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このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
The difference gets to the meat of this whole discussion - Russia assassinating a Russian dissident on Western soil is less of an affront than Russia assassinating a Western-aligned militiaman from a third country (as with that Chechen-Georgian they got in Germany), which in turn is much less of an affront than assassinating a leader of a Western-aligned nation or NGO. Going from left to right on this scale is what one would call escalation. Maybe they would, but then they would be escalating; it seems like they haven't, and the most likely reason for that is that it would be an escalation that they did not want to go for.
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3mo ago
Even if the Ukrainian Defense minister was assassinated on say, German soil it is still unlikely that the US would send American soldiers to fight the Ukraine War, or that we’d bomb Moscow. So again, the situation isn’t really the same as Hezbollah/Iran.
I actually think that German boots on the ground in Ukraine would be a fairly likely response in that event (and American ones if the assassination happened in the US) - and, well, Iran hasn't sent physical soldiers to attack Israel yet, and we are seeing American and German hardware raining down on Russia every day. I'm sure Iran would have been happy to let its rocket volley be launched by Hezbollah or Hamas rather than sending it directly, too, if they had had the logistical possibilities to move the launchers there, as the Western alliance has with Ukraine.
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このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
If they have (and, well, what do we know if there is no success and no public record of claimed attempts?), they surely haven't tried to do so on the soil of a Western country?
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3mo ago
I don't understand how all of this reasoning (apart from the value judgements regarding Iran, the IRGC etc., which seem orthogonal to any determinations about the proper way to treat proxy wars) wouldn't apply to Ukraine and NATO. Do you see the same binary choice between "the backers should just attack (Russia/Israel) themselves" and "the backers must keep a sanitary cordon around the proxy that entails not inviting its representatives into own territory, and if they do it anyway they can't complain if the proxy's representatives get attacked on their soil" in that case? If not, what is different?
I could imagine someone as on board with the official US line as you would have the reflex to say that Ukraine/Russia is not a proxy war because Ukraine decided to fight out of its own volition, but I have not seen a case being made that Hezbollah does not have the will (nor have I seen the suggestion that in a proxy war the proxy must be unwilling). If you wanted to say that it's all different because Ukraine is a real country blessed by the US while Hezbollah is a terrorist militia and therefore doesn't get agency, then it seems like you would just be taking roundabout steps to Russell-conjugate "proxy war" so that the bad-sounding word does not apply when your side does it.
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3mo ago
Why does the way that the US designates it matter? Whether it's an escalation or not surely depends on the perception of those affected by the measure, as understood by those who took it - if I know that you will consider some step a greater infringement of your interests than anything I have done before and yet I take it, then I am escalating. Russia considering Zelenskiy and/or the state of Ukraine illegitimate would not have any bearing on how escalatory an assassination of him would be either - or are you implying that this is different because the US is the one that thinks Hezbollah is illegitimate?
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このMOLOCHだ！
3mo ago
Have they, or anyone, done it before on the soil of a country that is friendly to the leader and has sufficient state capacity of its own that there isn't some sort of "we're just doing policing for you that you would be doing yourself if your country functioned" narrative that lets everyone save some measure of face? Israel assassinated some Iranian scientists before, but that seemed like a lower-ranked target than the leader of an allied military (and anyway was shut down by US pressure about a decade ago). This seems akin to if Russia went from having that Chechen militiaman shot in Berlin to blowing up Zelenskiy (or at least Syrskiy?) during one of his visits to the West, which surely would be seen as an escalation - or Ukraine going from merely blowing up Russian milbloggers to setting a bomb in Russia for Kim Jong Un.
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3mo ago
I was hoping that I wouldn't need to dig up living examples of posters (because I think it just causes resentment and distrust - a bit of a sense of camaraderie is one of the things this place still has going for it), but how does e.g. this not fall under the category of wanting to make people angry? How does this wall of polemic and gaslighting word games not? Is it just because the people it would make angry are unlikely to be in the audience and stick their neck out? A rule that you can't make the people here angry but are free to do smug little victory dances where you dunk on groups that are not on the forum is also an obvious recipe for reinforcing any existing biases.
Even that's not enough on its own. But it wasn't on it's own, since BC had such a long history. What do you do when someone repeatedly announces that he doesn't give a shit about your community norms?
Go back to a time when community norms were actually applied in a way that got in a way of the victory-dancing for the dominant group, and you'll find plenty of declarations to the effect of not giving a shit about community norms too.
