naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I see. Well, thanks for pointing it out--that does give me more context.
No one has actually reported that comment, and probably we wouldn't do anything about it if they did, not least because that user would have several AAQCs every month if they hadn't opted out, and essentially never gets hit with negative reports. I'm not thrilled at reading someone self-describe as having been "radicalized" by footage of these attacks, but given that we are talking about a terror strike reasonably compared to 9/11 (worse, on a per capita basis, to say nothing of the addition of infanticide, hostage-taking, and rapes) I'd be hard pressed to explain why "radicalization" is not a reasonable response. I also note that "summary execution" means without formal trial, which is worrisome but not quite the same thing as "without evidence," and "10,000-30,000 fighting age men" is not quite the same as "every Gazan," either.
In cases of war and terror, the line between "boo outgroup" and "no really, I'm arguing that this is a relatively specific group of people who have clearly caused extreme harm and are not going to stop causing extreme harm until someone puts a forcible stop to it" is maddeningly fuzzy. All the more reason to approach such discussions with maximum charity, I guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
The US is 200% on Israel's side
And yet powerful American politicians are clearly less than 100% on Israel's side.
but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth
Consensus-building much?
I did not suggest, sneakily or directly, that "we all know" this to be true, and I did not treat it as a given truth. I argued that it is true, complete with a couple of links to background context and further information, and then I suggested in essence that if people fail to understand this point, the mistakes of the past will be repeated in the future. That is not consensus-building, that is just making an argument.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
the repeated calls on this board for treating every Gazan as a Hamas terrorist up to the point of advocating for summary execution without evidence or even requirement of specific wrongdoing
Well, there are, uh, a lot of posts happening on this topic so I apologize if this sort of thing is genuinely slipping through. I don't see every comment that gets reported, and there are other moderators, but I, at least, have yet to see a single comment in the queue that meets this description, even though I've seen several comments in the queue claiming that this sentiment is being expressed here, somewhere.
(I don't doubt that some comments might be reasonably interpreted this way, but presentation matters. So long as no one explicitly says "all Gazans should be assumed terrorists and shot on sight," less direct claims like "I just don't see how Israel has clear options when it comes to clearly distinguishing between guilty Hamas and innocent Gazans, here" should be interpreted more charitably.)
(I also tend to object to people making sweeping characterizations of "this board" while themselves disclaiming such characterizations; you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. The way you've done it here is relatively mild, but still, I don't think it is beneficial for you, or anyone, to approach conversations here as me-against-the-Motte's-hivemind.)
I don't necessarily mind thought experiments that encourage people to put themselves in someone else's shoes, either, but still it would probably be best to not illustrate those thoughts in terms of the direct personal application of an unflattering stereotype of a user's professed identity.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village?
Because that would be unnecessarily antagonistic, which is against the rules.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
They would take the lives of 1000 innocents in the most torturous way possible to save a single one of theirs.
Most of your comment falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think, but this line in particular seems like standard-issue hyperbolic propaganda. Like, show me one instance where this looks literally true, a single instance of Israel selecting "the most torturous way possible" to kill "1000 innocents" for any reason at all, much less to "save a single one of theirs."
This is (apparently!) a hotly contested issue, so I was feeling mildly reluctant to moderate you in spite of the overall badness of the comment, but that sentence in particular just struck me as entirely too much heat, directed toward your outgroup, for what looks like no light at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
...how come the Palestinian liberation movement...
What does that matter to the Egyptians, Iranians, etc. who just need a convenient tool? What the Palestinians themselves think of all this is only marginally relevant, so long as they remain a functional tool. Israel's role in shaping that tool is also irrelevant; iron sharpens iron, and Hamas has shaped Israel as surely as Israel has shaped Hamas. But it is not Israel who ships arms into Palestine, not Israel who trains Hamas terrorists.
