraine ever retake Crimea. There is nothing surprising about this: the slaves of Haiti were more bloodthirsty than their French masters, so were the Indians in North America, and so too are Palestinians. What master in his right mind wishes to kill off his slaves?

It is almost unimaginable that Russian will be allowed in any state capacity should Ukraine ever retake Crimea.

so were the Indians in North America

What master in his right mind wishes to kill off his slaves?

Canada, famously, had programs designed to assimilate Indian youths into the dominate culture. Countries throughout the world like France, Germany and Sweden had programs designed to force a certain dialect on the people usually through the schooling system. This kind of thing was considered normal and progressive back then. This was also true in the USA with the once thriving Italian and German speaking communities dying out once it was deemed unpatriotic during the World Wars. I don't find my Grandmother's family giving up their Junker last name any great tragedy.

I don't find the Ukrainians, empirically, anymore bloodthirsty than the Russians in this war. Nor the Jews anymore bloodthirsty than the Arabs that have always wanted to extirpate the Jews by any means necessary.

Most (but certainly not all) progressives I've seen are careful to distinguish that when they express support for the Palestinian cause, they are not defending Hamas. There's no question that Hamas's goals include complete extermination of the Jewish people, they don't even pretend otherwise, but one can in principle support the Palestinian cause and Palestine "from the river to the sea" without also calling for a final solution.

Perhaps this is just a motte-and-bailey argument no different from the revisionist claim that the Confederacy was fighting for "states' rights". I honestly don't know and can't offer an opinion on what proportion of Palestinians sincerely support the extermination of the Jewish people, or see that as a necessary evil in the establishment of a Palestinian state. But in principle I see no reason why pursuit of a Palestinian state must require the extermination of Jews (or even just Israelis).

If Palestine is from the river to the sea that means Israel does not exist. Now does it mean the necessary genocide of Israelis? No but in practice it will

I've heard progressives say that abolishing the Civil Rights Act is absolutely letting back in Jim Crow and full blown racism. They don't believe Constitutional talk of the value of federalism or decentralization and private, voluntary action. No, CRA removal is just an exterminationist aim.

But Jim Crow wasn't exterminationist. The sum total of all lynchings of blacks in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 was 3,446, according to the Tuskeegee Institute (who I don't think are incentivized to be conservative with the number).

I haven't seen any type of coordination or planning to it, which is something common to most other historical examples I would call "ethnic cleansing." To my knowledge, the 60's and 70's radicalism was not focused on forcing whites out of cities, but rather blaming whites for self-segregating in areas away from blacks.

Like 2rafa, however, I would certainly agree that it was "ethnic replacement," with a fair amount of inter-ethnic conflict as well. I would also call the displacement of blacks out of many areas of Southern California by latinos "replacement" as opposed to "cleansing," because it was an emergent phenomenon and not premeditated.

It was at least a form of ethnic displacement. I think the case for ‘cleansing’ is that some of the action that led to large scale population movement (like bussing) was top down state implemented rather than organically decided by communities, and this probably pushes it into ethnic cleansing, even if unintentional, by state and successive federal governments. Then again, can ethnic cleansing be unintentional?

Similarly, whether black people were subject to a policy of ethnic cleansing in the South isn’t completely clear. Obviously many left in the Great Migration (which ultimately spurred the above), but while both good job opportunities in Northern cities and racism and ill treatment in the South are cited as reasons they did so, I think the former was a bigger draw than the latter was a push.

(Similarly we might say that many whites left the inner cities not only or even primarily because of high crime rates, but because many actually wanted the bigger houses, gardens and so on of the suburbs. Suburbanization didn’t begin in 1965 after all. But there’s enough of a historical record of an immediate collapse between ‘65 and ‘75 that it’s clear something exceptional did happen.)

While I would agree that Jim Crow wasn’t exterminationist, my understanding is that lynching refers to one special category of violence and does not cover all white-on-black terror of this period.

What about modern how many of the lynchings were correct extra judicial hangings (eg the decedent did in fact rape a woman)? I don’t think extra judicial is good (big believer in process) but it doesn’t strike me as a huge problem if say 39/40 of the annual lynchings were based on an accurate view of crime.

To me, the problem of Jim Crow was more the laws that made it difficult for blacks to earn income etc.

Lynchings were also as much a cultural practice as anything else. For most of US history, most lynching victims were white. It's just that as the late-20th century cultural changes saw lynching as a whole decline, it declined last in the south and actually increased for blacks as overall numbers trended downwards, even as African Americans who went from being demographically-disproportionate victims to actual majority victims as lynching faded from common use.

I'll pass a relevant source that seems to be mostly in the middle-of-the-pack for year-by-year showings, but if you look at year-by-year breakdowns, black lynchings weren't as, well, consistently allocated as one would think for a 'maintaining control' policy. Civil War reconstruction generally ended in 1877, when federal troops were removed and local political dynamics re-asserted, but black lynchings were actually lower in the 80s (50-70) than they were in the 1910s.

In so much that lynching was a policy tool to cow and terrify into subservience, it was mostly a specific decade of about 1891-1901, where the only 9 years of triple-digit-a-year african-american lynchings occurred, most of that in the early 1890s. This certainly corresponds to the dismantling of the last of the reconstruction-era state governments and the imposition of disenfranchising Jim Crow, but this was far more about asserting control than maintaining control. Once control was taken, lynchings generally decreased over time to a point that they were more living memory than practical, following the white trend of generally declining numbers about 20-30 years late.

Lynchings gradually declined to in the 50s a year in 1920, to basically halving to the 20s or below in 1922, and dropping below 10 a year around 1936. By the time of the Civil Rights movement of the US in the 1950s-1960s, when the average American lifespan in 1960 was 60-70 but the average age was 30, for most people lynching had been a terror-policy in their parents or grand parents age, not in their lifespan.

