JTarrou
1yr ago
Lot of projection going on here.
Perhaps you'd like to hear it from the Hamas spokesman in an official interview with the NYT?
I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times
From a member of their Politburo (an apt name, I might add)
“Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
JTarrou
1yr ago
I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Wait, you think that Israel should be putting troops in Afghanistan/Iraq? Even Bush wasn't that dumb.
JTarrou
1yr ago
You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.
Never heard of her.
JTarrou
1yr ago
you never hear about
Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!
JTarrou
1yr ago
We know that the academic-government-NGO complex is cooking the scientific books in service of whatever the short-term political goal is for their class. COVID proved this beyond a shadow of any doubt, and in short enough timespans for a lot of people to notice. This may not matter much for most of the hard science that is not politically salient, but it matters a lot for "science" that is directly impacting public policy. Economics as a profession has always had this weakness.
You seem pretty big mad that a few of us are not gonna roll over for Euler anymore. Institutional trust is a thing, and it is a thing that has been entirely destroyed. If your "experts" and their fan club want to be taken seriously, they need to clean house. People who abuse positions of trust and authority to promote false science to the public need to be publicly punished, those who enabled and repeated the lies need to be publicly punished, and the entire superstructure needs to be completely re-oriented to avoid such obvious bullshit in the future.
If you start now, you might get back to the position of trust in fifty years or so. Until then, your data is meaningless, your appeals to authority hollow. It could be correct in any specific instance, to be clear. But it can't be trusted, because it's being produced by partisan hacks who will lie their heads off for any or no reason at all. None of us have the time to investigate every paper to see if it's hogwash or not.
So you can stop appealing to that particular naked monarch. If you want to be able to appeal to "science", you best start with making the science trustworthy.
I'll wait.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yeah, it sucks when your sense-making institutions don't have any more credibility than Reddit randos. An appeal to authority would go down really well about now.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Over the long run. They can hide the ball until someone they don't like can take the blame for it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Perhaps. That's one option.
Another is that economics is staffed by the same sort of experts who run our health care systems, legal systems and educational systems. They went to the same schools, drank the same koolaid, attend the same parties and conferences, belong to the same socioeconomic strata. Maybe Gell-Mann Amnesia is creeping up on you.
Anecdote is small data, but it's the only data I can be sure isn't horseshit.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
JTarrou
1yr ago
You're still wrapped around the axle about the word "nation", which I did not use. We've established that there are no universal definitions for what is or is not a "nation", so that's probably not the way to go if we want to be able to judge the violent actions of various groups. The question remains, what does?
JTarrou
1yr ago
Forget "nationalism" for a moment, then. What is the correct level of organization for group conflict, or is there none?
JTarrou
1yr ago
1: Fair enough, but nations that have achieved states are a selection pressure away from the nations that tried.
2: I'm not denigrating "feels", just using a colloquialism. The level of feeling that produces group violence is an important milestone, but there are perverse incentives to recognizing it as the dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate violence.
3: Do see Gandhi, please. Note the massive ethnic cleansing and the several wars fought with the other side of that partition. You make my point quite precisely, nothing requires that the military organization be used against the previous ruler specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
4: I disagree somewhat on your definition of nationalism, because I think the causality can run both ways. Nations may or may not become states, and states may or may not become nations.
Which brings us to the crux of the question of mine you quote. I take it your answer is the state? If so, with some exceptions I agree with you.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The most important point is that they must see themselves as a distinct nation.
So, like economics and politics, the international order is mostly just feels? But that brings us right back around to my practical point, which is the only way we know how strongly people feel about being a nation is usually when they start killing people over it. So, being a large enough group that feels strongly enough about their "nationhood" to begin organizing militarily is a functional definition of a "nation". If this nascent group can maintain that organization in the long term, they will most likely achieve some territory, become a state and we're back at "might makes right".
JTarrou
1yr ago
A nation is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural or historical criteria.
This seems entirely too broad. Is a street gang a nation? A knitting circle? A hundred remaining members of a defunct native tribe? A thousand? In the context of our discussions this week, there's tens of millions, maybe a hundred million descendants that can look back to the Confederacy and the South more generally as a shared cultural and historic criteria. Are they a nation?
Tabling that for the moment, and assuming we have a solid definition for nationhood on this basis: Do nations have the collective right to own land, control that territory and engage in group violence to acquire/protect it? Is the "nation", however defined, the proper unit and scale of violent action? Is it the state? Individual?
The question as I see it is which level of human organization is recognized as the proper scale for violent conflict.
JTarrou
1yr ago
First, you seem to be talking about who is going to be able to create their own state at some point, rather than what merits deeming a particular group to be a nation.
Yeah, kind of. Having found the intellectual problem unsolvable, I have napkin-mathed the practicalities.
Perhaps definitions are in order? What do you mean by "nation" as distinct from "state"?
JTarrou
1yr ago
There's a strong practical case for military force.
It might be a bit circular in reasoning, but in practice it's the only thing that has ever bounded which groups get their own polity and which don't. Be nice until you can coordinate a sufficiently targeted and violent meanness.
I would say, in the absence of any overarching moral principle here, that any group that can maintain a military campaign against the military force of another group for some extended period of time (think generations, not years) is probably going to be a nation at some point. Groups too small or fractious to form, fuck and fund a military don't get on the board, and groups too weak or psychotic to fight other militaries haven't cleared the hump. To be violent and weak is simply to dig one's own grave.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?
Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I don't think any of those are likely to get you to the point of the test, regardless of feasibility.
My (peacetime) military officer father told me that the infantry liked people that came from poor backgrounds because they were more aware of their surroundings and accustomed to discomfort and privation - and that middle class guys were too "soft" to make good infantrymen, at least initially.
The line I heard from more senior NCOs was about age rather than SES, but it was that you could teach an older man to be a soldier, but you'd never teach him to like it. Could work for SES to a degree.
Personally, I doubt that the military has a "type" for infantry, they just take whoever signs up. It's selection effects from the groups that sign up, guys who are willing to undergo the privation to gain the status. If the girls back home don't think your service makes you more attractive than something else you might have reasonably done, not many guys are signing up for that. Within a very narrow stretch of society, having been the "real deal" is a major status boost.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Congress hasn't done anything in decades, there's no reason any of us should care about this sideshow.
JTarrou
1yr ago
If there were a reliable test for aggression in combat, the country that had it would be unstoppable militarily. The fact that no one on earth administers such a test implies that it is difficult if not impossible with current science. They all rely on a mix of private violence, training and hazing to try to weed out the squeamish, with imperfect results.
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
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