I am not "pro-Israeli" in any sense; as an American I am in fact deeply skeptical of Israel as a frankly unreliable ally. But this does not change the truth of the matter, which is that if Palestinians were not a convenient tool of anti-Israel Islamists (and, I suppose, the occasional secular anti-Semite) then the Palestinians would have no allies at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
A tangent, but the "Native American population" by self-identification has never been higher.
It is a tangent, but Palestinians and Native Americans have a lot in common, geopolitically. For example, in my experience there tends to be a lot of talk about the "ongoing genocide" against both groups, which are growing and have never been larger. That's a remarkable accomplishment in the face of "ongoing genocide!" To say nothing of their selective endorsement of ethnonationalism and feudal notion of binds between blood and land, but only for non-whites...
I also expect more people to repudiate their majority European DNA in an effort to claim these privileges for themselves.
This process is well underway. The so-called "civil rights movement" transformed racialism from a legal and social liability to a legal and social advantage. For those who lack a plausible race claim, novel takes on sex and sexuality offer an alternative. And yet in most places I've seen this pointed out, someone inevitably trots out the strawman: "you think someone would just choose to belong to an oppressed minority? Hah!"
Except that's exactly what the numbers seem to be telling us. People follow the incentives, and flee the costs. We've incentivized fracture and factionalism, so fracture and factionalism is what we are getting.
They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy.
About 20% of Israel's citizens are Palestinian. The people dying in Hamas-controlled "Palestine" are primarily those who chose (or whose families chose) to fight a never-ending war against the presence of Jews in Israel. If Israel were to kill every single Palestinian in Gaza and the West bank, there would still be Palestinians, and there would still be a great many Arab states, with hundreds of millions of people living in them. If Hamas were to kill every Jew in Israel (about 7 million), this would bring an end to the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish nation in the world, and very nearly cut in half the total number of Jews alive in the world today. By contrast, there are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 6 million in other Arab countries, and 700,000 in other countries.
Not that either group is really a plausibly endangered minority; there are fewer Danes (5 million), and only very slightly more Native Americans (~10 million). But the Jews, in short, are far closer to being "wiped from the Earth by [their] enemy" than Palestinians, much less Arabs (which Palestinians, ultimately, are--along with 450 million others).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
There is an Israel-Gaza Megathread now.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
We have also created an Israel-Gaza Megathread for your convenience.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
was it the same small group of people nominating all three posts because they were complementary
Well, all three posts arose in the same conversation, but multiple users nominated those posts. There was partial nomination overlap on two of the posts, but nominations on the third were not from any of the same users who nominated the other two.
have we rooted out a silent consensus among Mottizens?
In spite of what Hollywood, social media, and even conventional wisdom sometimes suggests, I do think it is the case that faithful sexual monogamy (or, at worst, serial polygamy) remains the standard expectation among American adults, and probably human adults generally. It is perhaps a little surprising, given the rationalsphere's reputation for acceptance (arguably, embrace) of polyamory, but I would be reluctant to agree that it is "heterodox" to expect fidelity within the bonds of marriage. Heterodox, maybe, to Notice and Condemn it in the public sphere, but still; sometimes I wonder if we need a way of clearly distinguishing when we're talking about the human experience (as experienced by actual humans) versus the Human ExperienceTM (as theatrically portrayed in legacy media, social media, etc.).
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
So how do you sort through AAQC nominations?
All nominated posts go into a single pile. Dozens of posts, [sometimes] well over a hundred, are nominated every week. The soft goal for each week is to recognize about ten quality posts; sometimes less, sometimes more, but much more would get quite unwieldy. Some nominations are obviously people using the AAQC report to mean "I really agree with this user," but I think a solid majority (so far!) are posts that could plausibly be included in the roundup.
Unfortunately that means the primary goal of the moderator sorting through the pile is to look for reasons to exclude nominees. Posts that receive noticeably more nominations than other posts get more benefit of the doubt. Posts that themselves generated other Quality Contributions get more benefit of the doubt. Beyond that, it's a curation process. Did I learn something from this post? Are others likely to learn something from it? Does it represent a view I don't encounter often? Does it exhibit some measure of expertise? Is it surprising or novel or beautifully-written? Does it display a high degree of self-awareness, effort, and/or epistemic humility? Does it contribute to the health of the community? Is it likely to generate further interesting discussion? On rare occasion I will disqualify a post because the user who wrote it has other, better posts already included in that week's roundup--but sometimes a post seems too good to not include, even if it means that user gets three or four nods in one roundup.
