site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4734 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

4
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What are your favorite examples of individuals spitting absolute truth on camera?

Whether about politics, oppression, anything.

Stephen Colbert correspondents dinner: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY

Jon Stewart in Crossfire: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

Both of these men have largely become more vanilla, but these clips really highlight their young brilliance.

I dont know how anyone can watch that crossfire clip and think Jon Stewart comes off well. All he's doing is his classic "clown nose on, clown nose off" routine where he takes jabs at people then retreats behind his comedy the second he recieves the mildest pushback.

Even if that was his debate tactic, his point came off quite clearly. His point being, shows like Crossfire and pundits like Tucker Carlson are harming political discourse in America. It’s a debate style the hosts were not accustomed to and I think it works to good effect.

Stewart's famous crossfire clip seems more a strong demonstration of the difference between statements said and points made. He made a lot of statements about 'spin alley', and 'the absurdity of the system', and lacking 'moral outrage', and he came on with the whole concept of 'nerf crossfire'. But both hosts denied them, and Stewart had no serious evidence or support for his claims beyond common knowledge; he didn't even provide serious support beyond reiterating over and over that the CNN staff can't complain about him not doing even a trivial effort.

The actual point he made was that Crossfire made a mistake: they trusted him. Which still says something interesting! But it's something rather different.

His point was a rhetorical masterstroke at the time, and continued to be for a few years after... right up until it became evident where his proposed alternative led. He and the philosophy he's advocating in that clip has done orders of magnitude more to hurt America than either of the men he criticized ever could.

Can you expand on what philosophy you think he's advocating for? My takeaway is he was advocating returning to a time where politics wasn't treated as entertainment or reality TV. Shows like Crossfire have a financial incentive to treat politics as a battle royale, a sporting event, to keep their viewers eyeballs glued to the screen. This has made it more difficult for politicians to have rational conversations and rational debates, because everything is spun and amped up and taken out of context. Politics doesn't need to be a form of entertainment or culture war; it can be a boring, grinding process, whereby serious people make serious decisions about the future of America.

I think about this pretty frequently. It's unfortunate in the US that today's politicians are those who look good or are entertaining on TV. We used to have scholars leading the country, men like Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Thomas Jefferson. Whatever these men's faults were, they were incredibly intelligent writers and thinkers. They made their bones via fighting in war or through consistent and intelligent writing. Today's political landscape has been so changed by TV and social media, it seems impossible to return to that style of politician.

Anyway, that's a bit beside the point, but I am curious how you think Jon Stewart's political advocacy has harmed America more than Tucker Carlson's.

Crossfire treated politics as a battle royale. Stewart and his acolytes normalized politics as a joke, and the idea that the other side might have a valid argument as a punchline. They were extremely influential, to the point that many Progressives appear to have gotten a significant amount of their political news through the filter of their shows, and by claiming to be comedians they excused themselves from any expectation of using their influence responsibly. They were instrumental into solidifying Progressivism into an echo-chamber, with Stewart's morally- and intellectually-bankrupt "punching up" philosophy being a significant contribution to the Great Awokening. Their entire careers were spent dumping gasoline on the culture war, culminating in John Oliver's promotion of Trump as a Republican Presidential candidate.

Today's political landscape has been changed by TV and social media. Stewart and his acolytes are personally responsible for some of the largest and worst of those changes.

One note I'd give was that Stewart claimed Crossfire was less a battle royale, but literally "pro wrestling". I can't find the original "NERF Crossfire" gag on Comedy Central's site or YouTube, and it wasn't even a full section, but the main joke was about mainstream media lobbing softball interview questions at a variety of powerful people. "Spin alley" is a dated reference now and was failing in its original sense even in the 2000s, but it had since turned into the broader field where every head-to-head discussion would get recontextualized into a victory by its partisans.

"Where's your moral outrage on this?"

And there's a steelman where this was kinda true! The formalization of interview processes meant that anyone with a reputation for crushingly hard questions would never get to interview anyone of substance again. Especially high-profile politicians would get a handful of (ingratiating) personal questions built to humanize them, and at most a couple (sometimes pre-vetted!) softball policy ones, nearly as a rule. Rarely, you'd see absolute nobodies or politicians on their way to retirement get embarrassed as a way to generate some heat, even 'hard-hitting' direct news was more interested in talking up . Outside of directly dealing with the powerful, shows like Crossfire favored a barrage of bloodless short interactions : look at this, or this, and there's a pretty constant pattern where the show was little more than point-riposte, never any serious engagement and always swaddled with cruft and removed from concrete assessments.

"The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk..."

But then you look at the story closer, and Stewart was supposed to be promoting his book. Carlson and Begala looked ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but no small part of it is that they were trying to play straight man to a comedian who wasn't interested in that whole game. Asking what people's moral outrage doesn't even make sense: he was holding them to a fire that he didn't bother naming.

So you get stuff like this, instead, as the high point of The Daily Show. There's moral outrage, for sure! Absolutely the sort of political discussion that allows shots below the belt, with all that implies even for the trivial dorks, at least for the people Jon Stewart and his audience didn't like.

And yet, the exact same criticism Stewart brought against Crossfire applied to his own work, and to the not-featuring-after-crank-muppets conventional news media that increasingly aped him. Rather than dissolve the point-riposte of Crossfire, it simply let the riposte swallow all discussion -- no need to even state your own position in a way that might make a viewer uncomfortable.

Wtf is the drama with tpot going on right now? Like what is this about?

What is tpot?

Something short and stout: here is its handle; here is its spout.

("This part of Twitter," a social-circle which I have some sense is rationalist-adjacent and known for being weird, but even the former I'm not really sure about.)

A little over a week ago, a tpot-popular poster was allegedly linked to a criminal history sheet that's about as bad as it gets (cw: child sexual abuse), and has since deleted their twitter account after what looks to be confirmation. Along with Brent Dril showing up under a new handle (context), this has gotten a number of people who've long been critical of the most sexually-weird parts of Bay Arean culture doing 'I told you so' laps, and a number of people who were just generally critical talking up how it shows faults in the entire tpot culture, and some kinda with a foot in each. And some of it's gotten people... well, I'm hoping paranoid.

AFAICT, the vibecamp organizers are doing the ISO standard response of 'this guy was already banned' (which seems to be genuinely true!) and 'we're revising our safety procedures', but this still leaves a whole lot of people who didn't even think about those safety procedures as things that existed, for good or ill, or who believed that they were tied into relevant ones and found out they hard way they weren't.

Perfect example of how a truly abysmal top-level post brought out a great post as a reply that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Small question: what's up with the new user filter? Is this message even visible?

Was planning to comment on that today myself. It makes sense as a hazing/selection process; to select for posters who are committed/neurodiverse enough to not just give up and leave, but patient enough not to chimp out over being ignored.

It does seem to create a dilemma over what to do if the filtered post was one you really want an answer to, though. In most cases it'd be egregiously obnoxious to keep posting the same question; but the filtering/wait period introduces that nagging doubt that maybe the person with the perfect answer is on here and just didn't see it.

I just didn't want to waste effort on it if I was shadowbanned.

I can see you.

I asked about this a month ago and got a response from one of the mods.

Typically I read all the comments by a particular user. Trolling stuff never gets out. If we have recently banned or perma banned users I have to be on the lookout for similarish commenting.

There are certain thresholds you have to hit before your posts and comments get auto-approved.

Spam and bots are not serious problems. But trolls and ban-evaders are major problems. The time delay of a moderator reading the comments and approving them helps lower the effectiveness of trolling, and makes bans actually costly (unlike on reddit, where they were trivially easy to dodge as long as you didn't piss off the admins).

We try to lean heavily towards approving new comments and posts. So all of your comments will eventually get approved.

And when I asked about reposting a question/topic from the previous week:

As a general rule, reposting from a previous week's thread is ok.

Intentionally reposting from something that is already in the thread is frowned upon.

The rule of thumb I use when modding: is there already a live discussion on this topic, if so, just join that. The deader the previous discussion the more ok it is to repost it and start it up again.

That's helpful but it would be nice to see it fleshed out.

[SAURON] I ... SEE... YOU...

In my experience, a number of the "forget 'politics,' build parallel institutions" types — I'm especially thinking of examples like "seasteading" enthusiasts, or Balaji Srinivasan and his "network state" — tend to dismiss questions of their proposals' economic viability with vague, optimistic handwaving. Is this just due to optimism bias and wishful thinking?

It's a selection bias. Those who start thinking about these questions abandon the whole idea.

My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.

But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?

Likely most of the barrier was on the part of employers. In my previous job there were zero women in a firm of about 80 people. Not an exaggeration. Of different companies across the industry, similar policies prevailed. In 18 months I saw exactly one woman doing the same job as me (she did it badly). I also had more than one person tell me they wouldn't want to work with a woman.

All of course, illegal - but despite that, the situation persisted, despite the absence of any formal barrier.