While the history and use of lynching against African Americans is a real and terrible thing, it's often used anachronistically. Lynching-as-culture predated Jim Crow, and was in no way reserved for African Americans. Lynching-as-control-tactic was far more about establishing Jim Crowe than maintaining it, and absolutely did see African victims raise even as white victims declined as lynching in general became less accepted. By the time of the civil rights era in the 50s and 60s, lynching hadn't been any sort of meaningful policy for decades, which is to say since before the Baby Boomers were even born after WW2.

https://famous-trials.com/sheriffshipp/1084-lynchingsyear http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html

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The definition of a "lynching" from the Tuskegee institute is "a confirmed extra-legal death in which three or more people participated as perpetrators."

"Terror" is very different from "extermination," and distinguishing the two doesn't support your case. Terror can, and often is, employed in order to punish people who are seen as stepping outside of the proper, socially-prescribed role. Thus, a black man who tried to vote in the Jim Crow South, or who insisted on dating a white woman, might well be terrorized with a nighttime visit from the Klan and a flaming cross on his lawn. But if the black man stopped trying to vote, or broke up with the white woman, he would then be left alone - the terror had performed its purpose. That is malevolent, but not an attempt at extermination.

I don't think the mirror image argmument of supporting the Confederacy's aims of independence but objecting to the Davis administration would hold much water anywhere.

It wasn't just the Davis Administration. All four states that issued explanations of their reasons for secession put the threat to slavery as the primary reason.

Be careful with historical documents - those were political documents written for public consumption. You're not entirely wrong - the seceding states clearly thought slavery was a central pillar of their unique civilization (though they were not unconflicted about it). However, they also had every incentive to try and bring the northern abolitionists, who were a small minority widely-viewed as radical, humorless, and radical (not in the good sense), front and center. When you're reading those, take the same attitude you'd take towards Lindsey Graham talking about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or AOC talking about the Floyd riots - it's basically the same thing.

I don’t buy it. Yes, those were political documents, but they were aimed at at least three audiences: 1) the federal govt; 2) foreign powers, esp Great Britain; and 3) their own citizens. Their incentive was to convince all of them that secession was legitimate, and saying "we want to preserve slavery" was not the way to do that.

But it's not a mirror image argument. Davis admin was unarguably the leading institution of the Confederacy. Hamas isn't unarguably the leading institution of the Palestinians, while there's not an unarguable leading institution the PA still is the formal representative of Palestinians (in abroad contexts, for example). Hamas runs Gaza, mostly, but that's different from the Palestinians.

Were the videos of the Oct 7 attack meet with delight or dismay in Palestine?

While I agree with your point of 'that's different from the Palestinians,' I'd also point that- from my perspective- 'The Palestinians' as a coherent collective has been degrading over the last many years, at the very least since the 2007 Hamas-Fatah conflict in which Hamas notably publicly executed Fatah officials by throwing them off of tall buildings, which was then accompanied by the attacks on Israel that led to the Gaza blockade and the loss of Gaza-West Bank travel.

We're about 15 years into not just the political, but cultural divergence between Gaza and the West Bank. Different social services, different education systems, different lived experiences, and so on, with increasingly little interaction or cultural exchange between them to produce a meaningful 'average' Palestinian experience. Gaza and Westbank were already heavily divergent from the Palestinian experiences in regional refugee groups, where- for example- Jordanian-Palestinians had different degrees of 'authentically Palestinian experience' from the Kuwaiti-Palestinians (at least before their expulsion), and so on.

To a degree, 'Palestinian' is becoming less and less a meaningful political identity, and more of a sub-ethnic/social descriptor, whose meaning changes by geographic area.

but one can in principle support the Palestinian cause and Palestine "from the river to the sea" without also calling for a final solution.

This is a flagrant example of sane washing/running cover.

It's the same Motte and Bailey bullshit where more milquetoast progressives chanted Defund the Police and All Cops Are Bastards, and when pressed, retreated to claiming they just wanted accountability in policing.

Burn it before it takes root.

I came to a conclusion a while ago that I am no free speech absolutists under a couple of conditions. The Free Palestine from the river to the sea is one area where I think we may have passed what I think we can allow. There has been some talk of foreign ownership of tick tock and how we had limits on foreign ownership of media. My Overton window for restricting speech comes down to these factors:

  1. Is it something really bad that if implemented would ruin civilized society. This saying comes far too close to explicit promotion of genocide. Sure you can sane wash it but it really does feel like a belief one step away from advocating a policy of the holocaust.

  2. Is the threatening speech outside of a nutty 1-2% of the population and capable of becoming official policy. I don’t care what some cult talks about which includes things within some gender studies program. Looking at views in the younger generation it feels like the majority of young people hold these beliefs in some form.

Society needs the free exchange of ideas obviously and free speech should be the dominant belief in most instances but this seems to be approaching if not past my line.

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The Free Palestine from the river to the sea is one area where I think we may have passed what I think we can allow.

Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea.

The moment you decide that some particular phrasing or statement deserves to be suppressed with government force you immediately engender a hostile reaction, as people usually implicitly realise that authorities banning certain types of speech are not doing so for the benefit of the people they rule over. While obviously some "speech" doesn't get this kind of reaction, like child pornography, political statements like this absolutely don't fall into that category.

Personally, the fact that you've established a "line" of permissible opinions immediately makes me want to repeatedly violate it, because I see that as an attack on my own freedoms. And of course my counter-argument, which has just as much validity as your desire to put a clamp over my mouth, is that calls for censorship like your own lie outside the bounds of permissible political discussion.

Yes I have a line. Kill all Jews seems to be it.

