domain:gurwinder.substack.com
FtSoA
1d ago
First off, does Hamas really care about what happens to Assad or Iran? They take Iranian weapons but they also backed the Syrian rebels against Assad, they aren't exactly a full on proxy of Iran like Hezbollah.
Assad, no. Iran and Hezbollah, yes. One needs supplies.
Hamas is Sunni, not Shia, but the shared devotion to destroying Israel gave them an otherwise strange set of Islamic allies.
If anything the fact that Iran was ultimately dragged into the fight despite desperately trying to stay out of it directly is a Hamas W.
Sure, they wanted the whole Islamic world to rise up. The more the merrier. Except for the part where Iran and Hezbollah got their ass handed to them. That's not the result one wants for one's allies.
Hezbollah is in the same position it was in 2006
This is not true. Israel was largely considered to be the loser in that conflict, or at least having underperformed. In 2025, Israel blew the fuck out of Hezbollah after demonstrating that Hezbollah was almost entirely militarily ineffective.
Hezbollah is much weaker than in 2006, and will remain that way if the Israelis aren't exaggerating about their intent.
Houthis are stronger and more influential than ever,
They are doing pretty well, yes. But they are overall the least important bit as demonstrated by the fact that they're having a great time while their allies get wrecked.
Iran survived Israel's best shot at regime change and responded with enough missiles to break Israel's missile shield and deplete it's interception capacity down to nearly 50%
Thanks to Trump, so far yes the regime survives. However, it's in a much weaker position than it was before, and longstanding problems like the economy continue to worsen. I've seen some credible-sounding reports that moderates/reformers are rising in power/prominence due to the embarrassing defeat, and how much Khamenei is in touch with reality is hard to know. His succession will be much more fraught than it would have been if it had happened without the 12-Day War.
Iran's missile production and launching capacities were hammered pretty hard, so you really have to squint to see the silver lining in the dark clouds of "we launched a bunch of our prized military capability at Israel and had nearly zero military effect."
It remains to be seen what Israel's red lines will actually be for e.g. Iran rebuilding certain military capacities. But the IAF demonstrated the ability to conduct air strikes at will and there's little hope for Iran that they can suddenly acquire or develop top-tier air defense systems. And assassinations on the ground are also always a fun fear for Iranian leaders.
Syria is a real loss but Assad was always the weakest link and his fall had more to do with his own incompetence than Israeli brilliance
Who suggested otherwise? Israel was not the primary factor there. The Turks did more, I think. Plus the fact that Iran and Russia both had to back off the level of support given their other military priorities.
It's not a great time for Iran. They spent decades preparing to put up a good fight against Israel and/or the U.S. and in a matter of days they were revealed to be a paper tiger against Israel, with just a dash of U.S. involvement. They can try to pretend they did more damage to Israel than they actually did, but they can't deny their own high losses, or that Israel could do it all again.
I was driving through an extremely rural suburb of a city the other day that was also extremely wealthy. There was a wildly high end custom furniture store next to a Walmart. As I drove home, I saw an Amtrak station in the city, then realized there was another out in the middle of nowhere.
It made me realize that a lot of the things that people use as tribal or economic indicators in the US might not be as cleanly distributed as people think.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
I can’t remember the last time I saw an “indie vtuber” who didn’t have an OF or a Patreon where she sells audio porn, it seems to be a requirement.
FtSoA
1d ago
It's like a freedom of navigation patrol but for free speech and scientific awareness.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Your whole post is about left wing subversion in film, and yet you gloss over the most subversive film in the post. The Northman was ahistorical subversive garbage. I got 15 minutes into that film and it was looking pretty based and redpilled and then ^^^Anya Taylor-Joy^^^ showed up. So now we have to take a historically accurate film set in Scandinavia in the Eighth Century AD on Earth and cram an ayylmao actress into it in the name of “diversity”
—inb4 some onions boy is like “weeell ACKSHUALLY there were ayylmao minority populations living in Scandinavia back then, look at this article from ^^^Barbra Xorlon-Stygggaszzzt^^^ from the history department at ^^^University of New Mexico, Roswell^^^
I don’t care. One blurry UFO in one Viking woodcut doesn’t mean we have to take work away from human actresses and give it to ayys. This is human erasure.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
That is unnecessarily antagonstic.
