2D3D
21hr ago
Honestly, as a third worlder, I find these intellectuals to be disingenuous blowhards. Railing against the first world is easy, because there are sympathizers in the first world eager to take up any cause that undermines proximate enemies. Railing against their own elites is harder because of the obvious risk of bodily harm but also because the intellectuals want to be the elite and thus want to preserve the system for themselves to take over. The first world being heckled isn't even the same first world enabling the third world elites to stay in power; Shell pays off Bruneian royals to have first rights to extract resources, and both the Shell executives and Bruneian royals buy property in High Street with their share of the loot.
The other group that I find to be disingenuous blowhards are the first world anticorruption campaigners. Moralizing from afar is especially tedious for a recipient to hear, and the anticorruption westerners are usually the most clueless and sanctimonious dickheads to ever lecture us. We don't really like corruption here already, but some bespectacled nerdy woman lecturing us makes us reflexively band up to our kin. Better my neighbor reap the rewards than some NGO pretending to be useful.
2D3D
1d ago
Sorry, I missed something. Why is MoR associated with SSC? I vaguely know something about LessWrong being the 'less racist' offshoot of the SSC culture war discussions, and Yudowsky is associated with LessWrong for (reasons???), but I don't know how that leads into MoR being a culture war flashpoint or even signpost.
2D3D
1d ago
Not quite a tangent, if you think about it. The language of 'exploitation' is employed by failing nations to externalize their own responsibility for failure onto other countries that are willing to accept said responsibility, whether or not said country actually did anything. Bangladeshi intellectual employs the language of colonialism to blame English self-flagellants for their current woes, even though it is Pakistanis who engaged in * actual * genocide. Pakistanis are both too poor to be bilked for sympathy, and also more likely to declare that the job should be finished than issue even a cursory apology. By contrast local activists in the UK or US are eager to take up the Bangladeshi cause to castigate their proximate opponents.
Similarly, Nigerian or Congolese or Saudi governments engage in direct transactions with foreign entities to let their own economies and resources be exploited. Oil or minerals buried underground have no worth if they are not extracted, and waiting 50 years to MAYBE develop the necessary industry and intellectual capability to exploit said resources is itself a threat when neighboring countries would immediately attack if the land owners are too weak to protect themselves, like Guiana.
Most of third world exploitation by first world powers is not done by the first world, but by the rules or local power brokers who sell out their own people. The khaleeji nobility reap all the profits of their oil resources and spend said profits in Europe. Meanwhile South Korean chaebols who let their people be low wage factory slaves were strongarmed into domestic reinvestment for industrial development. Whenever a country cries against the evils of colonialism, it is useful to ask where the monies received in exchange for selling out their people actually went.
2D3D
3d ago
Palestinians played the game badly, but they are a useful player for antiwest types to cheerlead, and thats where the Palestinian momentum comes from. Jews have been a lousy cause to advance, because they are actually winning. They achieve on their own merit, so there is no glory to share. By contrast the Palestinians, should they win and kill every Jew, will OBVIOUSLY credit the brave warriors of the Columbia BDS executive committee for achieving such a great victory, letting these children bask in the glow of their participation trophy.
2D3D
3d ago
This is similar to the US in Iraq/Afghanistan. Our error was in being too concerned with casualties, when in war they often are the point.
Casualties, and humiliation. The failure of Afghanistan for the US was in trying a consultative approach, putting in local leaders who would exercise the necessary political authority to stabilize the violent tribes while staying their hand in conducting pogroms and massacres. The peace of the Taliban was an imposed one by the rifle, just as the peace of Timur was one of the sword and the peace of Shah (can't remember which one) was imposed by the Raj. Humiliation and subjugation destroys the root of a poisonous tree, and while the soil will grow another cursed plant later on, it will have to take a new form and promises at least a generation of brittle peace as it grows.