I absolutely believe that people should be able to say that. I don't agree with that message, but I think it should be possible for people to disagree with me. But I didn't actually say that anyway - the fact that you interpret that statement as "kill all jews" is entirely on you. The fact that a statement you disagree with prompts you to hallucinate genocidal intentions is an excellent argument against your self-admitted desire to be placed in charge of what constitutes permissible speech.

Aren’t you a Holocaust denier or am I confusing. People say things before they do things. We aren’t talking a fictional writing class.

You're accusing me of being a holocaust denier because I disagree with your desire to shut my mouth for me? This is comically uncharitable and looks to me like nothing more than an attempt to attack me by falsely putting inflammatory words in my mouth while feigning innocence by way of ignorance. For the record, I'm not a holocaust denier, and have never claimed to be. I have in fact made posts which reference the holocaust as having happened, and it boggles my mind that I have to actually state this.

But to answer your point, the claim that people who say this are actually making is that there'd be a single state, democratic solution. If you believe that being members of a multicultural democracy instead of an ethnostate would be the death of the jews then you're making the same arguments as the white nationalists on the alt-right, and you don't get to criticise anyone for being racist anymore - which is something I believe you do care about, given that you tried to attack me by calling me a holocaust denier.

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The problem with that is at some point you wake up with Ministry of Truth. You can check UK and EU and hate speech which is moving to become more and more encompassing.

On the other hand I have recently came to the conclusion that freedom of speech and freedom of stupid/obnoxious/hipocricy are two different freedoms. And they should be mutually exclusive in a single person.

Gonna have to disagree with you there, I'm a free speech absolutist who thinks the Holocaust happened, disagrees with the Nazis on everything and am not antisemetic in the least - and yet I'll defend to the death their right to say Jews are evil and the Holocaust never happened.

And you hold that position if your choice becomes something like

  1. Shutdown tick-tock
  2. Let the speech happen, probability of a Holocaust happening increases to 30%?

There are things I value more than free speech. I don’t have a problem with a lot of things America did in third world countries to limit communism. Sure you can argue I’m giving you a false choice but I’m not positive it’s a false choice.

30% seems wildly exaggerated. I think suppressing the river to the sea sloganning on TikTok would only make it louder on other platforms, so I'll put the effect at "decreases by X%".

So far, I have seen no evidence that suppressing speech (in the sense of sharing ideas, ideals, theories etc.) is actually reliable at reducing violence on-net. In fact, it's one of the favorite tools of authoritarian governments to oppress people physically, and also suppress their speech to keep them from complaining about it. The only thing suppressing speech seems to be consistently good at is helping the elite enforce their will on the population (hell, even that not always; there's plenty of examples of inept crackdowns that seem to actively help the spread of whatever they wanted to suppress. Which seems good for exactly as long as you agree with the elite.

That said, I think there are some common-sense limits to speech. Explicit calls to violence, coordinating crimes etc. really have very little redeeming qualities, have a very direct connection to actual violence/crimes and are imo quite easy to distinguish, so I'm not overly worried about outlawing them. On the other hand, while I'm hardly a holocaust denier, I'm pretty strongly against the holocaust laws in my country, germany, because it's imo essentially identical to define Pi by law to be a specific value so that nobody is even allowed to question it - even if we're pretty confident about it, this is imo not inside the scope of what laws should (and contrast to defining Pi by law for the purpose of legal disputes, while still allowing discussions about it).

The obvious point would seem to be to speak out on how the choice is a false dilemma being proposed by the people predisposed to censor tick-tock, who are merely utilizing unrelated historical events to try and emotionally cludgeon people into accepting censorship as the lesser of two evils rather than an unrelated, and unnecessary, evil in and of itself.

A bit if deeper thought is they every nation has their memes or same mythology. Letting the Chinese picks the algorithms and memes for our next generation seems dangerous. This Israel situation might. E a prime example of that.

Thing is, even now and even if you are the USGov, you can't really shut down the speech. You can drive the unsavoury characters underground, and leave the folks who might actually be able to work out a solution unsure what they can say (and by extension do) -- but samizdat was a thing even for much more repressive governments in a much less technologically advanced environment. You can't stop it, why no meet it head-on?

Look at here, we have resident Holocaust narrative non-enjoyers, very enthusiastic ones -- how much traction do they get? Honestly modern narrative enforcement just makes me more doubtful of all the stuff I learned in History class, not less -- I'm not quite buying SS's line at the moment, but really how would I know any better? That's where your values put me -- thankfully I think they weren't quite shared by the powers that be for this lovely period of a few hundred years so far; let's not fuck it up.

Eh, the IRA wanted a United Ireland, many Catholics also wanted that. But I think you can support Irish Nationalists without supporting the violence of the IRA. And I say that as a Unionist.

The question is how much of the Palestinian population supports the murder of Israelis to get their nation and how many do not. Presumably some portion of their population is actially "sane".

The question is how much of the Palestinian population supports the murder of Israelis to get their nation and how many do not. Presumably some portion of their population is actially "sane".

The crux of the matter is that the latter isn't in charge of Palestine, so it's a bit of a moot point.

Well not really, most "sane" Catholics presumably weren't in charge of the IRA either.

That doesn't mean Israel can't target Hamas, and some "sane" Palestinians are of course likely to be collateral damage, but if Israel ever wants any kind of settlement that isn't killing every Palestinian they need to try (as much as operationally possible) to not turn more of the "sane" into more radicalized. Thats why the British u-turned on internment and the like.

I've remarked before that I think the American Revolution should be more properly understood as an example of secession, not revolution. After all, the most famous document promulgating and defending the American position is the Declaration of Independence, and the choice of title is appropriate.

