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FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
If Trumpism is temporary, then he can't destroy Columbia in three years. If it isn't, then giving in will destroy your institution.
To survive, liberal arts educators have to be willing to become St. John's College. They might not have to buy they have to be willing to.
Botond173
16hr ago
Excuse me but what's the point of listing four qualifiers? Your question just becomes meaningless at that point.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
16hr ago
My money would be on Gibraltar first.
FtttG
16hr ago
The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point.
Didn't Gen Z overwhelmingly vote for Trump?
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
16hr ago
Who has behaved this way apart from the UK? France certainly hasn't.
Totalitarianit
16hr ago
Fair enough. My point in saying exceptionally deadly was to make a relative comparison to other modern and common diseases like the flu. It was statistically more deadly than the modern flu both in absolute and relative terms. Higher hospitalization rates, higher death rates. If the word "exceptionally" is too strong then I can use another word. It was notably or demonstrably more deadly than the flu.
As far as our reaction, yes, it does sort of track that way. Before it had really spread across the US, the world was watching Covid destroy Italy. Our country's reaction in March and April of 2020 was totally understandable given what we knew at the time. What was less understandable were the prolonged lockdowns with exceptions for racial justice protests that were backed by open letters from medical professionals, demonization of Ivermectin (like it was poison), accusations of racism for entertaining the idea that Covid might've leaked from a lab, constant narrative shifts on the efficacy of the vaccine, etc.
SkoomaDentist
16hr ago
it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.
Have there even been civil wars in modern industrialized states that weren't linked to the larger state breaking up (Yugoslavia), another war, clear ethnic conflict or another more powerful state meddling and triggering the war?
striker
16hr ago
Complete lack of comments is probably 99% of substacks. Including mine, disappointingly. (I’m as prone to dopamine attraction as the next man…)
striker
16hr ago
like, is everyone paying for fake AI comments?
I fear there’s every chance of this.
I haven’t noticed many good comment sections.
Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) has a mature type of commenter, which is probably to be expected.
George Saunders (Story Club) has a very committed and engaged community, definitely more rounded than your tongue-in-cheek example.
Paul Kingsnorth (Abbey of Misrule) has a very good community who engages reliably.
Even these top 1% are often characterised by positivity towards the poster. It’s very much a leader-follower dynamic.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16hr ago
The problems is that Israeli propagandist in the west always try to make every attack on them some major moral and civilizational issue.
I feel like this argument burned out for me during the first Trump term when the "Muslim bans" were castigated for clear racial/religious animus and disparate impact on a subset (even a fairly limited one) of (mostly-)Muslim nations. I thought the arguments were somewhat reasonable and compelling that the combination of a history of disparaging remarks and policies (which may perhaps have been defensible in isolation) was at least arguably a bridge too far (see a near-divided SCOTUS in Trump v. Hawaii).
But in the case of Israel, self-styled "anti-Zionists" (many of whom were clearly against Trump's travel bans on the above basis) manage to make no shortage of religious/ethnic animus comments, and propose policies that disparately impact the (unitary) set of Jewish-majority states: Your rules, applied fairly.
Totalitarianit
17hr ago
But it wasn't a nothingburger. It was a somethingburger. The mainstream lied, often and badly, but that doesn't mean Covid itself wasn't siginificant.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
The last republican president assassinated was Lincoln in 1865.
No, Garfield and McKinley were both Republicans.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
I'm confident we could game out how the conversation goes, right here and now. Sometime in the next five years, a popular Democrat gets topped by an assassin. Someone comes in here and says The Culture War has Gone Too Far, we have to get a handle on the violence guys, sure things happened in the past, but now it's serious, it's time to crack down on the hate and radicalism! How do you think that conversation goes?
I think you are being a little unfair here. I do not remember anyone on the Motte (even Blue folks like me) reacting to the attempted Trump assassination with anything other than disapproval. Maybe I didn't express enough horror and disapproval for you, but no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged. And by and large, I did not see that reaction even among my most leftie friends. Sure, TikTok was full of people screaming in dismay that the shooter missed, but do you think that actually represents mainstream Blue tribe thinking?
I think more Americans of all political stripes think trying to assassinate politicians (even politicians they dislike) is bad, than you are willing to credit.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
17hr ago
You could use a site or script to edit all your comments with nonsense and then delete everything (I've done this). You'd keep the karma.
The only issue is entering your password into a third party free site. A script with open code would be better.
Last issue is that many subreddits will ban you for mass editing and deleting your comments. They have bots watching out for this.
TowardsPanna
17hr ago
I haven't really noticed that. Most of the time I just see a complete lack of comments. I think the writers are pained by that. I see some of them on discord and x, subtly or not subtly longing for more engagement. It could be that some of them go the route of paying for engagement in the same way that e.g. a restaurant can pay for fake reviews. I assume they probably figure that 'it'll get the show started, and then the real organic engagement starts and snowballs!'
Honestly, I've never posted a reply on substack as far as I can remember, but I was considering doing it one of these days, and I was gonna just straight up praise and gush... I'd be one of the ball-washers you describe. Because the blog in question is a very very good one. When I see strongly coherent and inspiring writing that speaks to me from start to finish, I'm genuinely impressed. Because it's pretty rare and not that easy to accomplish. It takes time and practice and skill to consistently write well. And to do it for several pages on end? Takes energy and commitment too.
I've never been good at writing long texts myself. I didn't really learn how to do it in school, and didn't have a supportive home environment to cultivate skills. Despite being a pretty good wordcel by nature (at least the receptive/decoding part), I wrote as little as I could get away with in school for various reasons: bad teachers, depression and anxiety, difficulty with identifying and putting feelings and thoughts into words because of alexithymia and low confidence, and so on. When I had to do it in university it was a pain and a stressful chore on which to procrastinate and agonize. It still doesn't come naturally. There's probably some critical/sensitive zones involved in the developmental psychology of a good writer. Then there's the part of self-construal: do you believe others have any interest and approval of what you might write? Would it be 'legit' in front of a public audience, etc.
