domain:nytimes.com
I don't understand it one iota.
I think the piece by O'Neill gets close enough, though it reads like he gives too much credit to people that don't deserve it.
It confirms that what poses as an anti-war movement is, in truth, an anti-civilisational movement – an alignment with Islamist hysterics born of a blasé feeling of detachment and contempt for one’s own society.
If one wants to oppose Israel's latest foray or advocate for the dissolution of the Israeli state they can do so a number of ways. A leftist, secular academic position has built-in sympathies and ties to the Arabic world. In addition to a finite (in my opinion) academic understanding of a concept called colonialism. One could also don the suit of an Islamist, or a bygone pan-Arab nationalist, and find many justifications. One could pick up an /pol/ suit and scream edgy slurs to throw stones at the house of the Jewish conspiracy. We have all reasons for stuff, but I mean to say there are a number of positions wherein it makes sense to oppose the state of Israel. Plus, our reasons don't need to be any more than a copy-paste. Status delende est.
The "middle-class ‘progressives’ who fancy themselves as anti-fascist" worldly champions of the down trodden fill the secular leftist academic's shoes and only indirectly. The secular, leftist academic made an easy-to-use cookie cutter framework to view the world: oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. Add a garnish of Global South to the brown, colonialism, and campism. Now you've got a rich, if limited, set of ideas that nearly anyone can pick up. It's derived from broader complexified works of the humanities, but distilled for Popular Use it works great.
It's a hell of a meme. Simple enough to be understood by people who never have to read a book, but truthy enough to get by as a deepity. Most importantly, the ideas/platitudes/sayings are incomplete or inappropriate often enough to be controversial. The last bit is important, because one doesn't wield youthful rebellion, or spur a desire for change, without warriors. Warriors don't volunteer for boring, centrist peacetime garrison duty. The white man didn't have a burden to stay home and send paper and pencil to civilize the world. When the workers of the world united they tended to cede power to a new elite who, by chance, seemed to be the ones who controlled the means.
One thing I think the doomers and blackpilled are correct on is that we have not fully reckoned with the impact of 20th century. Institutions like the academy have only started to consider it worth a looksie-- for the elite institutions, in a meek, delicate way. We are experiencing a hangover from the Cold War, with all the Soviet propaganda, ideology, and theories that came with it, spurred it, and preceded it. That's the material now we have to make it work.
The march through institutions was not a test. It was not a joke. It was material project for material gain. Coordination, intent, and weight of importance can be debated, but, frankly, there's plenty of people happy that the kids are Waking Up. The kids could be waking up to champion some terrible not-yet-known techno-electronica to achieve peace (I suppose the Nova festival goers were trying this) or they could rebel against HFCS. They land on Palestine, they land on Israel Bad, they land on the West Must Be Destroyed because those are the ideas that were left to them. The CIA really didn't do a very good job.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
23m ago
Christ in the Americas, a high school history textbook for Catholic students. It's a pro-Catholic telling of North and South Americans history. Columbus is portrayed as a good man with flaws. Cortes is portrayed as a champion of order and goodness, a sort of crusader king. Aztec nobles are portrayed as blood drinking demon worshipers (Aztec deities are referred to as "the devil gods") who oppress the borderline-enslaved peasant masses. St Brendan the Navigator is claimed to have probably visited Newfoundland. The writing is definitely aimed at high school kids, but the narrative is compelling. It's kind of like reading an action novel.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
24m ago
I started Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss just a couple of days ago. It's been a highly interesting read thus far, the glimpse into the New York City of the 70s has already made the read worthwhile for me, much less the story of Eddie himself.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
30m ago
For me personally, good examples would be Snow Crash, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and a Confederacy of Dunces. All three were just a pleasure to read. For something more niche, I really enjoy reading almost anything written by G.K. Chesterton. His prose is very good and I never get tired of his irony.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
30m ago
When I gashed open my face a coach commented that it was going to be a cool "300 scar" after it healed up, so I thought I'd finally read the Frank Miller original comic. I'd seen the movie about 30 times when I was a kid, we used to quote it to each other constantly, it's hard to express what a big impact that movie had on little league baseball teams and boy scout troops around that time. I was surprised by the original in many ways:
-- The plot points and lines from the book largely make it to the movie 1:1, with a lot of stuff added in to pad out the movie run time. The movie is largely, I would say, better for it. Having watched the movie, the comic feels like it's missing beats. In the book the soldiers are "boys" and merely "his bodyguard" while in the film Leonidas specifies that he picked men who had sons to carry on their name, which was a good scene from the start. Especially the "back at the ranch" plotline in Sparta. But the plot around the queen wouldn't work anyway because...