Israels peace with Jordan, Syria and Egypt would have failed were it not for their own internal coups. Israel may not have flown the star of david over Cairo, Damascus or Amman, but their internal rebels did, and that is itself enough to incentivize peace while buying time to deal with internal struggles. Israels light touch is not what rewarded it with peace, the incompetence of its enemies is what gives Israel each of its future days.
2D3D
3d ago
Under the Ottoman rule peace was enforced via subjugation. The Muslims were content to let the Jews and Christians live so long as the Muslims remained supreme.
but good luck advocating this murderous and hateful belief to the rest of the world.
The Arabs are right now celebrating their victory over the Jew and promising endless Oct 7, and immediately after Oct 7 we had the NY DSA and elite universities rush to celebrate the slaughter, complete with swastika signs and giddy promises for more slaughter. You are free to castigate those supporting the moral position of an Israeli state exercising the right to defend itself, but your own moral position is shared by loathsome belligerents that would rape murder and flay you apart, in that order only if you're lucky.
2D3D
3d ago
Doctors and engineers are a valued commodity, so the trick is to redefine every military aged male who declared their intent to be an aspiring rapper. From aspiring rapper to charity case thinking about turning his life around, this refugee will surely accrue positive value for Sweden in n=ERROR years.
2D3D
3d ago
Jordan and Egypt at war with Israel is a massive loss for those 2 countries. The inertia of peace keeps them from rattling the sabres to sate domestic bloodlust. Being in a belligerent state makes obvious the precarity of their domestic military and economic capabilities, exposing the regime to internal threats that are much more willing and capable of stringing the existing leaders up from lampposts. Its better for Sisi and Hussein to shrug their shoulders and say 'the US is forcing this peace on us' than to actually mobilize and expose how weak they really are.
2D3D
3d ago
The ones who signed the treaty are not the ones who wield the knife to stab the Israelis in the back later. Arafat signing the Camp David accords would have seen him deposed in an internal Fatah struggle, much less any Hamas action later on. Hamas signs the ceasefire now because all the other Gaza militants are similarly degraded, leaving Hamas relatively strong.
Also, they are pretty stupid. My characterization of 'playing the game right' is more a reflection of their maximalist strategy having unexpected payoffs, not that they received their expected payoffs. The expected Hamas payoff for launching the Oct 7 attack was to prove the IDF incapable and spark a regional war that would crush Israel in a tidal wave of West Bank and Hezbollah militants, or failing that to sit back and eat a campaign of retaliatory airstrikes that leave Hamas intact underground. That payoff did not happen, but the new allies of Hamas - western activists cosplaying as revolutionaries to attack proximate enemies - were happy to take up the Hamas cause for themselves, giving a payoff where one failed earlier. Even if there were no actual payoffs, Hamas and its supporters are perfectly capable of scribbling in their own reality to their internal stakeholders who are themselves predisposed towards conspiracism and matyrdom.
2D3D
3d ago
Wikipedia is particularly captured. Source pollution and semantic abuse have allowed pro-Palestinians to cite dubious sources as fact instead of opinion. The page you cite already stares Oct 7 is a tactical Hamas victory, and on its Oct & attack page it cites a Haaretz article for the IDF being responsible for killing its own people oer the Hannibal Doctrine, conveniently locking the Haaretz article behind a paywall.
There is endless denial by Palestinian supporters that there was any crime committed by Hamas, and that if Hamas did do it then that it was glorious and the Jews deserved it anyways. Bafflingly the most prominent apologists are privileged western (including Israeli* like Haaretz journalists who write for leftist publications such as Vox or Jacobin) activists who do all the intellectual laundering to sanewash Palestinian objectives. A cursory glance of what the Palestinians themselves say they want - mass extermination of Israelis as per the Hamas charter, repeats of Oct 7 as often as possible - is ignored in favor of paeans to theoretical harmony that would exist the moment Israel lays down its arms. This utopianism flies in the face of reality for a theoretical unified Palestinian state, for the Palestinians have been engaged in Fatah-Hamas civil wars since... pretty much the beginning of the PLO.
A charitable interpretation is that underdog support blinds pro-Palestinians to the genocidal intent stated by the Palestinians themselves, using evolving language of 'trauma' to whitewash such language as temporary maledictions brought about by (maximally traumatizing) ongoing Israeli actions. Such an interpretation required willful self deception regarding what the Palestinians themselves openly celebrate and have done to great glee.
2D3D
4d ago
I mean the bigger deal is that Journalist is now a protected class on the same order of Doctors, Clergy and Messengers. It is definitely just a coincidence that the moral case for this class upgrade was promulgated by journalists themselves.
Its the same as Women and Children. Given the footage of fi refights, it seems that Gaza has speedrun progressivism by allowing gender conversions for its fighters, and even age conversion for its grown men to suddenly be 'children'.
2D3D
4d ago
Is this a Nixon Goes To China moment? Hamas/Qatar thinks they could extract more from vulnerable Democrats, but Trump will order the Sixth to just slave all munitions to Israeli fire control and at least give some kill marks to the US. If Trump is known to be maximally unsympathetic, then rushing a sellable victory is more important than holding out for Harris breaking with the Israelis.
2D3D
4d ago
After all, Israel has in the last year shown that it is not a country that you want to fuck with if you have the typical second/third world minor country type of corrupt, ineffective, and technologically/organizationally relatively primitive military.
I wish this were true. Military leaders may recognize that their corrupt inept armies cannot take on Israel at all, but there are plenty of stupid jihadis on their private telegrams who celebrate having defeated Israel comprehensively in every engagement. In these telegrams and social media the Israelis have retreated in shame from every battle, having lost thousands of soldiers who spontaneously disapparate to spare the jews the shame of having dead soldiers paraded before the victorious Palestinians. Palestinians keep crowing about their indomitable will and ingenuity coming up with novel solutions to defeat the Israelis and western sympathists are eager to signal boost the victories of the underdog because victory=moral support. In this information environment, the Palestinians do not think they have lost anything. So long as a single Palestinian is alive, the Jew is defeated, and the Jew being defeated means the Palestinians have won every battle. The logical order does not follow, but Palestinians and their supporters are uninterested in using logic, much less understanding it.
2D3D
4d ago
The only difference is that the Jews finally managed to organize into a cohesive unit as opposed to a billion squabbling factions and their enemies have somehow gotten even stupider than they were in the past. The only smart thing Israels enemies did was cut loose the most worthless dead weight. Jordan and Egypt both refusing to return to the 1966 borders where West Bank and Gaza were not under Israeli occupation is the singular political masterstroke that has made all their military defeats worth it.
2D3D
4d ago
Turn the other cheek when there is a promise of heavenly rewards. In real life continued cooperation in the face of defection just makes you a chump ripe for the taking.
The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.
There are plenty of well meaning Israelis who believed that defense is itself an aggressive proposition, that opening their homes and businesses to Gazans would foster cooperation and love. Those people set up open air festivals and farming villages next to Gaza to facilitate such endeavors. For their efforts they were slaughtered and raped on livestream, to the cheering delight of the very Gazans they tried to help.
2D3D
5d ago
Did they stay home instead of voting? And were they in significant enough numbers to move the needle were they to turn out? I have very lefty friends telling me that supporting Gaza would have won Harris Michigan and North Carolina (I don't understand this one) for (((reasons -ok jew hate))), and that defund the police backlash will blow over once the social programs start driving down crime, winning over Pennsylvania and Geoegia. In their view this would have given her the popular vote by increasing turnout across the blue strongholds, and flipped the key battleground states. This seems too deep in the woods for me as an external observer, but at the very least it seems that my lefty pals have retreated deeper into their shaky mottes, even as more normies are ok talking openly about how theres too many ugly dudes in dresses talking shit about kids.