Why limit yourself to the workplace? Women's rights were limited in multiple ways. The workplace has been where I have encountered the most bumps, but my mom and grandmothers ran into serious problems with financial independence and access to education.

In the workplace, as others have said poor women always worked. My grandmother was from a wealthier class and when her dad abandoned the family and she was left without an "appropriate" introduction to a spouse, one of her brothers fortunately paid for her to train to be a librarian so she could support herself in her spinsterhood. (WW2 also meant marriageable men were in short supply for women who had been raised to be pliant and pretty.) She worked as a librarian until she met my grandfather after he got home from the war. Once married she had to leave her job (she was now to make a home and babies, who cares if she also loved her job?). Society and men exercised a great deal of control even over the relatively privileged women. If my grandmother's brother had not stepped in to rescue her she would have had no resources and extremely limited agency to establish herself. The plural of anecdote is not data but you might be surprised at the stories of your older female relatives. My mother (silent gen) was not able to establish her own financial life outside of my father until after I was born (genx). Sure, my dad could co-sign but why should that have been required? When she was in high school her parents had to assure the school she was allowed to take advanced academic courses, because she was going to go to college - and not to get her Mrs. In HS my parents had to pressure the school to let me take advanced shop classes because girls weren't allowed. Notably neither my father nor brother have similar stories. I am aging out of the carefully asked questions in job interviews about whether I was going to have or already had children, without breaking the law. My husband and I work in the same field and comparing this stuff has been interesting. Somehow there's never been a concern about any family obligations or expectations, errrr, I mean anything that might interfere with his ability to do a job. I tend to think my not wearing a wedding ring (assuming no kids) and having a gender neutral name (getting past the girl cooties resume rejection) helped me get more than one position.

They're also referring to things like women being barred from most elite colleges or being unable to open bank accounts or lines of credit without male co-signers.

I didn't know about those. Were they unable to open lines of credit because the law prohibited them, or was this something banks chose to do?

Both, depending on jurisdiction, since a lot of it was state-by-state. Once the USG passed the Equal Opportunity Credit Act of 1974, some banks tried an end run around that by simply marking women as high-risk lendees, since it was still legal to just fire a woman if she got pregant regardless of marital status.

I know one dear lady who bemoaned the fact that she could not get a credit card of her own. She was a stay-at-home mom and would be relying on her husband's income to pay the bill when it came due. Knowing the context of that particular situation, it was very much a, "We want the name of the income-earner on the account, so we have suitable recourse upon default," type of situation. Unfortunately, also knowing her shopping proclivities, it was probably a responsible risk assessment. Obviously not all situations are going to be the same, and I'm not aware of details of laws that might have been in effect in other jurisdictions.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men [emphasis mine - ox] – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths.

As @2rafa wrote, prole women have been working for wages since they lost the fight to the spinning jenny and later to the sewing machine. It's the middle-class women who got the chance to have a career and not just a teaching job to keep them busy until they invariably got married and became a homemaker.

Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.

People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.

This is actually new to me. Thanks for dropping the facts.

“Single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930” shouldn’t be surprising, though. What’s more interesting is the quality of job (front-end clerk? barista?) and what the labor force participation was for married women. It’s not like single women throughout history were unoccupied from work, just lounging around reading books.

The point is that both single and married women worked through history in ways that have and haven’t been captured by official data in various forms. And the main thing that spurred women’s work outside the home was that traditional industries (widget production, most commonly textiles etc) that women (single and married) did from home were automated by new industrial technology that required workers at a central factory instead of dispersed at home. The second thing that happened in the 20th century was that the invention of labor saving technologies at home like dishwashers, refrigerators, modern ovens and microwaves, washing and drying machines, vacuums and so on meant that once children were no longer extremely young, the task of running a household was significantly less labor intensive than it had been, and it’s this that also led to increased workforce participation.

For a specific subset of upper-middle class and wealthy women, labor participation was indeed largely cultural rather than driven by material need. But this is only a minority of women, and was itself spurred in part by the fact that declining inequality meant that a Victorian PMC lifestyle (which involved many more servants than the average modern upper middle class American has) was no longer as sustainable on one income, so the choice was more between becoming a maid for your own household or working to be able to hire help; many women still face that choice and prefer the latter.

That makes sense. Thank you for your answer. This opens up another question, though: if not much has actually changed for women, what explains The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness?

Social networks declined, and this has a bigger effect on female than male happiness.

Careers don't make most women happy in the long term, which is why you can see a trend of highly competent and successful women leaving their extremely lucrative and successful careers by the time they reach their 30s. For example, when you look at lawyers, 30% of women with JDs are unemployed from the ages of 36-40 compared to just 4% of men.

There's a recent survey of women lawyers leaving their firms that indicated that 82% of women left due to lack of flexibility and work/life balance. The article on the survey tries to paint the picture that women aren't leaving for the commonly held belief to be stay-at-home moms, but it's clear the high-stress and workload jobs at the top law firms aren't making women happy, because if it made them happy, why would they quit? The men aren't quitting, in fact, they'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week because the men in these professions are highly conscientious competitive people who find their sense of worth from dominating their chosen area of competence and will put in those extra hours to beat the guys that don't. You don't see them complain about work/life balance because to them it's one aspect they can use to win against their competition. Jordan Peterson talks about women who quit their careers in this 11 minutes video and is worth watching if you want more reasons why women leave their careers. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in that video that I don't want to bother quoting right now.

Something to keep in mind is that a lot of guys also wouldn't be happy working 60-80 hours a week. That's why most men aren't CEOs, doctors, lawyers. But there are enough men with that drive, and those men outnumber women with that kind of disposition. Men also find fulfillment in providing for their families, which is why many men deliberately choose to work overtime if they can, to earn more money for their family. Women can show their love and support for their family, but they'd rather do it in the presence of their family rather than slave away at a job where they are away from their family.

What feminism has done is tell women that they don't need a man, they don't need to do traditionally female tasks, and they can go out there and work and compete just like men in all those highly respected and sought-after professions and fields. As a result, a bunch of women pursued extremely tough and competitive careers, only to find out that it didn't make them happy. Is it such a surprise that working a highly stressful, competitive job with a lot of responsibility is really, really tough and doesn't give you time to do much else? Most men wouldn't want to do those jobs, which is why most men don't do those jobs. Feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men. And they'll be happy doing so.

Women in general would be much happier raising a family than working a highly stressful job. Women prefer to work and be with people, and properly raising a family ensures that you'll have people around you well into your deathbed. However, because feminism has pushed women to pursue a career and actively put disdain on traditional female roles, more and more women are delaying or ignoring the idea of being a mother. By the time these women realize that careers don't make them happy and that they might want children, it might be too late. And if they're lucky enough to still be able to have children, well they still have to find a suitable partner to be their husband. Women tend to date across or up the social ladder, so if you're a highly successful woman, your options become quite limited. And their success is to their detriment, as men don't care how much the woman makes, and men prefer younger women. Thus, we're seeing the rise of childless old women and as they get older they slowly lose their social connections and without having a family they become more and more isolated. As a result, we see more and more women get depressed as all they to show for their life is a career they don't care about and the bitter truth that feminism lied to them, as their now aging bodies are too old to have children.

Some women resort to freezing their eggs so that their age won't be a problem, but there are many issues related to egg freezing. If the frozen eggs no longer work, as it hasn't for so many women, then they truly have no option to bear children as by the time they do go ahead and use their eggs their bodies are too old to have children.

Other ideas may have factored into "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion, but I'm not going to explore these ideas further right now.

Great post! Thank you!

No low effort "Great post" posts, please.

Is this a new rule? I haven't been around much recently but I don't recall it from the earlier days of ssc/themotte. No judgment here, just curious.

Low effort posts have always been against the rules, though it's not one of the most strictly enforced rules. But we do want to avoid allowing one-line "I agree!" or "No" posts cluttering up threads.

Thanks for the context. I guess the ones I'm remembering being an accepted part of community norms were a little more lyrical than "Great post thanks", but the content was roughly the same.

Also working "outside the home" was not the only kind of work - it's easy to think of being a homemaker in the 21st century as just essentially being a glorified doer-of-chores, but apart from the idle rich women who worked at home were near-constantly busy with domestic tasks. Before the advent of the commercial washing machine, laundry was an enormously labourious task. Sewing and mending clothing was the norm. Food preparation was much more involved and complicated. Work at home, depending where one lived, also involved a myriad of tasks ancillary to agriculture, or forms of cottage industry.

Reposting in the new thread, guess I posted too late on the previous one. Will take the hint and not repost further if this gets no engagement.

I want to stop relying on 4chan for the latest AI news, currently searching for some better sources. I’m a long-time reader of Zvi and followed him to substack, and his summaries on AI are still excellent and information-dense, but (hedging) either his and my own points of view on AI drifted too far apart which colors my perception, or (honest opinion) the latest kerfuffle with Altman’s firing, reinstatement and everything in between finally broke his mind, and he is no longer able to keep back his obvious doomer bias, which is infecting his every post since. I still respect him and appreciate his writing, but disentangling the actual news from the incessant doom attached to them is quickly becoming tedious.