The part that comes before the famous "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." is the following:

"The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

This is a document about secession and self-determination. Next is the really famous bit (I'm adding numbers in brackets to highlight an internal list):

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, [1] that all men are created equal, [2] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [3] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

A clear statement of fundamental principles, but one key point later on is that Jefferson isn't claiming that these principles are a departure from English tradition, but that the Crown has been egregiously violating English tradition. The list doesn't end at three items:

"[4]--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [5] --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"Alter or abolish" covers many potential approaches, from reform to secession to complete revolution. Which approach is justified in which cases?

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

This, I think, is the start of the answer to your question--the right of self-determination in terms of fully reforming/seceding/revolting must reach a threshold of severity in terms of provocation. The reasons matter, and the weight of tradition matters. "Light and transient causes" are not enough, and so:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

When there is a longstanding pattern of abuse aimed at fundamental liberties, some variation of reform/secession/revolution is justified, and even morally compulsory. Note that Jefferson is not merely concerned with rejecting the old, abusive system, but also the necessity of replacing the old system with a new government that will properly "secure these rights." He is justifying a transition from a very bad system to a better system--tearing down the old and stopping at anarchy is not acceptable.

"--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world...."

What follows is a bill of particulars, listing the offenses of the British Crown according to Jefferson, which amount to "a long train of abuses and usurpations...evinc[ing] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism...." The details of this list are instructive, but outside the scope of this comment. After the list, Jefferson argues that the leadership of the American States has done its due diligence, and tried to fix the situation by attempts at reform, before proceeding to secession:

"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

"Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends."

We have appealed to both the Crown and the British People for redress; neither provided it. As a result, we're walking away from this toxic relationship, but we're not going to kill your cat out of spite--we just want to go our own way. Note that Jefferson doesn't merely say that the behavior of the British Crown has been grievously bad, but that the American representatives have been particularly patient and prudent--there's an implied standard of conduct for the secessionists that continues in the final paragraph:

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Jefferson wraps up with the final requirement for secessionists who are doing things correctly--you need to make your case. Not just that the suffered abuses have been so terrible, but also that you've tried lesser means and are only escalating when those means have failed, and that your judgment and restraint are being offered for consideration to both "the Supreme Judge of the world" and "the opinions of mankind." Are your reasons sufficient, or just "light and transient causes"? Do you have a plan for self-government, such that you can responsibly join the community of "Independent States"? Have you "Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms" and are you confident in the "rectitude of [y]our intentions"?

Any secessionist or revolutionary worth their salt will answer yes to those questions with confidence--such is human nature. But Jefferson clearly isn't claiming that 'we've investigated our own motives, and found them acceptable,' he's appealing to God and man to be his judges.

In my view, Jefferson adequately makes his case as to the justice of the American secession from Britain. I think other secessionary movements are a mixed bag--some meet the various thresholds of behavior and others do not. In this framework, there isn't an unfettered "right to self determination" by a given identifiable subgroup of a larger political unit, but extreme cases may present a duty to reform an abusive government, or seceed from it, or overthrow it.

So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination

Is there? The right to self-determination belongs to "peoples.". You are assuming that both Palestinians and southerners are/were "peoples", but what constitutes a "people" is the most contentious part of the right to self-determination. Not only are you skipping over the hard part, you are ascribing to progressives views (ie, re what constitutes a "people") that they might or might not hold. (And note that African-Americans in the antebellum South would also seem hold a claim to be a "people" under some views of what constitutes a "people.").

This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?

Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.

Yeah, this is one of many reasons that I am dubious of the entire concept. Part of the problem is that the "answer" to the first question is that each "nation" has the right to self-determination, but a "nation" is largely self-defined. To quote Wikipedia:

Carl Darling Buck argued in a 1916 study, "Nationality is essentially subjective, an active sentiment of unity, within a fairly extensive group, a sentiment based upon real but diverse factors, political, geographical, physical, and social, any or all of which may be present in this or that case, but no one of which must be present in all cases."

And:

Nationalism is consequently seen an "invented tradition" in which shared sentiment provides a form of collective identity and binds individuals together in political solidarity. A nation's foundational "story" may be built around a combination of ethnic attributes, values and principles, and may be closely connected to narratives of belonging.

Re Israel/Palestine, a complication is that both have a legitimate claim to being nations, but want to locate their state in a particular place. Though afaik, there is no requirement that a nation have its state in a particular place (see, eg, past proposals to locate the Jewish state in places other than the Middle East).

From the point of view of the part of the modern left that generally favours secessionist movements, a big part of the answer is that they favour secessionist movements that appear to enjoy supermajority support among the inhabitants the seceding territory, or actually do enjoy a bare majority confirmed in a referendum. The progressive position on Scottish, Catalan, or Quebecois succession is that it is an appropriate matter for a referendum in Scotland/Catalunya/Quebec. In general, the view of progressives outside those places is that a "yes" vote is not per se a progressive cause, although holding a referendum that the British/Spanish/Canadian government doesn't want is one. In the case of secession of the West Bank and Gaza from being de facto part of Israel (i.e. a two-State solution), no such referendum is necessary because the result would be obvious.

"From the river to the sea" is a claim that the Israeli Jews are settler colonialists and not part of the "legitimate" population of the territory and that therefore a referendum that included them would be illegitimate - pre-GFA Sinn Fein took the same view about the Protestants in Northern Ireland, and supporters of Ukraine have made the argument about Russians who moved to Crimea post-invasion. This viewpoint used to be fashionable when the left was more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism, but in the current year nobody claims to support a United Ireland without a referendum, and the people chanting "from the river to the sea" are either confused about what this means or rabid anti-Semites.

Under this framework, the Confederate secession was illegitimate because the democratic consent of the inhabitants of the seceding territory was never secured. 40% of the Confederate population (including majorities in LA/MS/SC) were slaves or disenfranchised free blacks. And white support for secession was never close-enough to unanimous to argue that a 40% minority didn't need to be consulted.