No it's not.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?
(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
The bigger question's going to be whether, even if this never becomes socially acceptable, it'll be possible to meaningfully restrict. You can put a norm out to punch anyone who wears these things, but it's only going to get harder and harder to spot them as the tech gets better.
That's a legal problem. Here in Russia, possessing a recording device that is not immediately obvious as a recording device is a crime. If you order them from AliExpress, the customs will let the cops know.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Why don’t you just ask people directly how rich/poor or urban/rural they are?
JTarrou
1d ago
A lot of pushback on the least important part of a month-old post for a pack of people who like to consider themselves smarter than the average bear.....
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
roystgnr
1d ago
IMHO the best rationalists (unlike myself) are extroverted. But if you interpret "in the LW sense" as "prone to endless navel-gazing akrasia on online forums", which IMHO is only a little unfair, then that selects for introversion too.
thejdizzler
1d ago
- 40 minute walk, 15 minute drive with usual traffic
- 40 minute walk, 20 minute bus ride
- 30 minute drive. Fruit, berries.
- 20 min walk 5 minute drive
- Looks like 22 minute drive
- 40 minute drive or 15 minute train from station that is about ~20 minutes away from where I live.
JTarrou
1d ago
People who work at a university aren't nearly smart enough to be on the far side of that slope.
roystgnr
1d ago
Sorting the people best at some trait into the jobs that most benefit from that trait is useful for society at large, even if every job would show some benefit.
Just because good engineers must communicate well and good journalists must understand math doesn't mean we could swap them around with no problems; the priority order differs from job to job.
And conscientious isn't quite a trait with no downsides like communication and math skills are. I've seen many a conscientious person buckle down to spend hundreds of hours brute forcing the implementation of a poorly conceived idea that a less diligent person would have pushed back on.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
How far away is the closest symphony orchestra that pays it's musicians?
15 minutes away by subway
How far away is the closest bespoke suit shop?
10 minutes away by foot
How far away is the nearest commercial farm (not hobby), and what do they farm?
50 minutes away by car, strawberries
How far away is the nearest Amtrak station?
Halfway round the world. 15 minutes away by subway if you're fine with any other long-distance trains
How far away is the nearest Walmart?
Halfway round the world. 40 minutes away by subway if Metro C&C counts
How far away is the nearest international airport?
25 minutes away by taxi, 45 minutes away by subway and express bus
VIM
1d ago
It wouldn't just be military aid, it would also be the diplomatic cover. If the American President had the foreign policy sensibilities of a Mamdani or a Fuentes then Israel would be instantly sanctioned and isolated. Considering Israel is entirely dependent on imports they wouldn't last long. At a minimum it would be impossible under such circumstances to maintain a standard of living comparable to what it manages today.
Remember that the US also pays Egypt and Jordan billions of dollars in aid every year as protection money for Israel. The real bill of protecting them is far higher than just the cost of the bombs.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
-
Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
-
Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
-
Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
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Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone."
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
roystgnr
1d ago
I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.
The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
I owe you responses to the other posts, but I am a slow & lazy writer with a penchant for procrastination, and lurking. I'll answer this first because it's a quick answer. My motivations is that I'm deeply sceptical about people and the world. This is only partly related to LLMs but starts deeper. I'm sceptical and cynical about human motivation, human behavior, and human beliefs. I'm not really interested in weighing in about "intelligence" that's a boring definitional game. I use LLMs, they are useful, I use them to write code or documents stuff in my professional life. I use the deep research function to do lit reviews. They are useful, doesn't mean I think they are sentient or even approaching sentience. You are barking up the wrong tree on that one, misattributing opinions to me that I in no way share.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long
Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago
They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak
What is replacing them?
roystgnr
1d ago
magicalkittycat
1d ago
don't sell guns or sex
Those aren't speech. Those are definitely questions of autonomy, but they aren't speech. Which makes me think we're both having different conversations here.
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