Are there any other substacks or blogs which post on anything AI/LLM related in a similar manner? I’m mostly looking for technical insights and distillations of the current zeitgeist, I dropped out around the Altman incident due to RL things and am trying to get back in the saddle. Sources unaffiliated with the Yud cathedral are preferable but not necessary, I’m more or less a brainlet but I can read when I put my mind to it.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord? I grew up somewhat Christian going to church but my parents stopped making me go around 14 and I quickly became an atheist. However, throughout my life there have been moments (very short) where I believe in Christ. Tonight was one where my fiance and I watched a beautiful choir in a beautiful church and as I held her hand I felt God. I felt Jesus and his sacrifice.

Of course, intellectually I know this is nonsense Christianity has been proven to not be true and just a superstition but there is something about it that draws me back so close to almost believing it.

I've had those moments occasionally, when I was younger. Now my daydreams are filled with AGI.

Yep. I had moments like that over my life, they slowly increased as I learned more about Christianity and started to take Him seriously. Now I do believe that Christ is the Lord, although I’m occasionally still wracked with doubt.

I think the key is that the intellect isn’t often the best way to live life or make big decisions. Living from the heart seems to work better, at least for me.

There's a nigh infinite number of ways to approach this. I would recommend perhaps starting at the beginning of the fabulous Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (https://shwep.net/). Christianity did not evolve in a vacuum. It's a part of western thought with roots dating back to pre-Socratic philosophy. It may benefit you to have a more complete picture of how it came to be and the issues that early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine wrestled with. There are as many different Christianities as there are Christians, and there is almost certainly a Christian path that is true for you.

Oh, to return to the time when delving into a site like this doesn't require engaging in countless hours of the inferior activity of listening instead of a considerably smaller time of the superior activity of reading.

Amen brother. Amen.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord?

Yes. I am a Christian and know that Jesus is Lord, the living God, who died to save us from our sins and rose again, who was born on the first Christmas as a baby born of the Virgin Mary and is literally present in the Eucharist for the salvation of all men.

Of course, intellectually I know this is nonsense Christianity has been proven to not be true

No, it hasn't. You can claim evidence for Christianity has been brought back to unfalsifiable claims; I can point to falsifiable claims that Christians will point to, although I acknowledge that eg the tilma of Juan Diego isn't a slam dunk argument even if no one has managed to disprove it and that the core claims are unfalsifiable even if I think that the balance of evidence and arguments weighs in favor. I'm not aware of anything that has disproven Christianity, although probably a few specific sects staked their existence on falsifiable claims.

and just a superstition

That's not what a superstition is. A superstition is a specific belief about how the world operates(eg if you break a mirror you'll have seven years of bad luck) which is rooted in magical thinking.

I don't. Perhaps that is because I don't go to ceremonies designed to cause such a feeling.

There are anecdotes of people who thought they were reasonable and strong-priored enough to resist cult indoctrination going to cult indoctrination sessions and buying them hook, line and sinker.

This essay of Greg Egan might help you.

I became an atheist around 8 at the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Then when I was a teenager, I tried to believe in God because I wanted to believe there was a powerful being I could pray to who would solve my problems, but I just couldn't get past the ridiculousness of things like Jesus walking on water of magically multiplying fish. It just seemed so stupid that I every time I tried to take it seriously, I felt like a fool. I do like the aesthetics of church and mass (though I hate standing and kneeling), but I just can't bring myself to believe things that go against reason.

Nope.

I generally believe it but also fairly frequently have doubts. I still consider Christianity to be undoubtedly useful even when I’m really not certain if it’s true, so I try to keep practicing regardless.

Unfortunately, no.

Does anyone else occasionally feel that Christianity is real and Jesus is the Lord?

I mean, I'm a Christian so I would say I feel that more than occasionally. ;)

Christianity has been proven to not be true and just a superstition

So far as I'm aware, no such proof exists. The general reasoning I see given for atheism isn't "Christianity is proven false", but "Christianity isn't proven true and so one should assume it is false until proven otherwise". The two positions are very different, with different implications on how you should think.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose you saw a unicorn on the street today. If unicorns are proven to be impossible, then you are probably hallucinating and should see a doctor. But if it's merely the case that we don't believe unicorns exist until we have proof they do, congratulations cause you just proved unicorns exist. That's why the distinction between "proven false" and "unproven, assumed false for now" matters. In the former, evidence for the false proposition can safely be considered faulty. In the latter, evidence for the proposition can potentially show that the proposition is true after all.

Back to Christianity, that means that if you feel you have reason to believe in it (which I'm not saying you do, only you can decide that), then you shouldn't set aside those reasons because "eh it's proven false, it's just superstition anyway". Instead, you should follow up on those reasons and see where it takes you. Maybe it changes your mind, maybe not, but it seems to me that it's worth investigating just to see what happens.

Personally, I would encourage you to continue to seek the truth as best you can. YMMV, but my own experience has led me to believe the wisdom of "seek and you will find". I spent many years being atheist/agnostic, and at times I despaired that I would ever be able to resolve the questions I had inside. But in time, God led me to the answers I wanted in a way that I could accept. Now looking back on it all, yeah the path was winding and at times dark. But given who I am, and how I see the world, it probably couldn't have worked any other way. So while the journey was long and tiring (mentally), it was my journey and I'm grateful for it. And it's not over yet, of course.

I hope you find the answers you seek, man. Even if you wind up deciding "yep it's all bunk", I hope you're able to have the peace of having found those answers. Good luck, and Merry Christmas!

But if it's merely the case that we don't believe unicorns exist until we have proof they do, congratulations cause you just proved unicorns exist.

No, you are still vastly more likely to be suddenly hallucinating in comparison to meeting mythological creature that nobody had found any evidence for hundreds of years. The same can be said about attributing internal feelings to hypothetical unseen all-powerful being and not some mundane neurological reason.

On the other hand, if I see a unicorn in the street, and the neighbor tells me yep, that’s what it is, and neither of us have been drinking, and the pack of neighborhood children run over and pet it, and they say it’s a unicorn…

Christianity has been proven to not be true

That would be quite a feat.

Where shall Israeli Jews go?

Let's assume Palestinians win in the end. Maybe it's the BDS movement that succeeds, maybe it's incessant terrorist attacks, but at some point everyone realizes that a single-state solution is the only option that is viable long-term. And this single state (from the river to the sea) is going to democratically become an Islamic state. A state that is unwilling to prosecute any hate crimes against its Jewish citizens (or non-citizen residents, a la Estonia and Latvia).

Will any other country agree to cede some of their land to a sovereign Jewish state? Something incredibly depopulated (to avoid another conflict with the natives), but still suitable for human habitation and with access to the sea.

Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia? Gascoyne in Western Australia (just 9000 people, you could just buy them off)? The Antarctic Peninsula?

If we’re doing hypothetical scenarios I’m voting for Mars. We will eventually build human civilization there, and since nothing else has worked, why not. Either they’ll build a paradise on Mars or not. No one gives up their land, so nobody is put out. The land is nearly infinite as compared to Israel which is pretty small.

Latin American genericstan just gives them an autonomous territory with a flat tax rate? They move to Canada and Australia en masse? The Antarctic peninsula is probably too cold for large scale human habitation even under a climate maximalist scenario.

Nowhere. Any such situation will only lead to civil war, again - i.e a repeat of ‘47 but with a better armed and trained Jewish population, and a less willing Arab world.

I don't think your scenario is remotely likely, mostly because the more the Palestinians actually start winning, the more support Israel would have. The only reason Palestine has so much support in the West, and even in the Muslim world, is because they're underdogs getting their teeth kicked in. If Israel started getting its teeth kicked in, a lot of international support would swing back them. But for the hypothetical, lets say America and Europe go hyper-isolationist and refuse to do anything remotely military aid related outside their borders no matter how much harm it would avert. Israel is left on its own, and the Muslim world takes the opportunity to all gang up on Israel. I don't think the Israelis would all move to anyone in particular together, they would just be refugees like Syrians or Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in humanitarian trouble. They'd be a bit different because normally such groups would go to their neighbors, but in this case all their neighbors would be participating in ethnic cleansing them. They'd probably end up mostly going to European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, and a large portion also going to the US and Canada who usually tend to accept lots of refugees/immigrants.

At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.

This doesn’t sound realistic without nuclear weapons. Israel has much superior technology but relies on America for it almost entirely as senior idf personnel openly and frequently admit. But then they do have nukes (although Iran might have them soon too)

I agree that it's pretty unlikely that the Arab world would commit to the sort of total war and mobilization that it'd take to beat Israel, but there are about 100x more Arabs than Israelis. If they were truly committed, they'd win. Just another thing that makes the scenario OP posited unrealistic though.