Note that the democratic theory of secession is mostly relevant to cases where there are not large numbers of human beings being mistreated. The strongest argument for the existence of a Palestinian state is of the same type as the argument for the existence of Israel - that there are several million people whose fundamental rights will not be respected if they are ruled by people who hate them. The strongest argument against Confederate secession is the same as well - that the practical impact of the secession would be to violate the rights of human beings by enslaving them.

There's a strong practical case for military force.

It might be a bit circular in reasoning, but in practice it's the only thing that has ever bounded which groups get their own polity and which don't. Be nice until you can coordinate a sufficiently targeted and violent meanness.

I would say, in the absence of any overarching moral principle here, that any group that can maintain a military campaign against the military force of another group for some extended period of time (think generations, not years) is probably going to be a nation at some point. Groups too small or fractious to form, fuck and fund a military don't get on the board, and groups too weak or psychotic to fight other militaries haven't cleared the hump. To be violent and weak is simply to dig one's own grave.

Ok, but this seems to be a different sort of claim. First, you seem to be talking about who is going to be able to create their own state at some point, rather than what merits deeming a particular group to be a nation. Second, the key point of the right to self-determination is that it is a right, which is a claim that "might makes right" is illegitimate (what is the right to free speech, or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, if not a claim that govt power to act is not relevant to determining how govt and the individual must interact with one another). And of course, the right to self-determination was quite consciously a repudiation of imperialism, which of course is perfectly justified under your formulation.

To be violent and weak is simply to dig one's own grave

Yes, but that is a peripheral issue. We are talking about what groups have the right to self-determination, which is a completely different question from what tactics should be employed in pursuit of that goal.

First, you seem to be talking about who is going to be able to create their own state at some point, rather than what merits deeming a particular group to be a nation.

Yeah, kind of. Having found the intellectual problem unsolvable, I have napkin-mathed the practicalities.

Perhaps definitions are in order? What do you mean by "nation" as distinct from "state"?

Well, the standard distinction (note that I am merely describing the standard usage rather than advocating for it. I think that nationalism (this one, not the vernacular synonym with patriotism) is a pernicious doctrine). This does a decent job re the distinction:

A State is an independent, sovereign government exercising control over a certain spatially defined and bounded area, whose borders are usually clearly defined and internationally recognized by other states. . . . A nation is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural or historical criteria.

Hence, the Kurds are arguably a nation. But they don't have a state. Ditto the Basques. Ditto the Uygyurs. Ditto the Catalans. Perhaps even the Walloons or the Quebecois.

A nation is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural or historical criteria.

This seems entirely too broad. Is a street gang a nation? A knitting circle? A hundred remaining members of a defunct native tribe? A thousand? In the context of our discussions this week, there's tens of millions, maybe a hundred million descendants that can look back to the Confederacy and the South more generally as a shared cultural and historic criteria. Are they a nation?

Tabling that for the moment, and assuming we have a solid definition for nationhood on this basis: Do nations have the collective right to own land, control that territory and engage in group violence to acquire/protect it? Is the "nation", however defined, the proper unit and scale of violent action? Is it the state? Individual?

The question as I see it is which level of human organization is recognized as the proper scale for violent conflict.

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I think that progressives usually value other things more highly than they value national self-determination. So for example they would not support American whites creating their own ethno-state enclave. They see whites as the dominant ethnic group on the planet and it would probably take an enormous diminishment of white power in the world, beyond even the "the US turns into South Africa" scenario that many right-wingers fear, for them to see whites as an oppressed group that it is in alignment with progressive values to support against oppression. After all, one can argue that in South Africa whites still dominate the economy. Not that I think this is a very good argument, but my point is that South Africa would have to become even more significantly a place where white people are not on top than it is now for progressives to change their minds about it.

Progressive support both of the Union in the Civil War and the cause of Palestinian independence is explained by the fact that they view the Confederacy and Israel as two manifestations of what they see as their core enemy - white supremacist colonialism. They think of Ashkenazi Jews as being a type of white people and they see Israel as being a white colonialist project similar to Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, or the French in Algeria and Vietnam. They think of Israel as being analogous to the Confederacy and they think of the Palestinians as being analogous to the Confederacy's black slaves. They think highly of John Brown and they would think highly of a pro-Palestinian John Brown. They think highly of Lincoln and they would probably also think highly of some national leader who used military force to get Israel to give the Palestinians concessions. If that national leader also oppressed people, well, there are ways to rationalize that, the simplest one being just not to think about it too hard. Lincoln himself was no great champion of civil liberties, anyway, except when it came to slavery, but oh well you can always argue that "can't make an omelet without cracking some eggs". So for example, forcing white people to risk their lives in the army for a few years is viewed as good if the army is then used to end the practice of forcing black people to pick cotton for their whole lives and their descendants' lives and so on. Although as a side note, to tell the truth I kind of doubt that most progressives (or people of any other political alignment, for that matter) are well-read enough about the US Civil War to even realize that the Union widely used conscription. But maybe Gangs of New York changed that, I'm not sure, I haven't watched it myself.

There is also a subset of leftists who generally just oppose the US government and its geopolitical adventures, seeing the US government as the current chief global manifestation of the great progressive enemy. This explains for example the subset of leftists who support Russia in the current war. Such open opposition to US global hegemony is common among hardcore leftists who do not necessarily think of themselves as progressives, at least not in the sense of what people nowadays usually mean when they say "progressives". Leftists who are closer to the Democratic Party view of things, on the other hand, feel little negative emotion about US global hegemony and have a lot of desire to use the US governing apparatus to promote the cause of social justice.

So for example they would not support American whites creating their own ethno-state enclave.

A question that progressives sometimes get asked is 'how can you be so against white separatists but still associate with black separatists?'

One answer is 'As we understand the situation, in the US at at least, most black separatists are talking about going somewhere new and founding a black-only community, and most white separatists are talking about expelling everyone else from where they already live, or just oppressing them until they leave.'

