domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Stellula
47m ago
I think they’re largely cosplaying. Meaning is the only way through suffering, and these people are looking for some sort of meaning to help with their nihilism/depression.
I think there’s also an element of them getting to wear keffiyahs (which look cool) and do a big cultural appropriation without getting in trouble for it socially.
yunyun333
51m ago
They're maybe tangentially related to Biden stopping some shipments of bombs and threatening further restrictions.
cjet79
1m ago
For top level posts in the culture war roundup there needs to be more effort and content.
In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:
- Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
- Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
- Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2m ago
/u/johnfabian referred to a good 15-year window after 1991, ie 1991~2006. Do you think this is the period when woke radical leftism had taken over the humanities? It certainly precedes the word "woke".
A claim that Soviets killed 10-15 million instead of 40-60 million would be an exceedingly odd one from a point of radical leftism, since it's still far too many killed people for communists to be comfortable with it, and anarchists and others would presumably not care that much either way, since they would see Soviet Union as a bad thing either way.
Jiro
57m ago
Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism
"Jesus went to Hell" is not really particularly hard to understand.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
42m ago
You literally just need to write one paragraph. Five to six sentences. I have never seen a post that had at least one paragraph of original thought get modded for effort.
somedude
48m ago
We're forbidden to talk about anything unless someone writes a 40k word essay about it first. Simple as.
johnfabian
2hr ago
Describing the approach the communist leaders adopted towards their enemies as "identity politics". As I and many others use the term, "identity politics" refers to politics based on immutable identity characteristics (race, sex, caste, ethnicity etc.). It appears that (with the possible exception of the aristocracy, depending on how hereditary privileges worked at the time), none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description: kulaks can sell their land and immediately become non-kulaks, industrialists can sell their factories.
I would too hesitate in calling it "identity politics" (feels intuitively wrong), but I would not say the rest. In the Soviet system the circumstances of your birth were not so easily washed away. One might become a "reformed" ex-noble or ex-bourgeois who is a true believer in the promise of Communism, yet somehow these people always tended to be the first ones swept up in any new or recurring wave of paranoia. There were also in practice discriminatory measures applied against people who had "class traitor" backgrounds, even multiple generations past.
Also the Soviet state effected very real ethnic discrimination, either purposefully or via other less deliberate means. Ethnic minorities were perpetual sources of paranoia and distrust; in the lead-up to WWII and during for example there were a number of purges, forced displacements, mass imprisonments, killings, etc. that might not qualify as genocide but come very very close (and morally deserve little distinction). The Holodomor is the most famous but there are probably some you've never even heard of like the Polish Operation or the deportation of Tatars. These are just some of the more notable ones, there was a whole history of "population transfers" which sounds like a sort of benign planning thing but in reality was often a very brutal form of ethnic violence.
And this is without getting into the more passive bigotry within the Soviet system of preferences towards certain groups over others with respect to everything from university spots to food allocation. Systemic racism is kind of a big deal when the system is a totalitarian one that controls almost every aspect of your life.
WhiningCoil
23m ago
Kind of, but kind of not.
Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings. Write too much, and you risk showing your power level and getting a mod warning for "Boo outgroup" or "consensus building". In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning, because it's often your outgroup behaving badly, in a public attention seeking manner, driving national policy, that is the news worth talking about.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
25m ago
-
Considerations to divest from Israel are becoming mainstream: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/13/metro/campus-protests-divestment-harvard-antisemitism/ [2].
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Youth shift against Israel: “Views of the Israeli people have soured among younger Americans in recent years. The share of adults under 30 with a favorable view of the Israeli people has fallen 17 percentage points since 2019”.
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Many formerly agnostic social influencers have come out against Israel specifically thanks to the protests, eg Jack Dorsey, Dan Bilzerian. Presumably many other wealthy and influential players are revising their opinions privately, not wanting to upset the clannish and powerful Israel machine.
popocatepetl
27m ago
I just don't find these sorts of "Ah, but what if [alternative explanation]!" type of arguments very interesting anymore. You caught me: I don't have some convenient within-sibling GWAS where they pinpoint the precise genetic markers that corresponds to "the ability to follow instructions". But considering that, whenever we've bothered to check, behavioral differences that aren't obviously cultural (e.g language spoken) always have some genetic component, I've stopped reflexively hedging when talking about these sorts of things.
However long the sojourn in rationalism, one ultimately returns to "yeah, I know what I know. It's common sense, screw you."