I don't understand why, rather than doing some weird moral transference where the Holocaust conveyed a free pass to colonise and gradually displace an unrelated people, they didn't just give them a slice of Germany after WWII instead. It's not too late for that either, if all the German politicians and civil society personalities that want to insert oaths to Israel in citizenship tests and wax poetic about how its survival and well-being is part of Germany's "state raison d'être" ("Staatsräson") put their money where their mouths are. I'd vote for using a chunk of the Southwest for it, say everything starting from Stuttgart; it's maximally far from the capital, there is nothing too important there and it's strategically situated in a corner next to Switzerland and France, at least one of which is unlikely to have any of it if Germany were to somehow try the Hitler thing again. I'd expect such a move to have greatly positive EV for our gastronomy, too.

If it ever occurred to one of them, I could see an AfD member making a similar proposal. Offer to let them have East Prussia and Danzig (the true East Germany) as the new Jewish homeland. It would be a pretty bit of trolling.

Those territories has been now longer under the jurisdiction of Poland (78 years), than a part of modern Germany (united in 1871), so calling them the true East Germany is a bit of overstatement.

I was referring to the minor brouhaha that developed earlier this summer when a prominent AfD leader was accused of referring to East Germany as “Central Germany,” thus implying that East Prussia was the real East Germany. As far as I can tell, this was a smear job, and she was actually using “Central Germany” in its usual, uncontroversial sense. Still, if they’re regularly accused of being revanchist Nazis anyway, why not lean to it and troll? Tacitly accept the revanchist accusation and use it to deflect the Nazi accusation.

If the Berliners want to sacrifice any of Germany for a foreign people, they can damn well do so with their own benighted corner of our country.

I think giving them MVP and perhaps part of Brandenburg would be a fine choice too, if they would actually take that benighted corner. It would even be close to the ancestral-ish lands of many Ashkenazim.

Aren't their ancestral-ish lands located closer to your original suggestion, in Rhineland?

Shapiro means from Speyer, Dreyfus means from Trier, Galperin/Halperin means from Heilbronn, I don't know the names for Mainz and Worms, but they were important centers of Ashkenazim culture as well.

Maximally offensive version: StarCraft-style base trade. They capture Mecca and/or Medina.

Slightly less contentious version: they plop down in a no-man’s land somewhere between the Donbas and the Dnieper to act as a buffer between two countries that both hate them less than they do each other.

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Judging by the amount of Hebrew real estate ads I see every time I come to Cyprus (often) nowadays that process already started

Maybe Bir Tawil, the unclaimed land between Sudan and Egypt?

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

Where will gay Israelis get married if they capture Cyprus?

A big chunk of the world.

Lesbos, obviously.

Maximally lazy version: they capture a chunk of Cyprus. It’s close by, and if Turkey can do it, why not them?

That was the approach taken by Isreal in Dean Ing's novel Systemic Shock, book one of the Quantrell trilogy: when World War IV [1] broke out, America was too busy with other concerns to worry about helping defending Israel from its neighbors, and Israel eventually ended up doing a hurried evacuation to Cyprus as temporary residence while they prepared their ultimate destination colonies at the L-5 points.

[1] What about World War III? Well, that was in somebody else's book,,,

I suggest here. This is mostly federal land at present, there's something poetic about getting the West Bank of Great Salt Lake, and if you can't even get along with the Mormons, I wash myself and my country of any further obligation to help.

How likely do you think it that Jews with a desire for an actual state would be willing to settle for territory that has nothing to do with their holy land?

So what's up with the amphetamine shortage? I can't tell if this is a shortage shortage, or if you just have to call up your psychiatrist in a panicked tone and mention the fact that you are literally out and won't be able to work tomorrow, and then they'll point you towards the secret stash.

Asking for a friend obviously.

Do you live in a college town?

Tagging on to your top level post to ask a question of the other users. Several have mentioned that AMPH is a ‘better’ class of stimulant than MPH. Why do people feel this way? Subjectively, it seems like amph is ‘speedier’, which means more enjoyable but also more prone to distraction, and with a bigger lag/crash after it wears off. Mph, in contrast, feels like less of a boost and more of a removal of fatigue, with less of a crash (but potentially a headache later).

Obviously responses are individual. What is the rest of the Motte’s experience?

And here I am swimming in them. Shame it's so hard to get the better class of stimulants, I'm not fond of Ritalin.

Any idea why this is the case? I don't know what the situation is in India, but I have read about other countries prohibiting medical amphetamines and allowing medical phenidates. I've never seen an explanation for the distinction though. Is it just fear of the second order effects of introducing a legal path to acquiring the, ahh, better stimulants?

They're legally (and for the most part medically) considered equivalents in the US. Though as you note and in my own experience, one is a lot better than the other in terms of side effects etc.

I would wager it's largely the stigma around amphetamines in general. I don't know any good reason why you'd ban those and allow phenidates, though I know Japan takes the opposite route and bans both, RIP ADHD-ists.

I don't think it's so much a fear of allowing legal amphetamines as much as an aversion to the entire class in general. And there's not much impetus to change things, at least in India, awareness of ADHD is minimal, and "a" drug exists, so it's not like it goes entirely untreated. MPH is ok, in effectiveness if not in terms of how pleasant it is to use.

(In terms of pure availability, India manufactures a ton of the stuff, including what you might import in the States, so it's little surprise we don't have a shortage)

So the status quo allows ADHD to be treated without introducing the wildcard of amphetamines. This makes sense. From what my Indian friends and acquaintances tell me, mental/psychiatric health awareness in general is minimal there so I'm not surprised there is no urgency to make changes to a system that provides at least some avenue for treatment.

I know multiple people that purchase all of their pharmaceuticals, from OTCs to scheduled drugs like modafinil, from online Indian pharmacies (mostly as a work-around for various insane US pharma and insurance pricing) so that also makes sense. Thanks.

Basically this is a long standing issue stemming from restrictions on production that pops up periodically. Not a new problem but it affects different people at different times depending on where the meds end up getting distributed.

One example: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/16dur21/stimulant_shortage_im_giving_up_yall/?rdt=65353

"Listened to a great podcast recently with an ADHD expert, who noted that in a recent meeting with the DEA and FDA all the reps of manufacturers said they were having no problems with demand and production, as has been noted in several comments. The distributors were the problem. The wholesale distributors got hit hard in the Perdue Pharma settlements. For things like supplying 450,000 opioid tablets to a single pharmacy in West Virginia, in one year, et cetera. So they just decided, extralegally, that they were going to limit distribution of ANY Schedule II drugs to pharmacies. Pharmacies cannot supply what they cannot get because of the distributors decisions."

This seems like the missing piece of the puzzle to me. The shortage has been going on for over a year at this point. If FDA/DEA quotas were the issue then the FDA/DEA could simply raise the quotas. But if manufacturers and distributors are afraid to ship out drugs in a way that might look suspicious because they're afraid of being sued, that is a much harder problem to solve.

Reminds me of the Covid vaccine rollout hiccups, but slightly less stupid because bad things can in fact happen if crates full of amphetamine end up distributed but unaccounted for.

One of my coworkers who is a programmer/SE mentioned to me he couldn't get any and it was affecting his job performance and we are a SV company with excellent health care coverage so it has to be real. This is in the Denver area. Like he is a top level SWE so if he can't get it nobody can.

Does anyone know of any smart, young(ish) Christian thinkers with interesting perspectives? Been listening the This Cultural Moment, about being Christian in a post-Christian world. It's excellent, but I'm having trouble finding more.

How do the few motte Christians manage their faith? It's something I really struggle with. I had a religious experience where everything clicked, but my brain is not good at this sort of faith and I inevitably end up in doubt again. I hate it.

Does anyone know of any smart, young(ish) Christian thinkers with interesting perspectives?

I like Gavin Ortlund's videos. He looks like he's maybe in his 40s, so I don't know if that counts as young to you or not.

Spencer Klavan and his podcast

Blake Giunta on YouTube (although much of his material is dated), Trent Horn, Br. Peter Diamond, Cameron Bertuzzi, Taylor Marshall, Return to Tradition, Timothy Gordon, Jay Dyer...

I'm not big into the newer crowd of Christian defenders. I'm still a fan of classic apologists like William Lane Craig, but the above has provided quite a bit of thought provoking entertainment.

I struggle with faith as well, although I’m a new convert relatively speaking.

For me what I do is try to avoid intellectualizing faith too much. I’m convinced that the modern world is way over indexed on rational, intellectual thought as the means to guide our lives. Let your heart lead you, in other words.

Of course that doesn’t mean you stop using your intellect. Reason is an excellent servant but a terrible master.

How do the few motte Christians manage their faith? It's something I really struggle with. I had a religious experience where everything clicked, but my brain is not good at this sort of faith and I inevitably end up in doubt again.

I have moments where I doubt my faith, as does anyone. But I try to bear in mind that basically every holy figure in Christian history has been plagued with doubts at times. Thomas the apostle talked with Jesus, saw him do miracles, the whole nine yards... and he still doubted! And the Lord didn't hold it against him either - indeed, he praised him for believing (albeit he also said it's even more praiseworthy to believe without needing hard proof).