If people wanted to start new white ethno-state somewhere else, with no non-white citizens so no one is being oppressed, I would think they are very stupid and tacky, but I wouldn't have an extremely strong moral objection.

Neither would I. Unfortunately I think that many progressives would oppose even a white ethno-state that set up camp in some completely unpopulated part of the world, purely on knee-jerk reflex reaction. Many of them seem like they simply cannot imagine any large-scale situation in which white people are not dominant.

In an odd way, white nationalists respect non-whites more than progressives do. White nationalists are usually driven by a fear of being overrun by powerful non-whites, meanwhile most progressives seem to not even be able to imagine that this is possible on anything other than a very local scale.

The problem being, of course that unless you leave Earth entirely, people live everywhere. This make the idea of founding an ethnostate anywhere on the planet an exercise in genocide whether hard or soft. Find me an empty plot of land somewhere near plausible trade routes, with a reasonable climate, and there are people living there.

I've never seen any progressives raising their voice about the plight of the few remaining whites in Zimbabwe, though . . .

(That might have changed had Mugabe forbidden them from leaving the country, but it's still a stretch of imagination.)

Unironically Zimbabwe would have been better off if it had stayed Rhodesia with white people in charge instead of being handed to the locals who have no metis on how to run a modern day state.

I refuse to believe the British who handed it over, who were otherwise competent and well calibrated, would not have foreseen this as a likely outcome but they still decided to shirk their duty to the land and its people and run away once it became clear that continuing to rule over it would cost more in time, effort and money than just abandoning it to the wolves. They were happy to take ownership of it when the going was good and they could freely extract resources from it, but bailed very quickly once it looked like shit was about to hit the fan.

Interesting fact - up until the 2021 Tokyo games, every swimmer who competed for Zimbabwe in the Olympics was white!!

https://apnews.com/article/2020-tokyo-olympics-sports-africa-zimbabwe-race-and-ethnicity-b7d5e876ceb3baccc5aefdeb2e77706d

Are the remaining whites currently under considerable threat? At least according to this they are being compensated for land reform seizures since 2020, and some have returned.

I do remember that when Mugabe's land reform and the related farm seizures were in progress, Mugabe was basically quite universally portrayed in the West as a black Hitler, and Zimbabwe was slapped with considerable sanctions, which actually appear to be still in force.

Why do you expect consistency from social posturing? The college kids chanting River to the Sea are just making mouth noises that they've been told are the mouth noises non-excluded, invited-to-parties people make. They wouldn't know what to do with a Jew even if they caught one.

Why do you expect consistency from social posturing? The college kids chanting River to the Sea are just making mouth noises that they've been told are the mouth noises non-excluded, invited-to-parties people make.

This may very well be true, but it is not really a sufficiently effortful response for this space. It is always the case that one possible response to $PERPLEXING_THING is "eh, nobody is serious anyway, this is all play-acting, there's nothing to be feared from play-actors, and nothing to be gained from engaging on substance and merits." But it's rarely a charitable response (to either the person making the argument or the people under discussion) and often just false in various ways. So if you're going to imply that someone shouldn't expect consistency, you're going to need to do it with a bit more effort.

It’s who/whom all the way down and there isn’t a consistent principle. A Palestinian one state solution would be a shithole with much much worse minority rights than say, independent Texas, but that doesn’t stop progressives from opposing Texas secession on the grounds of minority rights while supporting a Palestinian one state solution. Why? Because Palestinians are brown and non-Christian.

it’s a who/whom all the way down

I agree. Palestinians don’t magically want to kill Israelis as a deeply-held first principle. They want to kill Israelis for various perceived moral grievances against the state at large. As an example, there are 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank, many of whom presumably knowing that their actions have been condemned by the UN. You don’t get 700,000 people violating international law without a serious problem of complicity among the general public in Israel.

If we are to continue the Southern metaphor — who are the Palestinians? Are they the slaves waging a revolt? I think few people today would condemn Nat Turner, or the slave revolt of Haiti, despite the casualties. Or are they the Southerners fighting for their right to self-determination? IMO it’s elements of both. Perhaps Hezbollah are the noble Northern cause, willing to go scorched earth to free a captive people? I would say no, but that’s how they would see themselves.

I think re: Robert E Lee, his veneration isn’t due to being pro-slavery. It’s due to his character. He was considered by many Americans at the time to have a great character and an honest disposition. And this should be extolled, because conflict is inevitable for the human race, and the most we can ask for is that our enemies behave like the idealized Robert E Lee — truthful, dignified, humble, and willing to compromise.

I agree. Palestinians don’t magically want to kill Israelis as a deeply-held first principle.

Aside from "magically" I believe you are incorrect.

They want to kill Israelis for various perceived moral grievances against the state at large.

And if they didn't have those they'd have different ones.

As an example, there are 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers in the West Bank

And I don't believe the Gaza Palestinians give a damn about any of them.

I mean the southern metaphor is definitely imperfect, but notably the confederate army was mostly a "regular" force fighting using conventional tactics similar to say, Ukraine fighting Russia today(including being badly outclassed), not an insurgent group that mostly carries out terrorist attacks. The Israel-Hamas fight is different and doesn't map cleanly onto the civil war.

I thought of not because the South and Gaza map 1:1 but because the right to self determination is at stake with both.

Palestinians don’t magically want to kill Israelis as a deeply-held first principle

I’m not so sure nor should we turn your question into a binary. Very clearly killing is a primary goal for many Palestinians. The actual charter of Hamas plainly calls for the destruction of Israel, Jihad of all Muslims, and states the claim that all targets are legitimate. Hamas has repeatedly acted in accordance with that goal.

But even if the links have become distant from each other, and even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said:

The time(16) will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad(17), which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim)(18)

Palestinians don’t magically want to kill Israelis as a deeply-held first principle.