But, sadly, given that it is a winnowing process, probably the single most important question is just--how does this compare with all the other posts I'm reading through right now?
Now, posts that do break other rules are generally discarded first.... Some AAQCs do receive negative reports also, and this is shown in the AAQC queue. A negative report does not automatically disqualify an AAQC nomination, but if the post is in fact unnecessarily antagonistic, heated, etc. then it's usually easy for me to throw out.... If I have included something in this roundup that had negative reports, I either concluded that those negative reports were being used as a super-downvote button, or I found that the post's positives greatly outweighed the negatives.
To the direct question--
Is it number of nominations?
--the answer is a qualified "yes." A post with many nominations definitely gets a harder look, but I read every single post, and there are almost always posts with just one nomination that get included in roundups that exclude posts with two or three nominations. I have excluded posts with as many as five or six nominations--usually, hotly antagonistic posts that were clearly drawing super-upvotes (for some reason people seem to especially enjoy AAQC-reporting posts that flame the moderators). So absolutely no one is included in this list based on number of nominations alone, but as always community feedback plays a central role in how things get done around here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I haven't kept track of that (I basically never look at votes, just reports) but I do think we have had some low-negatives AAQCs. Even a Score: 0 is unusual, though. You got several nominations (nearly everyone in this roundup did), though. So you'd probably be near the top of "sort by controversial," if we had that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
That was a great post! And it did get nominated as an AAQC, but unfortunately a lot of good posts don't make it to the roundup purely on the basis of "trying to keep the report to a reasonable length." We get around 200 comments nominated each month and honestly most of them could plausibly be AAQCs, depending on the month!
That said, it still would not have been your first, at least not on this site--you were in the November 2022 roundup for this comment.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.
(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])
Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Hard to say. Maybe?
The decision to drop an official warning is not made on the basis of any hard-and-fast criteria. We let, honestly, a lot slide. There's only so much time in the day, and depending on what else is in the mod queue, the applicable standards may flex. Our approach is, in other words, inescapably conditional, adaptive, and imperfect.
Ultimately, if you're trying to get away with just enough badness in a post that you won't get called on it... odds are pretty good you won't get called on it. Until, of course, you do. Like driving over the speed limit, most of the time you'll get away with it, but if you do it a lot, you raise the odds of facing consequences for that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Expecting historical literacy from a college-educated progressive is like expecting fluent latin from a duck.
Do I even need to tell you why this warrants a warning?
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.
Right, that's why I said:
Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky . . . To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.
For that matter, self-insurance sometimes goes very badly even for whole corporations--though, as with insurance companies, the larger they get the less this is likely to be a problem. Small and mid-size firms do self-insure sometimes, and sometimes this goes badly for them. Two or three million-dollar medical events in a single year would be terribly bad luck for a company of, say, 500 employees, but it's well within the realm of the possible. This is why a company that self-insures should typically also have some kind of stop-loss policy backing up its self-insurance pool (and indeed many insurance companies themselves have stop-loss coverage). This is a fascinating area of the law that unfortunately falls outside my expertise, but I find it fascinating even so. Insurance and, essentially, meta-insurance form the basis of all sorts of interesting economic gambits. But some of the greatest profits of all have been won by persuading whole nations that participation in such gambits is wise, or even obligatory.
Which is to say: while I acknowledge that the equilibrium I live in requires that I bet, pragmatically, against the actuaries who think they'll take more of my money than they'll have to give back, I remain suspicious that insurance is in fact a deeply parasitic economic entity, of a kind that should probably be much more regulated than it is (even though I am, in almost all cases, reflexively anti-regulation).
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
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