-- The art style surprised me. Stelios is ugly, sort of dreadlocked, and vaguely African looking in the art. All the characters are ugly in that same sort of way, while the in the movie everyone is gorgeous. I remember Gym Jones being a major fad at the time, and the 300 WOD that was supposedly used as a benchmark during the training process remains a well known workout benchmark. Not get too navel gazing and homoerotic about it, but at the time the male bodies in 300 were a real cultural touchstone. This was a thunderbolt image of white masculine virility; so shocking I remember liberals like Dan Savage denouncing the movie as racist and homophobic, how it was movie about the fantasy of Republican White Men beating up fags and ragheads, some line like "When the Persians don't look like Iraqi Muslims they look like a gay pride parade!" Watching the movie that critique makes a certain amount of sense, reading the comic it really doesn't: the ethnic and physical gap isn't the same.
-- It's amazing how the comic lead to the movie created such a cultural movement, but I feel like the movie and even more the comic are barely remembered. About a million people a year run a Spartan Race now, and when it was founded in 2010 everyone knew it was coasting on the film, and now I would bet most people don't make the connection. Reminds me of the Desperate Housewives TV fiction drama, which inspired the Real Housewives of... reality TV juggernaut.
I'm still working through Infinite Jest with a friend, and I'm reading a Platonic dialogue every week or so. I picked up Celine's Journey to the Edge of Night which is brilliant and feels like a really important work, but I'm not far into it enough to comment. I'm curious how much it impacted Henry Miller, Sartre, Kerouac, etc.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
30m ago
Hey, The Motte. Recommend us some books that are fun to read and that aren't about the destination, but the journey. Books that delight the reader with clever turns of phrase, witty jokes or badass scenes every few pages.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
59m ago
It's pretty dishonest to pretend that nobody would react to the revelation that the entire extermination camp and gas chamber story was a lie, and nobody was killed in that fashion. You are saying you wouldn't care if that turned out to be false (I don't believe you by the way) but it would be shocking to many people. Certainly that story is the epicenter of the placement of Hitler as the anti-Christ of Western Methology. Things get very awkward if you admit the entire gas chamber and extermination camp story was all just a huge lie meant to manipulate the public, a lie you will get arrested in Europe for challenging.
The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs).
The Typhus epidemic killed 2-3 million people during WWI, mostly civilians. The Germans did not have a vaccine for Typhus during WWII.
The conditions in the concentration camps were also tolerable throughout most of the war, save for outbreaks of disease. It was in the final months of the war when German infrastructure was being destroyed from all sides that the catastrophic conditions became ubiquitous, a fact that this Revisionist film covers very well.
cjet79
1hr ago
I don't really believe you in the first place, and I'm not about to scan a book I have no interest in reading.
You made it sound like they never talked about it. But they obviously have in other contexts.
They didn't memory hole this thing. Multiple world leaders basically went from never caring about the Jews and actively keeping Jewish immigrants out of their country to being willing to help them found their own nation state.
Your an unreliable source of facts for me. It's like when I used to talk to 9/11 truthers. Sometimes what they said was correct in a very technical sense, but it would lead to false impressions. The "jet fuel can't melt steal beams" was the memed example. It always took a ton of effort to tease out the truth, way more than their initial assertion.
I've seen other people go through that circus with you. I'm unimpressed. As far as I remember your alternate history basically comes down to something like "gas chambers weren't used and only about 2-3 million Jews died" which seems like not enough to even change anyone's reaction.
The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs). Those are optimal circumstances, since those prisoners are more likely to be healthy young men.
There was an estimated 10 million Jews in Europe. Giving you a nicer target like 500k (5% death rate) which assumes all Jews in Europe were captured and numbers still fall way short of the Germans running normal prison camps where they make an effort to keep people alive.
I also don't really care how mass murderers achieve their numbers. Stalin and Mao got their record breaking numbers through starvation and brutal work conditions, no gas required. They were still evil assholes that committed atrocities. The fact that they aren't condemned as heavily as Hitler is something I blame on leftist academics and media covering for the communist regimes. The Jewish conspiracy angle makes little sense to me since vast number of Jews were also killed by Stalin.
Lewis2
1hr ago
I’m pretty sure “caring more” explains the entire difference. Men’s handwriting a century or more ago was far neater than most women’s today, and was in many cases neater than women’s handwriting from that same period. But back in the day, having a strong secretarial hand was a common job requirement, so more men were incentivized to write better.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Fair enough, I just think being the essential sex is such an advantage that everything else pales in comparison. If we were playing a strategy game, you'd know which was more important.
Thank you for making the thread, it's been a highly entertaining read.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
For example, if the average person guesses that a black man is twice as likely to go to jail as a white man (stereotype), the reality would be that he was 4 times as likely. The gist was that we actually understereotype, that a pattern has to be really obvious to become a stereotype. But this research became taboo a long time ago and I haven't seen anything recent.
So which stereotypes are accurate and which are inaccurate?
Are Jews cheating me twice as much as I think they are when writing a contract?
Do LAPD officers hate black guys twice as much as black people think they do?
Are the Swiss twice as humourless as I think they are?
What about outdated stereotypes? Are the French a martial race as in the 18th and 19th centuries, or cheese eating surrender monkeys as in the 20th? Are the Japanese incapable of making high quality products and only make cheap imitations, or are they single mindedly obsessed with perfection and making only the highest quality artisanal goods?
I'm genuinely curious, I tried to take out the gotcha examples!
cjet79
1hr ago
He was listing the most horrible things that have happened. He considered it equivalent to Europe being a bombed out ruin and 30 million combat deaths. I don't think a plain reading of the passage ever lands on "ambivalence".
So we're talking about one of the biggest events of WWII, and certainly the most unusual event, with millions of men, women and children allegedly being tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower and murdered. It's the event that forms the foundation of the contemporary anti-Christ mythos around Hitler.
And you couldn't find a single concrete reference to that in Winston Churchill's six-volume The Second World War, as I said, so you instead point to a single vague reference in a dialogue during a dream-sequence in a short story, which doesn't mention gas chambers or even Jews. Certainly my point still stands very, very tall. The fact you have to reach so hard to find a single reference of this world-changing event (which doesn't directly mention it in any case, it's just a literary allusion) from someone like Churchill proves the point very well.
Gaashk
1hr ago
I think women are also more likely to be good at signs and calligraphy, due to caring more.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
Interesting. The study I have seen said more than 80% were male but may be dated, to say nothing of the methodological issues. Personally I've never known IRL a woman who regularly played video games. Or maybe they've just never told me. Many years ago I saw my fiercely competitive wife on Mario Kart, and it's probably just as well that she doesn't have much interest in turning on the PlayStation .
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
Buried the lede there a bit.
Gaashk
2hr ago
They're significantly better at getting men to do things for them, even men who aren't getting anything in particular out of it other than "you remind me of my daughter" or some such.
benmmurphy
2hr ago
didn't Michael Jackson do something similar with 'they don't care about us'. i was shocked when i first heard the original words to that song and they were used as background music for a runners instagram.
Joyful
2hr ago
Wow is about half women, although the raiding scene used to be more like 25% (I haven't raided since 2016, no idea about now).
Joyful
2hr ago
Played a shaman in hardcore to 8 last week, put my nose out of joint, now I'm leveling up a ret paladin of all things in cata because I like MOP so I might want to play when that comes out. No interest in actually playing the cata dungeons or raids.
I dislike that they don't have bc and wrath servers, I don't like vanilla as much. I guess I have a private server to turn to if I need a wrath fix but I couldn't get their BC version working when I tried last year.
Joyful
2hr ago
They made us add the feminine version to every job description,
If anything "they" have been trying to strip out the gender entirely from job descriptions. Postal worker instead of mailman, calling all actresses actors, stewardess to flight attendant. Etc.
Joyful
2hr ago
what other aspects of her biology might take the sting out of her manifest physical inferiority and considerable neurotic pathologies.
Lol. Charitable. How about being able to not only live longer but also live better lives due to improved social networks. Men who lose their wives are emotionally screwed, women who lose their husbands are widows and mostly fine.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
2hr ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on the Iliad and Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.
Joyful
2hr ago
If I remember correctly, magnitude is actually half of reality, not more than reality. (its been at least 15 years since I read the abstracts of the research from the 60s? 70s?).
For example, if the average person guesses that a black man is twice as likely to go to jail as a white man (stereotype), the reality would be that he was 4 times as likely. The gist was that we actually understereotype, that a pattern has to be really obvious to become a stereotype. But this research became taboo a long time ago and I haven't seen anything recent.
That a high roll scenario is being required to enter your name into an overt registry of gun owners does not suggest the 2A is "doing rather well".
Heck, I'm in Alabama, which is the best-case scenario with so-called “constitutional carry”, but I still consider 2A effectively dead considering my only options to arm myself are:
Submit my name and address into the federal covert gunowner registry that comprises the FBI logs of background checks submitted by FFLs;
Open myself up to entrapment*, which to my knowledge is still a 100% permitted strategy when done with agency approval, by buying from a non-FFL stranger;
Buy from a non-FFL non-stranger, which is logistically a massive nuisance since it requires them to have already owned the gun in question for at least a year, or since before I mentioned the topic to them, lest box
21.aof the 4473 render their involvement moot.*I do not have the firearms knowledge to know with certainty whether a given gun secretly has some illegal modification, nor do I trust my ability to reliably identify a glowie posing an an individual at a gun show.
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