Maybe it didn't start that way. But at what point does it become a first principle? Hatred for Jews seem to predict behavior a lot more than any other principles. Given the choice between greater prosperity and killing Jews, they'll tear up their water pipes to build bombs.

If hatred of Jews were their first principle, we would see overseas Palestinians wage attacks on Jewish communities, where the communities do not have the heightened security of the Israeli state apparatus. That we pretty much never see that (thank God) is strong evidence that their grievances are against Israel and her people. In the average uneducated, undernourished, 85 IQ Palestinian mind, it’s a waste of time to distinguish between Israeli Jews and Israeli Zionists. Their enemies are uniformly Jewish-Zionist citizens of Israel.

I looked into the water pipe claim and I don’t see compelling evidence that this happened. It’s originally traced to a 2021 Telegraph article, which takes footage from a Memri Documentary. But per the documentary,

While the plan to reuse the explosives in the Israeli shells was moving ahead, long water pipelines were found buried in the areas of the settlements from which Israel withdrew in 2005. This discovery turned out to be a qualitative leap. These pipes, which stretched from the liberated settlements in the west across the Israeli border to the east, had been hidden from the eye. For years, they served Israel in its theft of Palestinian water. In the belly of the Earth, we found large quantities of thick metal pipes. It was part of a network that had been used to steal Gaza's groundwater and pump it into the occupied lands. We discovered the plans for that network, and then we dug into the ground and pulled out the pipes, so that they could be used in our military industries."

Given that this documentary is from 2020 and the Telegraph article is from 2021, it’s reasonable to trust the Memri documentary. Especially because it shows other procedures like collecting underseas Israeli munitions.

Undernourished and undereducated? 40% of gazans are overweight or obese and a gazan child completes 12 years of schooling on average. What are you even talking about?

From the UN’s OCHA: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/education-undermined-deteriorating-humanitarian-situation-gaza

Over 450,000 basic, secondary and kindergarten (KG) students and teachers are identified as ‘people in need’ in the 2018 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP)

There was a 30% dropout rate in 2017.

On malnutrition, UNICEF says “According to recent national surveys, Palestinians are facing a double burden of malnutrition; malnutrition, a high level of micronutrient deficiencies, and increasing obesity rates.”

So now you send me your sources and we can discuss?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/7c9b64c34a8833378194a026ebe4e247-0140022022/related/HCI-AM22-PSE.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi74f6gw5mCAxXQHjQIHT5FD8AQFnoECA4QBg&usg=AOvVaw24pMjExhMdGAki5ml2zd9F

In the West Bank and Gaza, a child who starts school at age 4 can expect to complete 12.2 years of school by her 18th birthday.

Much of what the UN says about Gazan schools can also be said about American schools. Our children really is not learning.

Re malnutrition - the life expectancy in Gaza is 74 years and the regional expectancy is 76 years (pdf). So there's really a limit as to how malnourished they can be.

Even if overseas Palestinians aren't a major source of antisemitic activity(which I doubt, but a lot of it probably gets attributed to non-existent white supremacists), they are by definition a selected population that values "eating" and "living in a first world country, outside of a jail cell" over "killing Jews".

Hamas has the ability to place covert members in expatriate communities. Half of all Palestinians are diaspora. But they don’t do this, so perhaps it’s reasonable to assume they don’t want to just kill Jews. Perhaps they want to reclaim their lost territory?

Wanted to quickly ask: How common is the knowledge that Lee 1. was offered a position among Union command when hostilities broke out, 2. himself held a desire for the states to remain in a union, and 3. ultimately chose to follow wherever his home state decided to go. It seems not very common.

Does that sound like someone solely motivated by a desire to keep Africans in the fields of the South for the express purpose of agricultural productivity? Sure he chose the side that ultimately lost, but it seems that this attitude of "throw him in with the rest" is novel, historically.

Why didn't Lee join the Union army and then sabotage the Union war effort?

  • -10

That would have been dishonorable

That was the "Lost Cause" Confederate apologist narrative widely taught at tons of southern US public schools up to at least the 2010s, including my own.

  1. ultimately chose to follow wherever his home state decided to go. It seems not very common.

His home state had split between pro-US and pro-Confederate halves. That's why there is now a Virginia and a West Virginia. Even from a perspective of turning off your morals and going for state alignment, when given a choice of which Virginians to side with he chose to help the slavers kill the loyalist half. I am glad his personality cult's statues are being removed and melted down.

I'm sure it was a binary choice for him too.

It speaks to his failures as a human being that he chose so poorly. Being uncommitted to the Confederate cause would honestly make it even worse that he chose to help them kill hundreds of thousands of people anyway.

This is year zero thinking. You are applying your 21st century morals to a guy who lived in practically a different universe. Who do you think were the failures as human beings of covid - the vaccinated or the unvaccinated?

If we're comparing people to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the rebel leader who killed tons of people for a bad cause fighting for millions to be enslaved and kept uneducated in harsh agricultural labor is clearly much closer to "Year Zero" than the people saying he shouldn't have done that, both today and in the 19th century. OP contains a ton of claims about him being conflicted and torn about this decision, and there were many southern unionists and abolitionists and widespread debate over secession, so clearly it was also controversial by 19th century moral standards. And the overarching discussion concerns public shrines and idols promoting veneration of Lee in the 21st century.

Lol all I said was this is year zero thinking, and you claim I am comparing people to Pol Pot? Do I even need to be here, it seems like you are trying to do both sides of the conversation yourself!

I wasn't comparing anyone to Pol Pot. I said exactly what I meant to say, and I meant every word of it. You are still applying your 21st century morals to a guy who lived in practically a different universe.

As you say the issue was clearly controversial - back then. Because it isn't anymore, I'm surprised to have to tell you, slavery was successfully abolished in the US years ago now. Nobody is torn and conflicted in two thousand and twenty three about whether it's ok to enslave black people. In 2023 the idea of enslaving another person is heinous, and considered a defining moral failing - like murderers and rapists, slavers are considered defacto evil, whereas back then people who owned slaves were controversial, but still respected - enough to lead the Union army for instance.

So unlike you, Lee did not have the luxury of recognising slavery as an easily answered black and white question, he was forced to consider the entire confederate cause (which was not just about slavery, although I understand why you think it was) and he even had to consider other things like looking after his home and family.

This is why I updated the scissor statement to something more recent - covid. Given how sure of your moral clarity you are, you can easily tell me who the failed human beings there were right?

Edit: legibility

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)

I do not believe you when you claim you weren't explicitly comparing MadMonzer and I to the Khmer Rouge. "Year Zero" was Pol Pot's concept. The usage here was not in reference to the Nine Inch Nails album or the day after Nazi Germany fell. It's like if someone called a debate opponent a Quisling then claimed they weren't comparing them to nazi collaborators.

Because it isn't anymore, I'm surprised to have to tell you, slavery was successfully abolished in the US years ago now.

Unfortunately it has not been fully abolished, just the chattel kind. A whole lot of people still think of slavery as ok if the slaves are given that status by a court per the 13th amendment rather than an auction block. Those of us who recognize forced inmate labor as slavery are considered controversial. I am fully confident that I would have been an abolitionist then as I am now. I worked in the prison system as part of a family dynasty of prison wardens and grew up constantly surrounded by inmate chain gangs picking cotton and soybeans under armed guard in the hot southern sun and being used for all manner of work from butlers to factory workers. I was repeatedly taught both at home, school and in training academies that the Confederates were the good guys and chattel slavery a mostly benign institution and believed both for a time. Yet I turned my back on this career with an offer in hand to become a warden (the camp commander kind, not the rank-and-file kind) with a lucrative salary due to independently reaching the conclusion that inmate forced labor constituted a form of slavery. This relevation and acting as my conscience demanded as a result had immense personal and professional cost that I do not regret for a moment. So yes, I am fully confident that given I independently rejected a widespread socially accepted form of slavery at high cost while being socialized to see both prison slavery and the original chattel slavery as acceptable with strong financial, family and geographic incentives to choose otherwise, that I would have also rejected the original chattel slavery. Additionally, while most of my ancestors fought for the Confederacy as light calvary and artillerymen, a few took to the hills rather than be conscripted into their forces. But we're talking about Lee here, not me. And again, according to the claims above Lee recognized slavery as evil but chose to lead armies to defend it anyway.

In terms of covid, Lee was a high ranking leader who knowingly committed an immense moral failing that killed tons of people, not a rank and file foot soldier taking potshots. So the roughly analogous figures would be high ranking leadership deliberately making decisions that got hundreds of thousands or millions killed while knowing better. In that department I would place the scientific and political leadership who oversaw gain of function research and covered up the lab leak rather than sharing everything they knew, Chinese gov personnel who knowingly allowed international travel while they had a new virus actively spreading within their borders, as well as foriegn government officials who refused to strictly quarantine travelers coming from China due to putting political/business considerations of not upsetting the Chinese government above preventing a new virus from spreading into their citizenry.

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No. I am applying the morals of his own time. Lee knew that slavery was evil, and fought to defend it anyway out of a misguided sense of patriotism. Given the many positive aspects of his character, I hope he gets to spend eternity slightly further away from the Fire than, say, Jeffrey Epstein.

What seems more likely to you - that Lee proudly fought to protect his evil empire that did heinous things he knew would put him in hell, or that maybe slavery wasn't considered so uniquely evil that it superceded every other consideration? That's the year zero thinking here, you treating it like a settled subject, like Lee's conception of slavery as evil was the same as a 21st century conception of slavery as evil, instead of say how blasphemy is evil.

Which side of the covid vaccine belongs in hell with Epstein, Lee and me? The pro or the anti? Is it more evil to force someone to surrender bodily autonomy or to put your health and comfort before the welfare of the sick and injured? Or am I missing fricking light years of nuance by reducing it to a binary like that?

He was in a senior leadership position. This wasn’t some rank and file conscript grunt just following orders.

IMO it’s even worse that he could have chosen the Union but decided to fight to keep race based slavery alive as an institution in his home state. The man is the opposite of an American hero.

Don’t forget 4. described slavery as a “moral and political evil.” Meanwhile Grant and his wife also owned slaves. Part of the problem is that modern people are allergic to nuance. Everyone must be either a hero or a villain. There’s no room in the modern imagination for anything in between.

The Civil War was about slavery; the reasons people fought for one side or another, on the other hand, varied a great deal, with ending or supporting slavery not being a major individual motivation. The conflation of the two leads to errors on both sides, with some people defending the South because many of the individuals fighting for it had benign or at least understandable motivations, while others project institutional/systemic causes onto anyone who fought for the South. That conflation also provides a fertile ground for fighting contemporary culture wars via history.

The Civil War was about slavery

This is endlessly repeated but breaks down fairly quickly. The North did not invade the South "to end slavery." The North invaded the South to end secession.

Yes, the South seceded to preserve slavery as they rightly saw that they were losing at the national level in the long run. But secession is not a synonym with war.

So there were two essential steps:

  1. The South secedes.
  2. The North attacks to prevent secession.

If it could be maintained historically that 2) was caused/motivated by abolitionist ideals, "The Civil War was about slavery" might make sense in its very ambiguous, general way. But it really cannot.

Eliding that preventing secession was the motivation for war by Lincoln and the North allows those "on the right side of history" to pretend that they and their allies were holy. On the contrary, their motives were at best Machiavellian.


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