2D3D
6d ago
Harris lost 15m biden voters because she was too cosy with Cheneys? Is this the 'democrats weren't woke enough, so their supporters stayed home' argument? Democrats needed to be more woke, promise more DEI positions, legally enshrine black representation, force a ceasefire on Israel (but not Hamas). If the dems did that, then the army of disappointed minority socialists would feel welcome in the now sufficiently progressive democrats?
Sounds just like the DSA meetings I attended in college. Rooms full of white (literal) autists and their racial adjacents (asian autists, latino autists, tranny autists, black autists, white progressives) theorycrafting about the hidden socialists eager for the revolution. In your neck of deep blue county are there people of working class values there, or is it primarily class aspirants?
2D3D
6d ago
So perhaps someone can answer: are they TRULY captured, true believers in the cause, or are they engaged in a social signalling game, everyone hiding their power level in public for fear of social sanction.
My till-recent theory of mind is particularly uncharitable: young men pretend to be progressive to impress young women. Yet I have met single young graduate men who, unprompted, stated their commitment to inclusive work practices at business meetings. Like they say it before the beginning of their presentation decks which will feature some black woman in a hard hat all the time, even though their solutions are pure leetcode deskbound shit. Its like true believers reciting the shahada. What gives?
2D3D
6d ago
Wokeness flourished when it was viewed as the inevitable stymied by a fraud, the will of the changing demographic majority-minority populace frustrated by the last gasp of white rage. That framing allowed white progressives to lead black progressive (women) by the nose, trotting out blacks as shields to block criticism of wokeness. The minority support of trump upends this entire argument, making it clear that wokeness was not supporting the preferences of the inevitable majority.
There are plenty of other reasons, in particular ZIRP ending and the fact that DEI policies neither improved bottom line nor stopped activist screeching. Nevertheless the vanguardist progressives have lost their colors. They have no leg to stand on, and barring a cogent minority voice emerging from a massive race scandal, wokeism has lost its merit.
2D3D
11d ago
I managed 6 full books last year, and about 200 'chapters' of works I've read in the past and saw fit to revisit, and maybe 1500+ pages of articles or journals or guides. I realized my lack of completing books cover to cover mirrors my lack of completing TV shows season to season or even video games: I'm old(ish).
Not that age makes me incapable of enjoying the new. More that age makes me have a larger corpus of works to compare new consumed media against, and if a new work fails to hook me I immediately tune out and go for a Greatest Hits run to tickle the nostalgia dopamine of reading that work the first time. New works failing to capture that for me largely stinks of just old age cantankerousness, and the threshold of excitement to breach is not worth the gnawing knowledge that i've read BETTER and this work just doesn't' cut it.
The sole exception is reading new books for my kids. Little shits that they are, they hold no interest for Journey To The West or Water Margin, but for them I can power through my irritation at the archaic prose and tired tropes. Maybe one day I will finally be able to read King Lear without falling asleep, just for their sake.
2D3D
12d ago
I think of Epstein as a variation of Godwins Law: once an argument invokes Epstein to shut down criticism of a practice it is clear that the practice in question has no defense at all. Especially since tying people to Epstein is so easy yet the details are so scarce. You'd think there'd be more dirt by associating with Palfrey, the DC Madam who trafficked children across state lines into Washington DC itself, but no one seems to give a shit. No Clinton, Trump or Windsor, no news.
2D3D
12d ago
If we want to apply a realpolitik lens to this framing, then go full sociopolitical grand theory of the world state. Such a grand theory can be all encompassing to the point of uselessness, but perhaps lets drill down specifically to the aspect directly at play: a pattern of repeated horrific criminality has been committed by the same communities over a long period of time and a wide geographic range. There are more and more instances of this happening, despite nearly a decade of awareness. Why?
The repeated calls for inquiries and fact finding is because all that has been done so far is inadequate to address the civilizationally destructive truth poisoning this global experiment of a unified borderless world we are unwillingly thrust into: people are in fact different , and some people have vastly different decision making heuristics due to inherently different values.
People doing bad things because they have bad information is technically a solvable problem, because they can be rehabilitated or informed enough to remap their payoff matrix to be in line with functioning society. Increase probability of being incarcerated for crime, crime is no longer a payoff. That is technically speaking a solvable social problem.
The problem here is that there is a group of people that keep coming up as a distinct category that explicitly demonstrates a totally different value matrix. The golden path of economic liberalism and maximal freedoms for women is not a paradise to be admired, but a bounty to be plundered. Western society in the 1990s and 2000s was high off winning the cold war, fat on wealth and weak in will, surrendering its children to foreign rapists on the twin altars of multiculturalism and contempt. Sexually libertine children were not viewed as free agents exercising their will in an era of peace, but easy targets for cultures that decidedly calculated the payoff for raping children was so high when the consequences were so insignificant.
These value matrices are not set in stone. But what we have seen is that whatever the western response has been to islamic terrorism and rape, it has been effectively surrender. The borders remain open, the streets remain uncivil, the rapists remain free. These foreigners took advantage of temporary weakness to raid a peaceful community that opened its gates and turned a blind eye to the ongoing pillaging.
The westerners still insist that the rights of the rapists must be protected, that the ECHR is a sacrosanct document, that imprisoning vile rapists is too costly, that denying the continued mass importation of the family of rapists and murderers on the grounds of human rights is impossible to stop because of some document written 70 years ago. The invaders have raided the peaceful village, raping freely and taking their spoils. In response the village has opened its hidden coffers to invite the invaders to change their ways, unbarred its doors to make the invaders feel welcome, castigate its own people for complaining about the predators of the invaders.
The decision making matrix of people are not static, they evolve in response to changing circumstances, and the matrix presented by the west thus far has been to increase its total surrender to invading islamists. In the face of this heuristic, is it not inevitable that the islamists will see fit to continue, if not intensify, what they have done with no expectation of consequence?
To depersonalize Musks own theoretical antipathy to islamic rapists and posit a grander theory of mind would come closer to the above analysis, that there is a civilizational rot occurring and that Musk is leveraging his massive influence to bring attention to and indeed influence a change in the decision matrix. A change not of the islamists, who Musk cares not about because tribal mirpuris are worthless even after multiple generations living in the west, but of the west that opens its gates. Musk may not be able to muster the militia and bar the gates of the village, but he can at least say that continuing to pretend the invaders have the same values is madness. If an inquiry reveals that the invaders fundamentally hold the values of the west in eternal contempt precisely because it is a foreign value irrespective of its theoretical merit and that the west is simply a prize to be plundered repeatedly with such little effort, then it definitively annihilates nearly 50 years of universalist values, and reveals an intransigent terrorist group within the midst of a population. The UK still hasn't addressed the traveler issue, so I don't imagine solving the Tower Hamlets and Birmingham islamist enclaves will be an easier task. But at least exiling them to their own territories and not pretending they're Just Like Us will be a step in the right direction.
2D3D
13d ago
Is it possible that Musk simply finds the quiet acceptance of Rotherham rape gangs abominable? I find it so strange that even here people posit some grander scheme at play whereby criticism of children being raped en masse by foreigners is viewed as part of a grand right wing scheme against political opponents. Yes, the left in its utter cowardice and contempt for white people has seen fit to allow thousands of children to be raped and murdered in the name of multiculturalism votes and thus the left should be annihilated, but the moral outrage of foreign criminals on welfare sexually torturing kiss is itself a point of enragement. People hate Swedes prowling for children in Bangkok, why can't here people simply hate Pakistanis for systematically raping white children for the sake of it.
It lifted its own geofencing and is pulling in restriction data from a FAA API to populate US specific geofences. DJI used to just utilize NOTAM universal warning zones as first point of contact, but various ATCs around the world kept putting in requests for temporary geofences for special events that DJI just ended up witb different APIs to submit. Not sure what the latest firmware is like, but I hear its made things massively easier for a country to issue geofencing restrictions without any users, even DJI, knowing why.
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