The way I see it is, if God didn't hold it against men like Thomas (and Moses, and other prophets, and various saints, etc) that they had moments of doubt, he isn't going to hold it against me. He knows that I'm human, and it just comes with this whole "human" thing.

I do have other things as well, but unfortunately they're kind of specific to my personal circumstances and I doubt they would help much. But if you want to hear anyways, I can share them in the hopes it will help.

The way I manage my faith and handle creeping doubt is two-fold. Some doubts require both solutions, some only require one.

  • "I could not have come to faith without God overriding my sin nature through grace and giving me a true free will choice to be saved. It would be perverse if He then would not extend the same grace to keep me in faith. God cannot lie, is not perverse and torturous, and it cost Him too much, too dearly, to buy me in the first place, therefore He will keep me in faith, sealed by the Holy Spirit, as He promised." Taking this as axiomatic helps me primarily with doubts which sneak up and try to tell me I've accidentally logically proven to myself God can't be real. (The section of HPMOR which shows Draco the genetic origin of magic is a cognitohazard for Christians. This is my antihazard, my Helmet Of Salvation, keeping me safe from such headshots.)
  • Taking each doubt one at a time, and ignoring atheist Gish gallops because I can assume they're lists the person found somewhere instead of generating themselves through logic and research. (Yes, I notice the irony.) For example, recognizing that a specific doubt/"disproof" came from reading someone else's solution to a theological cognitive dissonance I never knew existed until I saw their solution to it. Another one: looking for what is not said and what is assumed, such as assuming God is subject to time/sequence instead of its creator.

A lot of doubts were simply and cleanly handled by J.B. Phillips in his masterwork "Your God Is Too Small" (PDF link), and it's a book I return to less often than I'd like.

I was also recommended this series of classes on Faith And Reason, taught at a church in my city, and the teacher uploaded the worksheets for each class under Resources on each video. It's 68 addictive hours of practical theology and apologetics, and then he followed it up with another 30+ hours of Influencing and Engaging The Culture. A hundred hours of the most clean and incisive binge-worthy theology I've ever heard. (The class attendees are red-tribe in their responses, but the teacher is grey-tribe.)

メリクリ!🎄

What are your Christmas Eve plans? Obviously not everyone here celebrates Christmas, but I live in land of fake Christmas where the busiest shop on Christmas eve is KFC and Colonel Sanders is dressed as Santa, tonight is the only important part of the season and that only because it's when families eat Christmas Cake and young people have romantic dates.

As a dad of two, I of course made spaghetti and a couple of homemade pizzas. Tomorrow on the 25th I will be making chicken with cornbread dressing and, yes, greenbean casserole. It is what it is. My redneck background is never far. Also I am going to try out an eggnog recipe. and enjoy a few days off.

So what are we doing, Mottizens? Regardless I hope all have a pleasant holidays.

Edit:

In the days leading up to now, I have watched, with my sons, the first two Home Alone movies, Die Hard, as well as the best version of the Dickens story out there IMO, the 1970 Albert Finney Scrooge.

Sunday morning service, Christmas gathering with family, Christmas Eve Mass, and finally Lessons and Carols service with some friends. Having Christmas Eve on a Sunday this year really made it a church-heavy day.

I'm going to reheat noodles and take the maximum dose of stimulants so I can get some studying done. The former was a gift given to me, the latter a gift I give myself. God knows no obese men in red are going to fit down the skinny ass excuse for a chimney in my kitchen.

Tell me more about these noodles.

They're from a cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurant I like, now, going into the differences between "Indian" Chinese food and authentic Chinese food as eaten in China, that's a long story. I suppose it can be summed up as being way spicier than the original, and a few dishes that have seen divergent evolution, especially sides.

What happened to your greasy biryani street food???

Of course I know him, he's me!

I just had it for lunch and it's mostly assimilated, I'll be burying the remains in a few hours haha

It's a Finnish tradition to do most of Christmas stuff - big dinner, presents etc., state ceremonies - on Christmas Eve. Presumably previously this was so that the Christmas Day could be given to religious things and rest, but of course in these secularized days most people don't do the religious stuff.

After becoming more active in the Orthodox Church (Finnish Orthodox Church is in the New Calendar), where Christmas Eve is still the day of the fast, I've tried to move things to the Christmas Day, causing a bit of friction with my Lutheran wife, but this year I gave up and we had Christmas dinner and gave out presents on the Eve, and I also went to church on that day and skipped today. Christmas Day church has been hard for me anyway since I don't have a car, public transport is not on and I about 10 km from the church.

We had, from the traditional Finnish Christmas table, ham and the casseroles, alongside roast beef, Karelian pies and a feta salad. And egg butter with Karelian pasties, it astonishes me that such a simple thing as a mix of eggs and butter would be quintessentially Finnish/Estonian thing.

My sister, who lives in the same city as me, visited, and our mom is also spending the Christmas with us. This meant the kids got a lot of presents and were happy, including the first skis for our 3-year-old.

My understanding with Orthodoxy is that the fast shouldn’t be strictly legalistic. I’d imagine if your family always does the meal on Christmas Eve you could break the fast a day early, but I would talk to your father of course.

I had never heard of any of those dishes until now, but I'd eat them all.

Also in the land of fake Christmas. My wife made the cake this year, infinitely better than whatever we ordered from Lawson last year. The main course was some A4 wagyu steak I picked up at Costco, which turns out to be a fantastic way to season your cast iron.

Excellent, sounds like a lovely time.

Growing up, the only thing we ever did for Christmas Eve was to go to church in the evening. It was only time of year we would normally go. It's been years since we've done that. Lately, my siblings, sister-in-law, and I go to my parents' place for supper and put our gifts under the tree to be opened in the morning.

I was the same. I appreciate your opening gifts on the 25th instead of like the barbarians I have met who open them on Christmas eve.

We always opened presents on Christmas Eve growing up, but that was purely for practical reasons. On Christmas morning we had to milk cows, and (presumably) my parents didn't want to try to milk cows at 4 am while also corralling children who were too excited about presents to focus on anything else. But now that I'm grown, we generally do Christmas Day in my house.

Well, obviously there are extenuating circumstances for some, though I won't use that "exception proving the rule" phrase around these parts out of consideration for the angst it causes. What was the Santa story for you as a kid? Or was that kind of tale too unlikely for the practical minded farmer?

We got told that Santa came while we were outside doing chores (in actuality: my mom put the presents out during that time, of course). That actually worked for a while, though one year I did get the idea to sit and watch the house like a hawk. When I didn't see Santa but presents still happened, I realized what must be going on. I was around the age a lot of kids figure it out though, so the unorthodox Santa explanation worked well enough in the end.

We only opened one on Christmas Eve always pajamas, as an adult I realized it was so we'd look nice in our Christmas gift opening pictures the next day.

That's actually kinda keyed all things considered, might have to adopt that

Did you really put them on without washing them first?

Yes of course, it was tradition and we didn't buy clothes from repurposed pesticide trucks. Kids pj's in the 80s weren't starched.

Not who you're asking, but I find the world is divided into people who must wash an item before wearing it and those who don't care. I am in the latter. Also what about hats or scarves or gloves? Surely these don't get washed. To say nothing of suits or woolen or silk items that need professional care.

I wash hats and scarves. Not sure why you wouldn't. Aren't they starched the same as anything else? I don't categorize them as pajamas, though.

Wool scarves and hats of silk or wool are typically more of a pain to have cleaned. Particularly if newly purchased, it seems a tedious delay in the wearing.

My girlfriend is baking some sort of biscotti. We'll take those and some other snacks over to my parents' house, where we will drink wassail and sing along with Christmas music. I may break out the trumpet.

Do it!

I got to go to both church services and spent time with family. We did a big old potluck with turkey, green bean casserole, mashed taters, corn pudding, etc.

We had some young ones running around this year too, and it truly changes the whole event. Kids bring a lot of light and energy to these sorts of things.

They definitely do. My boys have allowed me to relive many holidays: Hallowe'en, Christmas the big ones. Good times.

We're planning to go to old town and walk around looking at the luminarias. Maybe we will eat tamales, as is tradition.

I have a four year old, so she's really into stockings and Santa and elves and whatnot.

Excellent! Now I want tamale. I've become proficient at making many foods from (not Japan), but never learned tamales.

I don't make them either, they're pretty labor intensive, and I don't have the right sized steamer.

If you live near a store that's selling corn husks, masa, lard, green Chile, and the right cheese to make them, you're probably living somewhere where you can just buy them.

Right. And I can barely get cheddar much less Oaxaca or whatever. It took me forever just to find cornmeal for the cornbread.

This made me curious how hard it might be to source ingredients. The pork and beef style don't need cheese, and it probably wouldn't be so hard to get ingredients for the filling. It doesn't seem like Japanese food includes animal fat, but I don't really know. The masa and dried corn husks seem like the hard part.