The hero's nerd's journey.
NelsonRushton
36m ago
Thanks for the feedback.
I am surprised you didn't cite a dictionary in your "quibbles". According to Webster's online dictionary, for example,
- Identity politics: politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group
- pogrom : an organized massacre of helpless people. specifically : such a massacre of Jews
and per dictionary.com:
- identity politics: political activity or movements based on or catering to the cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests that characterize a group identity
- pogrom: an organized massacre, especially of Jews
In light of that, I left in the reference to "identity politics", but changed "pogrom" to "campaign of political violence" to avoid the suggestion (though not the strict denotation) of a pogrom specifically against Jews.
WhiningCoil
38m ago
More or less exactly describes why I don't bother making many top level post.
sliders1234
1hr ago
Outside of the few actual connected Hamas terrorists do they even care? Or are they cosplaying civil rights leaders? They are heavily limiting who can talk about what they want. And there are enough videos online about people in the movement not really knowing all the details.
Perhaps they are happy they got their universities to largely do as they are told.
That being said they did get Biden to limit weapons to Israel. Without them Israel may have had more of a free hand to do as any other ME country would do if a rival population killed and raped 1500 of their people.
Stellula
1hr ago
A lot of the posters here are just very bad communicators who are good at writing gigantic, very low entropy walls of text.[1]
Those walls of text have become semi-required by the moderators[2].
Thus: normal posters don’t post about any of these (interesting almost always fruitful for discussion) topics because they don’t want to get banned. I suspect that most of the interesting people have already left the party, but unfortunately I don’t know where went.
[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.
[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
This is a guy who was literally pointing a gun at Rittenhouse when Rittenhouse shot him. The story doesn't even mention that part.
Corvos
1hr ago
I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.
Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
7m ago
If someone claimed that the Nazis killed 20 million Jews, you would in fact not be arrested for saying that the commonly estimated amount is 5-6 million Jews.
jeroboam
7m ago
I think there’s also an element of them getting to wear keffiyahs (which look cool) and do a big cultural appropriation without getting in trouble for it socially.
It's too bad that the woke schoolmarms ruined cultural appropriation.
Some people really, really, love to play dress up. Its not for me, but it seems like harmless fun and now its just another fun thing that's been ruined so that some people can signal their own moral superiority.
If some bored college girls want to wear a keffiyah I say go for it. Let's make the keffiyah and low-cut blouse look a thing!
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
9m ago
At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when).
I know that this is the talking point making the rounds, but the fact is that the DR is self-aware of a large contingent of Jewish so-called "Dissidents" who may profess interest in HBD and "The West" or whatever, but otherwise ignore or actively countersignal the Jewish Question as critiqued from the Dissident Right.
Everybody on the "DR" who ignores or countersignals the Jewish Question is automatically coded as Jewish by the real DR. That's a model with a high sensitivity and lower specificity, but a high-sensitivity model is what you need to countersignal subversives. Many of these figures orbit around the BAP sphere.
The fact is, racist Jews aren't dissidents, just like white racist liberals are not dissidents. They aren't wolves in sheep's clothing, they are sheep in wolve's clothing.
The whole "the entire DR is secretly Jews" thing is not true, but "the anons who claim to be DR because they poast racists memes, but they countersignal the JQ from the rest of the DR, those are all secretly Jewish" is true enough of the time to be a useful model here. The DR is very aware of what is going on here, nobody is surprised.
Jiro
16m ago
The "connection" is that someone saw the news and thought "That's an idea. Terrorism!"
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
16m ago
Personally, I'm not interested in philosophical musings, anything about AI, or ratsphere inside-baseball (isuch as anything about Aella), all of which make up a substantial number of each week's postings. I'd love to see more focus on current events to balance the Washington Post and Reddit shoving the woke perspective down people's throats.
NelsonRushton
18m ago
There are two definitions of woke on the table; there is the dictionary definition and there is what people refer to in practice as "woke". These are not the same and I am referring explicitly to the Oxford dictionary definition, which does not reference leftism in any way. Hitler definitely espoused a message of wokeness in the dictionary sense, casting the Jews, Slavs, industrialists as historical class exploiters and using this as a pretext for seizing various assets on behalf of the Volk (folks; people). A case can be made that the Ayatollahs were/are woke as well. I don't consider Hirohito a "mass murdering tyrant" because he was beloved by his people and didn't directly kill them.
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
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