The ideological homogenization of the forum is not the sort of problem that can be solved without making representatives of the entrenched ideology angry. I want it to be solved, and don't think it can be done without either aggrieving them in any way that can be slipped past moderation (so its representatives feel less welcome and leave) or enforcing the rules on them evenly (so they behave in a way that is more likely to enable retention of other groups). Either way is bound to make them angry. Since we've established that I also want to make people angry, may I inquire about the resulting delta in my social credit score?
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3mo ago
Where did I indicate that I accept the Floyd riots as being "against police brutality"? I don't, and I accept maybe a small sliver of the protesters as protesting against it (many more of the peaceful ones being protesters for lower policing standards against black people, drug users, or general).
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3mo ago
Mid-quality, perhaps. I think it gets iffy when they make posts that would be more than, say, 30% likely to get a modhat warning if they came from the wrong political alignment and were not made by a mod, because I don't think mods do (or can really be expected to do) issue modhat warnings to fellow mod.
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3mo ago
Could we ban a popular user for once instead? Every non-janitorial moderator action I see these days just reinforces the same tiresome monoculture that makes people rightly talk about themotte as a basically ideologically monolithic/predictable entity. At this point we have wound up with one single community-scale trapped prior; "moderation follows community sentiment" by explicit statement and this sort of "if it makes too many people angry, it causes us work" reasoning, and community sentiment follows moderation by gradually evaporating people who don't like the prevailing view cluster, attracting people who like it and occasionally banning those who bump into the Overton window's frame too hard.
A two-week ban for every angry response would have been a better choice for the sake of the forum's long-term ability to fulfil its original purpose.
Arguably the disingenuity happened a step further up already. How is it fair to describe the protests as being "against the knifing of schoolgirls"? Were the protesters asking someone to please knife fewer schoolgirls?
Conflating actions against X with actions against some Y which the actor holds to be correlated with X is one of the most basic dirty political tricks. This is what gets you "How can you be against (surveillance law)? Are you against fighting child pornographers?", or the same with police abolition and killing non-violent black druggies.
I concur that this is a pretty bad look from a moderator, and would really like the mods to look past the +44 upvotes and fawning u-go-girl responses and consider that this sort of thing is enabling/deepening bad tendencies in the community.
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3mo ago
Right, but I think the reluctance of Westerners (at least those past their rumspringa stage) also hints at a general sense that Chinese people are so alien that what works for them will not work for Westerners. China could of course campaign to dispel this sense, but this might be a two-edged sword. If Chinese and Westerners are sufficiently similar that PRC governance working for the Chinese is evidence that PRC governance would work for Westerners, then the converse inference that Western governance would work for the Chinese is not far away, and conventional wisdom holds that they are very concerned about that notion catching on.
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3mo ago
This entire discussion seems to be missing the point. So what if it did harm LoTT, was done in anger, or even amounted to a culture war low blow in the vein of organising a cancellation? We have plenty of unapologetic culture warriors on this forum, and the whole point is supposed to be that the rules create a neutral ground where they can interact with each other in a civil fashion. As I see it, instead the pro-LoTT crowd here has managed to organise and execute a harassment campaign on this site against Trace as revenge for having been a particularly effective culture warrior for the other side, while the moderators looked away. This is a failure of moderation.
YouTube is full of videos of Americans who moved to some Russian village with their families to "escape wokeness", but the only living-in-China videos I see are from young high-openness singles. I imagine that to be a dissident on behalf of some folk, you must want to or at least be okay with taking on its folkways, and in terms of those Russia is seen as much closer and more compatible with Western sensibilities than China.
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3mo ago
Then why aren't parents switching to voting Republican in droves? As far as I can tell from a quick search, the correlation is very small (and probably easily explained by other factors like occupation, sexual orientation etc.). The degree to which the premise is believed puts an upper bound on how compelling this argument can be, and the Red Tribe has not been doing a good job of raising belief in the premise. (In fact they have probably been doing the opposite: exaggeration and dramaturgy feel good to the choir but only raise the burden of proof to the unconverted when they don't come from the top of the status hierarchy)
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3mo ago
Are you implying that consent will be manufactured by "extending the plebs courtesy"?
US was significantly less divided in 2001 than now.
By what metric? US dividedness could well be argued to have the Shepard tone nature. Also, it might be worth noting that we are talking about the UK here.
To begin with, if anything the level of division regarding US adversaries seems to be lower now. Back during the cold war, it's widely known that Western societies were suffused with Soviet sympathisers. Nowadays, even on a contrarian forum like this one, the vast majority of people is enthusiastically aligned with the establishment position on Russia and China to the point that disagreeing will get you a wall of downvotes and actual social censure.
Vietnam
Wasn't the dissent there carried by a faction of elites, rather than plebs? They've learned their lesson; Harvard kids will probably not get drafted again.
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3mo ago
For what it's worth, I don't think there should be moderator action against him. The ideal of policing on tone and not content we had once upon a time served us well, and there is nothing wrong with the tone here; most people also seem to believe that he is speaking from the heart.
I can't help but notice that the people shouting for a ban the loudest are those that I would predict are offended by the content the most, and many of them have proven amply that they have zero reservations about proudly proclaiming their own controversial viewpoints in a way that is bound to cause aneurysms in those who disagree (and often with much less attention to tone). Especially as we never see any moderator action for the umpteenth "women pretend that abortion is an important right" or "yes, one Israeli is worth more than a hundred Palestinians" posts, doing anything here (and even merely engaging in the sort of modhat stop-and-search that this post is) sends the wrong signal.
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3mo ago
I'm trying to figure out on what proportions this actually describes your beliefs, amounts to an instance of trying a different belief on for size, and is an exercise in tricking the resident contrarians into vigorously defending the polar opposite viewpoint. Either way, the statement about fewer riots at least seems baseless - I actually happened to be in London in 2010?11? when the minorities were rioting, and it still looked more serious than the pictures we are seeing now.
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3mo ago
Wasn't the "weird" thing pretty clearly an organized campaign, with the first shot being that commercial with creepy actors strawmanning about reproductive politics? I figure they found an attack vector on Vance that played well with focus groups and are now committing all resources on it.
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3mo ago
I'm with you as far as lamenting LW drifting from its original purpose, however you want to describe the direction, but what does that have to do with anything? If you want LW fundamentalism, you obviously lost the moment you waded into a CW forum - "politics is the mind-killer" and all that. For that reason alone, neither cancel culture nor opposition to it can be a core LW cause. If you are looking to describe a hypothetical shared ethos of the "annus mirabilis SSC reader diaspora", rather than the LW community, then sure, being against cancel culture is part of it - but making a fool out of LoTT was not cancel culture by any reasonable definition. The post you linked under
observed last month
also does not seem to contain any argument for Trace either being in the "only bad targets" or in the "just kidding" class, or being in favour of cancel culture. Rather, it just appears to be a dunk that you are particularly fond of. Do you expect me to update in favour of anti-Trace after reading it, so I reason "Trace bad, cancel culture bad, therefore Trace likes cancel culture"?
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3mo ago
Right, assuming there were not in fact hidden additional elements, this trade does of course look flat out disadvantageous to Germany. I'm just trying to argue that the Germans did get something out of it (standing by conspicuously doing nothing as the US bails all of its citizens in trouble in the Eastern Bloc out might also be a bad look, and German media sure seemed to be fixated on the guy for several days/weeks before the trade while the hitman's release is already being buried). Ultimately, such is the life of the vassal; sometimes you have to humiliate yourself to help your master save face.
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3mo ago
Besides the overall inappropriateness of inserting this sort of drive-by attack against a member of this community in a completely unrelated context, the connection you are trying to make to make your attack work is way too contorted. What does "only bad targets" (not having universal principles) have to do with "just trolling" (not acknowledging the impact of your actions), and what does either have to do with the action of Trace's you presumably are still seething about (Sokalling LoTT)? As far as I can tell he neither contended that there are bad targets for being made ridiculous by being baited into posting fakes, nor did he claim that doing so would be inconsequential fun. If anything, his detractors are the ones who were shouting bad target after cheering on any attempt to bait and make ridiculous their opposition before.
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3mo ago
That would be surprising to me if true - I'd expect as-Saudiyyah (السعوديّة) just because gendered languages don't usually forget the grammatical gender of an omitted or implied word (and Arabia is feminine). However, I can't claim to be familiar with real casual usage since my only qualifications are a couple of college classes and general language nerdery.
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3mo ago
Are you positing a counterfactual timeline in which journalists conclude that whatever the alternative to Harris is acceptable for them, and have enough class consciousness and coordination to punish the establishment by tanking her because they wouldn't protect one of their own?
Some of them seemed to be quite open to the idea (though they were probably also hoping that the troops would act as a shield and the Russians, themselves not wanting a shooting match with NATO members, would essentially avoid striking anywhere near them). My sense from German media is also that there is a general drive to warm up the populace to the idea; either way, everyone involved probably understands that Russia in its present state would in fact be too risk-averse to seriously retaliate outside of the Ukrainian theatre or even target the troops unless they show up at the front.
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