I wasn't sure why masa is so different from corn meal and not interchangeable, and it looks like something about soaking it in a highly alkaline substance such as wood ash or slaked lime for many hours to weaken the cell walls, which is why it's so soft.

Yes the masa and cornhusks are the hard part. Not impossible, no doubt, but a big challenge. Plus I've no experience myself making them and it would be frustrating to go to such lengths just to screw them up.

I've already been in church for a morning nativity play and in a few hours we're going to have a Julbord with the family.

New for this year's celebration in Sweden was that in addition to the traditional Disney cartoon reel there was a similar thing put together but with traditional live action Astrid Lindgren Christmas stories and some newer animated stuff. Pretty nice imo and i feel like something like this might have a better future than the somewhat dated and historically unconnected Disney cartoons tradition that I feel like its on the way out.

What happened to the tradition of burning down the gavlebokke? As a Swede can you shed light on this?

I thought it was claimed by the birds this year?

Well... It's illegal, there are guards posted, there is camera surveillance and at least some years it's been impregnated with fire retardants.

The guy who burned it down in 2021 got a fine of some $10k and 6 months in jail.

Also, its Gävlebocken or possibly Gaevlebocken if you don't want use umlauts. Double 'k's aren't used in Swedish except in conjugations where two 'k's meet. Gävlebocken is a conjugation of Gävle (a town name) and Bocken (the buck), meaning the Gävle buck.

But it never used to stop people? It was a euro custom I enjoyed watching from abroad.

It used to stop people all the time.

That’s just lack of willpower.

For me, The Muppets Christmas Carol will always be the definitive version.

Oh I wouldn't dare quarrel about it Most who care at all have a soft spot for some version.

It's Scrooge (1970) for me as well! I had no idea the whole thing was on youtube, thank you so much and merry Christmas!

Christmassy semi-culture-war question for Americans: is the Grinchification of Christmas true?

It seems really funny because the Grinch is one of the American culture things, alongside with the rest of Dr. Seuss' oeuvre, which hasn't ever taken root here. They did show the Grinch movie with Jim Carrey and the later animated one in the theaters, but I'm not too sure anyone remembers them as anything else than basic streaming fare if there's nothing else to watch. Even though he's a children's character, supposedly, The Grinch doesn't even have his name translated to Finnish.

Of course one would be expected to know the rough details of who the Grinch is through cultural osmosis from Family Guy etc., but that sort of stuff is still not enough to make him a part of our culture, unlike with Santa, who still features the most heavily in local Christmas imagery (alongside with the Christian meaning of Christmas, of course).

Now that you mention it, I have seen a lot of the Grinch. I'm not sure if he's outright more popular than Santa, in no small part because Santa isn't anyone's intellectual property so he can appear on generic gift wrap and cards, and in malls as a mall Santa. But the Grinch is definitely appearing in a lot of bigger corporate ads.

Our public school did celebrate Grinch day and elf on a shelf as the main preChristmas characters. But I haven’t seen too much of the Grinch around here otherwise.

Yeah, this is definitely a real trend. I wouldn't say The Grinch is more popular than Santa yet, but he seems more popular than minor Christmas characters like Rudolph and Frosty, who were big deals back when I was a kid.

Anecdotally, in the very-red very-religious state I’m staying at, I haven’t seen any grinches but plenty of nativity scenes, some Santas and Reindeer. I do stay away from the blue core, though, so maybe there it’s more frequent.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Christmas is fully Grinchified, but I would say there's been a shrinkage of Santa. what's the point in Santa for people without children? For that matter, what's the point of a Christmas Day gathering when there aren't any nieces, nephews, or grandkids?

I think the grinch is a sort of unconscious thought of how over the top a lot of the trappings of Christmas have gotten. When I was a kid, decorating the outside of your house was a simple thing — a couple strings of lights on the gutters. Good. Done. A tree in the front room. Good. Done. Now you are pressured into huge displays (often including blow up props, lights on every tree and bush, etc.) and indoor displays (villages, Santa figures, evergreen stuff). Then there are the presents that get ever more expensive and include an ever increasing number of people, multiple parties as both host and guest, elaborate meals for not only Christmas, but the before parties and for a few days after. And of course several dozen fancy cookies.

It’s not really surprising that the culture would embrace a message that Christmas isn’t about big elaborate parties, displays, and presents, simply because it’s exhausting to try to reasonably do what the culture demands. The grinch isn’t saying “Christmas sucks” the entire message is that Christmas is about people and coming together and would still come even without all the trouble that goes into it.

The grinch is definitely a trend, but he's nowhere near as popular as Santa. I think it's a young blue triber thing to really emphasize the grinch; the median person sees him as a negative figure regardless of how the story ends. "He's a grinch" would normally refer to someone like Ebenezer Scrooge(also notably not a figure seen very positively despite the ending of the story)- selfish, anti-Christmas, meanspirited, whatever.

As a counterpoint, the store chain with the big Grinch merchandise deal is, well, Hobby Lobby, and I wouldn't say the clientele of Hobby Lobby is young blue tribers. Also, my girlfriend loves the Grinch, has for a long time, and she's from about as red tribe a background as possible; she grew up watching the Jim Carrey Grinch as a big tradition with her rural red tribe family and they all love that version of the story.

I think he's seen as a negative figure, but I also think there's a thing where people like to think of him after his big transformation; he's still a cranky grump, but he's more open to Christmas. They're not idealizing his pre-heart-growth stage, they like the grumpy guy who loves Christmas.

The Grinch doesn't even have his name translated to Finnish.

I dunno how you'd actually translate 'Grinch' -- it's, like -- totally not a word. I can't even really think of anything etymologically nearby those sounds, so leaving it as "Grinch" in internationalized versions is probably fine.

It should be at least "grinchi" to fulfill stereotypes of suomization.

The character's definitely recognizable, and there's a certain faction that promotes him more than Santa (or does weirder stuff). But at least as far as I've seen (admittedly, away from the coasts), he's more a minor part of the season, rather than a full replacement for Santa -- you'll see a lot of Five Below or Hot Topic grinch-themed stuff, but you're not going to see a bunch of kids lining up to have photos taken in the Grinch's lap. Even among the anti-christmas set, you're more likely to run into Jack Skellington as a symbol.

The 2000 live action and 2018 3d-animated ones got mixed receptions: Jim Carrey in particular sometimes was memeable but too exaggerated (for a Seuss character!), while the 3d-animated one felt too bland. Making a full movie out of the story just requires too much padding. Most recognition today will still reflect the 1966 version, which was really well-executed for its time and played pretty often on television during the Christmas season. If that one was never common fare for your area, that would definitely explain the different awareness.

How do you do an ideological/bullshit beliefs reset?

I have certain beliefs left over from my childhood and teenage years that are objectively wrong or misguided, and I know they are as much when I think about them rationally for often as literally as 2 seconds but this takes up bandwidth.

These are not political or philosophical but mundane heuristics and rationalizations. Following is a made-up example so please don't offer me advice on this, but it captures the spirit.

Let's say as a kid spending 5 units of currency bill was a substantial spend. It was a significant part of my allowance. Now as an adult, that 5 unit bill still hurts to spend.

The above is not the end of the world. But it's annoying.

I think it’s best to reason from the idea of useful information/heuristics. If you are using one on budgeting, I’ve always been rather a fan of using usefulness compared to hours worked. If you’re getting clothes that aren’t just going to be used for one year and tossed is better than getting fashion. And so if you’re only going to wear it three months once a week spending more “work hours” on that isn’t good. If you’re buying entertainment, something you’ll use a lot is something to spend more on than something you’ll rarely get use from.

Cartesian doubt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_doubt

It's painful and I have not done a full inventory but if you do you will be surprised how much BS you believe.

The fact that you rationally recognize such beliefs to be maladaptive is more progress than most make.

I'm not aware of any empirically validated strategy, but my advice would be to train yourself to consider specific situations as triggers, such that whenever you encounter them you jolt and remember to think things through. Eventually it should become engrained through force of habit.

If you're feeling experimental, well there's LSD, but loosening one's priors is not universally a good thing.

So, what are you reading?

Can't say I'm reading much. Poor Edmond Dantes is in prison. I suppose I'll pick up something Christian soon.

Someone gave me "Breath" by James Nestor as a Christmas gift. It's setting all of my woo alarms. I'll report back.

Planning to finally start Blindsight when I get on the plane tomorrow. It gets so much praise that I don't know if it's going to be one of those highly-praised books that's really good, or one of those ok books that everyone decided to ostentatiously praise as part of some mutually-reinforcing social phenomenon at some point.

Hoping for the best.

Just finished The Mountain of Silence which is a fun story that discusses the practices of Eastern Orthodox Christian mysticism. It was a fascinating and beautiful read, shattered many of my preconceptions about Orthodoxy.

The Eastern mystical tradition has quite a bit in common with Buddhism and other more popular mystical traditions in the West, but is still quite distinct. I hope we see a resurgence of monasteries in the US.