Perhaps I'm not the only one who's secretly a bit worshipful of the people who quickly produce great texts without straining the shit out of their brain muscles, somewhat like how a tech-illiterate might ooh and aah at the wizardry when you press ctrl+alt+del and shut down a frozen task, heh.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
A check of Trump's false claims about white genocide in South Africa
I really hate this. There was a time when even if they absolutely loathed the president, journalists would at least put a fig leaf of journalism over their hit pieces. Now this is journalism.
(1) There is a genocide of white farmers in South Africa.
Supporters of the theory point to murders of white farmers in remote rural parts of the country as proof of a politically orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing, rather than ordinary violent crime.
Yeah, okay, it probably doesn't meet the legally accepted definition of "genocide" (a particularness which doesn't seem to apply to Gaza).
The high court in Western Cape province ruled that claims of white genocide were "clearly imagined and not real" in a case earlier this year, forbidding a donation to a white supremacist group on those grounds.
Most of this article is "This isn't happening because the South African government accused of doing it says it isn't happening."
The government has a policy of attempting to redress inequalities in land ownership that are a legacy of apartheid and colonialism. But no land has been expropriated, and the government has instead tried to encourage white farmers to sell their land willingly.
Again, it's probably true that the government has not formally "expropriated" any land. Again, it's easy to point at what's happening in the West Bank - what the government is doing as a matter of official government policy and what's happening in an informal, extra-legal way is certainly examined in a much less sympathetic light.
Three South African courts have ruled against attempts to have it designated as hate speech, on the basis that it is a historical liberation chant, not a literal incitement to violence.
How many of these journalists believe in "microaggressions" and "words are violence"?
In a statement following the meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa, the EFF said it was "a song that expresses the desire to destroy the system of white minority control over the resources of South Africa" and that it is "a part of African Heritage".
Yes, I am sure those people chanting "Kill the Boer" were actually thinking "Destroy the system of white minority control over the resources of South Africa."
The video was made in September 2020 during a protest against farm murders after two people were killed on their farm a week earlier. The crosses did not mark actual graves. An organizer told South Africa's public broadcaster, SABC, at the time that the wooden crosses represented farmers who had been killed over the years.
Once again, his enemies take him literally but not seriously. Whether or not Trump actually believed those were literally burial sites, that wasn't the point of the crosses. They don't even try to debunk the fact that all these farmers have been killed, just say it's a lie because that's not where they were actually buried, so Trump is wrong.
Some land has been illegally occupied over the years, mostly by millions of desperate squatters with nowhere else to go, although some land seizures are politically motivated.
So, it's happening, but it's not politically motivated, except when it sometimes is.
The land is usually unused and there is no evidence the EFF orchestrated any land invasions.
"Usually." And they can't even say with a straight face that the EFF isn't behind it, just "no evidence they orchestrated any land invasions" - there's some weaseling in every word there.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17hr ago
If you mean the Fermi Paradox, it's... complicated. If you're talking about the Great Filter, no, AI catastrophe cannot be the Great Filter because the AI itself still counts as being an alien civilisation for Fermi Paradox purposes.
To get AI being an answer to the Fermi Paradox, you have to go into Doomsday Argument territory, and also assume FTL. I laid out the case you can make here. Whether to take Doomsday Arguments seriously is dubious.
Tanista
17hr ago
Yes. Inasmuch as anyone at Columbia actually believes that this is tyranny, they should be willing to let the institution's current incarnation collapse before they give in.
Or you recognize that Trumpism may be temporary and letting him destroy Columbia before that would be useless or counterproductive since institutions like that will be needed come the counter-counter-revolution.
I grant it's totally hypocritical if you think there's an active genocide though.
Jazzhands
17hr ago
Raccoon-dogs aren't even that special when it comes to being covid-susceptible. For a while blaming pangolins was all the rage!
Tanista
17hr ago
The entire history of the debate around wokeness: "Everyone is folding to wokeness, all the time. That's weird"
But also "so-and-so folded because he, specifically, is a pussy".
It's funny that even reversing the dynamic in favor of antiwokes doesn't change the assumption.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we accept all your characterizations are accurate, can you give any examples of countries waging war in the modern era whom you would not consider to be "fighting dirty," using the same criteria by which you are judging Israel?
2rafa
17hr ago
Superhuman AI is probably an inevitable consequence of the evolution of intelligence. There is a good chance the solution to the FERMI thing is staring us in the face / we’re about to find out.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17hr ago
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
The broader media tried to make Rittenhouse, J6, etc into ‘a national conversation about Republican violence’ already. They failed. They failed at making the Robert Dear shooting and the Paul Pelosi attack 9/11 tier incidents. The media is already pushing a ‘right wing domestic terrorism’ narrative by calling spray paint at a planned parenthood worse than a church bombing.
More broadly, I’m skeptical that there will be a republican version of antifa. Republicans are just genuinely less given to crazy radicalism spirals. There’s also no mentality of tit-for-tat limited exchange of violence; the Republican ideology holds that when someone just keeps punching you you shoot them.
Yes, they would. I don’t see a civil war scenario where Alabama doesn’t fall down to, like, post soviet purchasing power.
But I also don’t see a civil war scenario that isn’t sufficiently polarized for the goal of the two tribes to be ‘most money for myself’ as opposed to ‘hurt and subjugate the enemy’. Alabama may wind up like St. Petersburg, but that’s a significant improvement on Denver winding up like Grozny.
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