A friend lent me Sum, a collection of very short stories about different permutations of the afterlife. It's refreshing to read something that gets straight to the point.

Looking forward to your thoughts on Monte Cristo.

I’m almost done with Dreamland. Been enjoying it so far.

I just ordered a book of Kafka stories from eBay. I read The Metamorphosis in high school and recall enjoying it. We’ll see if his stuff is a bit too…grey for my liking.

It's the only Kafka I've read, but A Country Doctor is a must-read.

Finished Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front, 1944-45. The endgame of the Eastern Front tends to get short shrift in popular history with the exception of the capture of Berlin, and this is a very interesting book about a very messy series of campaigns. A must-read for lovers of war crimes.

Currently reading a collection of dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov, called Sketches of the Criminal World. More grim stuff, but quite darkly humourous at times.

dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov

Have you read his Gulag stories?

The book I'm reading is the second volume of a 2018 translation of his gulag stories.

Have you read "Till We Have Faces?" You might enjoy it, it's the rare book that's enjoyable both on the first read and on subsequent reads as well.

It's on the list now, thanks.

Just now rereading this for like the fourth time. It's fantastic, and Lewis himself called it his best book.

Yeah I think it's my favorite of Lewis' fiction, especially the first half.

There's a new Open Thread on ACX today.

Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back? I remember spending an unreasonable amount of time reading them, and would re-load them and scroll through hundreds of pages of half read comments to see updates. Now they seem kind of dull for the most part?

Adding: also, they seem more difficult to participate in. If I do ever comment, someone either slaps it down dismissively, or there's simply no response.

Another thought: maybe all the interesting stuff is happening on the hidden open threads?

Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back?

Well, you can check, the old threads are still right there. From the last time I had this thought and checked, they were significantly better back then, but most of the comments were still meh. There are still some good comments on today's regular ACX posts, as seen in occasional 'highlights from the comments' posts.

I doubt the hidden ones are much better.

Absolutely. They're awful now.

That's the question, right? Where do the interesting people hang out on the internet?

Where do the interesting people hang out on the internet?

If one knew, one would be there.

Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back?

Substack is a terrible platform to host these threads. When the number of responses exceeds a couple hundred, the page slows to a crawl.

I think part of it is that he isn’t writing about the same topics as he used to so people who follow him now are following him for his newer interests around city planning and the like. Those people are less interesting than people who followed him back in the day when he was anonymous and willing to engage more controversial topics.

The substack move hurt, in that half the thread seems to antiseptic substack guys trying to grift.

Antiseptic?

I'm trying to capture the vibe of Twitter and substack and other social media personalities who feel super fake all the time... Who talk in this newscaster tone, always respectful and nice, Flanders like. The opposite of dick stretching I guess.

And the ACX threads in particular make them that way?

No, the move to substack did. Substack threads on popular substrate all feature people posing and posturing to try to get followers.

I thought that Substack was ACX threads' substrate. I also thought that ACX was always on it, and that the "move" was from the Slate Star Codex domain to the ACX Substack. I wasn't following things closely at the time. Thanks for clarifying.

As is tradition, my sister and I got into a heated argument, this time about Israel and Palestine. The argument started as a disagreement about the meaning of "from the river to the sea" and then became about the conflict and history of the region generally.

Now, my sister, despite her strong feelings about the subject, knows almost nothing about the history of the region and seems to have gotten most of her information from TikTok. Nonetheless, she raised some points that I don't know as much about as I should, and I'm hoping someone can help me learn more about the following claims. These are all things she claims have been widely reported in the media (other than CNN et al.) and is absolutely certain are true.

  • Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza.
  • No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians.
  • Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately.
  • Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals.
  • Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?)
  • Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this.
  • Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt.
  • The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country.
  • Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. EDIT: I mean during peacetime and not casualties. I'm not talking about the casualties killed during current war.

I'm most interested in any claims of war crimes. I understand Israel claims they are not collectively punishing Palestinians but are actually targetting military targets, but what I'm most unsure about is what is the actual evidence we have about how much they might have deviated from that.

By the way, these debates always remind how bad most people's epistemic habits are. She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion. This from someone who had never heard of Mandatory Palestine and didn't know what a pogrom was, and seemed to know little of even post-1948 Israeli/Palestinian history. She also thought it was the deadliest current conflict and was deadlier than the Iraq War.

EDIT: The purpose of this question wasn't just to get more unsubstantiated claims. If people could provide sources supporting their claims, that would be helpful.

This article persuaded me that Israel was accurate in its assessment that Hamas were using the Al-Shifa hospital as a base of operations.

In order but unsourced:

Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza. Yes, but it's not unique. White phosphorous is too useful to not drop; everybody be dropping white phosphorous. If it lands on you you will die one of the worst deaths imaginable; but armies generally don't directly try to land it on people.

No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians. Maybe. Most of the claims of Jr. getting Wopper'ed. have been retracted; but there is no way to know for sure and such things have happened before on both sides of this conflict.

Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately. Yes. Any 2000lb dumb bomb on a dense city is definitionally indiscriminate; and they are going fucking crazy on the city with dumb munitions.

Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals. Yes and no: hamas has operated in those areas before and there is infrastructure there; but every hospital shut down or destroyed by Isreal durring this round of conflict has had +/- 0 Hammas command centers under it, and only PDWs stored in the actual hospital. That doesn't mean they weren't there before, however.

Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?) Kinda. They are doing as much as they can, but it's more like "throttled as much as is practical" than "Cut off totally". This might have changed since I last looked at it, though.

Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this. True. Israel has bombed sufferal safe evacuation corridors and the areas the told people to evacuate too, fairly consistently over several missions. It is basically impossible this isn't at least willfully negligent on their part.

Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt. True; but misleading. They weren't at the border crossing. That said, they have had at least one fragment from a tank shell hit someone standing in egypt, so they are being pretty frisky there.

The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country. True (kinda). Part of the founding of Israel is the balfour declaration; and it was less allied at the beginning than standing aside and letting it happen. They were firmly US allies REALLY quickly after ww2 though; as a capitalist white-enough outpost in the middle east.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. Ten(s of?) thousand(s?) at least; many of them by small arms at close range; cluding at least a couple hundred on the west bank where hammas doesn't exist. This is not in doubt, and is not surprising to anyone. If you want to ruin your day and your brain you can go look at the pictures, but I don't recommend it.

Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza. Yes, but it's not unique. White phosphorous is too useful to not drop; everybody be dropping white phosphorous. If it lands on you you will die one of the worst deaths imaginable; but armies generally don't directly try to land it on people.

My understanding of WP is that the "warcrimeness" is based entirely on if its being used (nominally) for smokescreens/illumination/whatnot, or if its being used as an offensive burning weapon against enemy forces in a civilian area - the latter being Bad and the former being Eh, Fine Enough.

Source?

no babies killed

I think a few babies were killed? This article says "Partial data by Hebrew media covering the civilians — killed by thousands of invading terrorists and by some of the thousands of rockets fired that day at Israeli cities — reveals that they include two infants, 12 other children under the age of 10, 36 civilians aged 10-19, and 25 elderly people over the age of 80, accounting for 75 of the 764 civilians.". It's true that no babies were 'beheaded' though, afaik.

Israel turned most of the water back on a while ago.

The formatting to that comment was confusing; the poster maybe should have used colons, or used ">" to make it a quote. "No babies were killed" was a repetition of a claim he was evaluating, not an assertion of his own.

That said, that's good information.

She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion.

Jesus christ, that's so backwards it's scary. You aren't passionate enough to form a correct opinion?! In what universe does that logic make sense? Surely she must see that the overwhelming majority of advances we have made - in virtually every arena, but most certainly geopolitics - have been through cold calculation, not the fire of passion? Should we hold a contest for the most hysterical and histrionic lunatic on the planet and run all policy decisions past her?

I'm sure she believes she does have reason and is using it to the correct ends that passion gives her insight into. As well as all notable heroes of history who had something they believed in and something they were passionate about that drove them. Meanwhile OP doesn't have any goal besides idly amusing himself with rhetoric and all of his logic will never lead him to the truth, only to "owning the libs".

Meanwhile OP doesn't have any goal besides idly amusing himself with rhetoric and all of his logic will never lead him to the truth, only to "owning the libs".

This is all heat and no light. Don't post like this please.

I should have made it more clear that this is how I assume OP's sister thinks.

Americans are inundated with pro-Israel propaganda.

There is a massive lobby operating in plain sight called AIPAC that basically controls the outcomes of all elections.

Huge organizations like Ivy League colleges that you'd expect to be insulated from foreign influence thanks to their humongous cash reserves are still under great pressure by deep-pocketed activists. If anything, it seems that American politicians are more likely to be impeached for not submitting to Israeli influence.

It seems to me that it takes a certain level of passion to overcome the constant drumbeat that Israel has a right to drop bombs on women and children and that American taxpayers should feel privileged to contribute to that war effort.

And who can blame passionate Americans in 2023?

How many conspiracy theories need to be fact-checked as 'mixture' by Snopes before the 'listen to the experts' poindexters learn to sit down and listen when Qanon Karen is talking?

Maybe that passion is misplaced, I've seen commenters here make convoluted arguments to still support Israel despite all the civilian casualties, ethno-nationalism, apartheid politics, genocidal statements... And perhaps they are right, and to be fair you need to have a very high IQ to understand the true moral righteousness of Israel's war on hospitals and apartment buildings.

I don't disagree that hysteria is bad. I do believe that there is little value in listening to what women are concerned about in matters of politics.

The sister is not getting drafted to fight a war on behalf of Israel, or say, on behalf of the children of Gaza (unlikely lol), so she has little stake in that story anyway.

If she does pay more taxes than she takes, then she may be allowed to air grievances regarding which children American taxmoney is slaughtering this week.

Huge organizations like Ivy League colleges that you'd expect to be insulated from foreign influence thanks to their humongous cash reserves are still under great pressure by deep-pocketed activists.

Qatar and the Saudis have been giving major funding to anti-Israeli academics for the past 30 years. Jewish donors not so much, they considered it more of a fringe issue and didn't push much until they saw how crazy things had gotten after the October 7th attacks.

Is Israeli treatment of the Palestinians much worse then the treatment of religious minorities across the Islamic world? It seems odd to complain about "civilian casualties, ethno-nationalism, apartheid politics, genocidal statements" when the muslims are so happy to impose them on others. The hysteria is one sided.

What is one-sided?

When deep state members decide that one country needs to be bombed, then we find out that the muslims there have been committing all kinds of crimes, gassing civilians, repressing protests, jailing political opponents... The hysteria was very much one-sided while it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...

Meanwhile billions of dollars of American taxpayer money were flowing into Israel.

Compare the press coverage of 2 wars :

[Underdog leader:] [Opponent's] bombing of maternity and children’s hospital an ‘atrocity

[Neutral observer:] The devastating [location] hospital blast is shrouded in uncertainty. Here’s what we know, and what we don’t

Can you guess which war is which?

...

You were right! The first one is about the crimes committed by the evil Russians.

Russia’s bombing of maternity and children’s hospital an ‘atrocity,’ Zelensky says

The devastating Gaza hospital blast is shrouded in uncertainty. Here’s what we know, and what we don’t

Why are the Russians evil? Oh yes, because they jail their political opponents, they have nationalist rhetoric, they target minorities and attack their neighbors...

Kind of like an Israel of Central Asia, but bad.

On one hand, we must spend billions of dollars to make sure that Israel remains an ethnostate

ADL proudly supports the right of the Jewish people, like other peoples, to self-determination. In the case of the Jews, this translates to the right to live in a Jewish, democratic state in their ancient homeland, Israel.

Jewish Democratic? What if the majority decides the state not to be Jewish?

Now what does the ADL think of white Americans' right to self-affirmation?

In a recent Facebook post, Ray Myers wrote, “I’m a WHITE NATIONALIST and very Proud of it.” Mr. Myers later attempted to clarify his post by stating, “I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country … And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means. … I mean, just like Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, too … We’re all in the same melting pot. Now why can’t we say, as Anglos, that we’re proud?”

White nationalism is a term that originated among white supremacists as a euphemism for white supremacy. The implications of Mr. Myers’ statements appear to be that America is a white nation and patriotism is synonymous with white nationalism.

ADL emphasized that “the post and comments are reason alone for removal of Mr. Myers from any leadership position with the Texas GOP.”

I see, ethno-nationalism for me but not for thee.

Who should I support?

The guy who wants the right to defend himself from his neighbors he doesn't like

Or

The guy who wants the right to defend himself from his neighbors he doesn't like

with my money

while lobbying to get me jailed if I say I want the right to defend myself from my neighbors.

I don't really disagree with any of this. But this isn't what motivates your average normie (like this guys sister) or your average muslim.

Your average pro-palestine protester isn't motivated by anti-white bias, you would probably find it difficult to find one who had anything positive to say about whites.

Well the average normie only sees what the media shows them.

While a lot of Middle-Eastern countries could fit into the 'bad' category of repressing sexual or religious minorities, there are 2 cases from a Western media point of view.

There's the good Middle-Easterner, who oppresses minorities, but he's an ally of the deep state like Egypt or the UAE, so the media goes soft on them to get resources or military support from them.

And then there's the bad Middle-Easterner, who oppresses minorities, but he's not an ally of the deep state, like Iran or Syria, so the media highlights the bad stuff to create support for ongoing or future military actions against them.

Then of course if we're talking to a leftist activist, they might not straight up believe all the propaganda of the State department.

In their case I could see different ways that they can justify ongoing oppressions of minorities that they actually like.

Yes I do love the gays and islamists are throwing them down buildings, but this is a result of Western oppression. The radicals are now in power because the 'nice guy' approach did not work

There is a logic to that, supposedly Hamas is currently in power in Gaza partly thanks to the work of Israeli operatives undermining more Western-friendly alternatives...

Likewise, the Arab Spring took out authoritarian governments in Tunisia in Libya only to make room for islamists, and similar developments in Iraq led to the rise of ISIS...

There is a strong tension between the two main elements taught in American colleges :

  • some identities should be privileged due to history (ie brown > white, woman > man, muslim > secular > christian...)
  • the ends justify the means (America dindu nothing in Dresden and Hiroshima and the rest of the deep state's actions up to this point) - in order to get a job in corporate America

It's no surprise that people combining these 2 ideologies together would believe that the cause of 'liberating brown muslims' is worth using such means as 'killing some oppressor-coded civilians'.

This post and this one are a bit too far into "rant" territory. While each has its merits, it's presented in such a blistering way as to drown the light in heat. Snappy rhetorical questions, pithy comparisons, passionate appeals, none of these things are forbidden, exactly, it's just that you've turned the rhetoric dial too high. Please dial it back.

This is nothing new, and, in fact, has been deemed as the correct way of thinking for at least a decade now. This is the entire basis of the whole "lived experience" thing; that the people with direct, often emotional, stakes in something are the most trustworthy for getting a meaningfully accurate reading of the situation and also for figuring out a prognosis to help the situation.

Scott described how easily people can slip between "this doesn't affect me so I can assess it objectively" and "this does affect me so I'm better informed about it than you and my opinion carries more weight". I would not be remotely surprised if @Glassnoser's sister reverts to the former when it suits her.

You reckon? That's more what I'm used to, people arguing whichever way is expedient, but usually when people do that they just handwave away concerns about bias, and usually self correct towards reason. Outright claiming something oxymoronic like "I care too much to be biased" seems like an escalation to me, but now that I think about it I don't argue with a lot of young people irl.

Now for something out of left field - I was bitching about this to my girlfriend and she reminded me of this excellent old Mitchell and Webb sketch on the topic - Train Safety

Brilliant skit. And it makes me sad to think that both Mitchell and Webb were probably fully onboard the lockdown train.

I do remember one of Mitchell's columns was about how he thought it was dumb that covid positions were dictated by political persuasion, and I've always seen him as centre left so I remain hopeful, but Webb has been a disappointment to me since he sided with the cops re dankula even though out of the two only dankula never wore a nazi uniform or did blackface.

Edit: no wonder I couldn't find the column, it was an opinion piece in The Guardian.

I stand corrected, Mitchell is more principled than I gave him credit for.

I can’t imagine David Mitchell needs too much of an excuse not to leave the house.

Logic/reason versus emotion/rhetoric is, for most of the West, a Star Trek fan thing, not a real philosophical dilemma they have to face themselves. For such people, the more you care, the more right you are, and it’s the unresponsive non-empathetic logicians who cause all the bad in the world.

My condolences. I can tell you that, re civilian deaths, the mere fact that Israel is not targeting civilians does not necessarily absolve them of war crimes, because "attacks that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof and that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" are also barred. How that might be determined by third parties is not clear to me.

On war crimes, I feel like people forget that hostage taking is a war crime, and it is undeniable that Hamas has captured hostages. And then you have the complimentary war crimes of Hamas using human shields, and Israel killing "excessive" civilians because of the human shields.

I'm pretty sure Hamas does operate out of hospitals. Here is an article from a few years ago, but I'm just a guy, I can't speak for the veracity.

It wouldn't surprise me if thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Gaza claims 20,000 deaths just from this current war. Even if that's a 10x overestimate, it's still thousands.

Sorry, the part about Palestinian deaths wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to war casualties but to deliberate killings of innocent civilians by the IDF in the occupied territories during peacetime.

If she's referring to massacres, I'm pretty sure that's not true. But the IDF has actually killed lots of unarmed civilians in the occupied west bank, some with poor or no justification. Thousands might be a stretch but Palestinians in the west bank complaining about IDF brutality definitely have the bodies to back it up.

Yes, I know. It's the high number that I wanted to confirm.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats