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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2827 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the best way to learn about visible stars and constellations so that I can tell my little kid about them? Ideally I'd like to do the learning together with her, and ideally with the actual sky to look at, but in the end whatever works is good enough. Any recommendations?

For quick object identification while looking at the night sky, I like Google Sky Map. Point your phone at the sky, and the screen will show labels for everything you see. When it came out, it was one of those magic moments of modern technology for me. It uses GPS, the phone accelerometers and the clock to know exactly what you point at, and the UI is pretty.

If you get her hooked, there's no way past Stellarium for proper nerding out during the post briefing. You can put your point of view anywhere, run the time forward and backwards, have planets/starts leave traces as they move, ect.

Do any of our resident doctors know anything about clostridial diseases? Tetanus, botulism, pulpy-kidney, black liver, etc.

You can vaccinate livestock for all of them, but afaik the only one available for humans is tetanus. Considering how untreatable a lot of them are ("supportive care and possibly surgery to cut out destroyed tissue"), I'm surprised there's not more focus on it.

And yeah, I've been sitting here staring at an animal going "is she more twitchy than usual? Is it normal to stick her head bolt-out like that?"

There's only about 200 botulism cases in the US every year, so I suspect that there's just no real benefit to vaccinating. You're more likely to die by falling out of bed than to catch botulism.

Maybe they could target the lucrative risky-home-canned goods enjoyer market, though.

Tetanus or botulism are the ones humans are at serious risk of getting. There's a vaccine for the former, and for the latter there isn't one I'm aware of,* mostly supportive care till the shitting stops alongside antitoxins. Unless you're an infant or an IV drug user, it's not the bacteria growing in your gut that's causing issues, it's the fact that you swallowed a significant number alongside their toxin.

The rest? Never heard of them, and I've heard of a lot of weird diseases that can be described as "we found 3 people over 10 years in a village in the middle of bumfuck nowhere". I would presume the average person, or even a farmer, isn't much at risk.

*I googled it, and there are a few out there, but none that are FDA approved.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't realize botulism care had gotten so much better, and grew up terrified of tetanus because one of my teachers got it.

It just struck me as odd that we have cheap(ish) 8-in-1 clostridial vaccines for livestock but never bothered with one for people. I guess it's also rarer for people to catch than I thought, with only a few cases in the US.

Is there an ELI5 reason why Russia wasn’t fully brought into the fold of NATO/EU/“the Western world” after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I’m pretty ignorant of the full history here, but I would think that given the politicians there were willing to peacefully dissolve the USSR that they wanted to fully integrate with the US/Europe. I would also think that the US/Europe would be eager to integrate Russia given that they’ve done so for most of the former eastern bloc countries, but obviously it hasn’t turned out that way.

You need to start with the NATO-Russia Founding Act signed in 1997 that outlined how Russia and NATO were supposed to cooperate and live in peace and harmony. (https://www.nato.int/cps/su/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm)

But the good feelings were short lived as the expansion of NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries and Operation Allied Force in 1999 were seen by Moscow as a betrayal of the agreement. Things got a bit better after 9/11 when there was a common enemy, but that again was quickly undone by Moscow’s view that NATO was sponsoring Color Revolutions in its periphery.

There was certainly windows of opportunity for closer cooperation, but there was a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding that stopped it from becoming a meaningful partnership.

STRATFOR’s George Friedman has said that America’s chief goal for Europe was to prevent an alliance of German intelligence / manufacturing and Russian raw materials / manpower, as this would pose a threat to American global hegemony. Source

That’s a pretty questionable translation. Might be worth putting it into a more modern tool.

Also, the author predicted a shooting war with Japan and Russian and Chinese collapse by the 2020s. I think he might be one of those alt-history guys.

Im pretty sure it originally was english? Besides, this seems more like a current iteration of heartland theory then an invention of his.

I see from the footnote that it’s a transcription of a YouTube video. I don’t know what “sott.net” does, but I can make an educated guess if they’re prognosticating “Zio Anglo American plans for world domination.”

Most historical fantasy isn’t particularly original. That doesn’t make it a credible forecast!

“sott.net”

Didnt even see that one lmao. Btw, re our modmail conversation, Ive tried to respond to you, and again, and then made a new thread. Do you see any of that? Zorba said last time that modmail is bugged.

Yeah, and I tried to respond. I don’t think it sends notifications correctly.

On YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=21Gouq6hp-0

A lot of people thought that there would be a conflict with Japan at this time. Hilariously, when I went to find a source for my recollection of “1980s fear of Japan”, the first was themotte back on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dclpo3/understanding_1980s_american_worries_about_japan/

Another: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1dwju3n/was_japan_seen_as_a_economic_rival_to_the_usa_in/

STRATFOR has been called a “shadow CIA”: https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB1002927557434087960 , https://www.reuters.com/article/business/wikileaks-targets-global-risk-company-stratfor-idUSL5E8DR01/

Like mall ninjas, but for the deep state.

Coca Cola, DOW Chemical, Goldman, Nestlé, Shell are clients to STRATFOR. Yale relies on a UPenn report to advise students to aim for a job there. So they appear to be decent mall ninjas. Although, I don’t think the CIA would pass on the opportunity to make money and advise American companies at a “non-affiliated”, “totally independent” think tank. So they might just be ninja ninjas, dressed up as mall ninjas, because who would ever think the mall ninja was the real ninja all along?

Russia was first too ramshackle and corrupt to integrate and then too authoritarian to integrate.

I guess there would have been a window specifically around 2004-2006, but that's a pretty small window.

That makes sense but what went differently in the late 90s/early 2000s in Russia compared to other post-soviet countries that did integrate around that time (Poland, Hungary, Romania etc.)? All started out as ramshackle and corrupt but around that time went in a different direction. Was the resistance to integrate more from the Russian elite/Putin not wanting to? Or was the resistance more on the western side?

Hundreds of years of history. Until the October revolution, Russia was for ruled for hundreds of years by a Tsar with absolute authority that was considered to rule by a divine feat. Stalin returned the country to de facto absolute rule after a brief interruption and that only ended with his death in 1953. 40 years of communism and a decade of chaos followed until Putin restored normalcy by assuming absolute rule.

Poland, Hungary and Romania didn’t have a similar centuries long tradition of absolute rule and had a history that wasn’t all that different from Central European countries until WW2 and thus had both a similar tradition and compatibility with western style society. Notably they all had a strong internal desire to join the west as soon as that became an option.

You could say both Russia and Poland / Hungary / Romania reverted to their previous trajectories after the fall of communism. It’s just that those trajectories were completely different.

Can we get the mods to please ban the troll accounts posting inflamatory content in the CWT as top level posts and deleting them after a few responses?. There are already two instances of new accounts doing it so far, and I think it would be in our best interest if the practice is heavily discouraged.

I’m only seeing one mass-deleter; I’ve already issued a warning.

To be clear, the content was acceptable, if repetitive. It’s deletion that suggests bad faith.

sorry about that, it was two top level posts from upsidedownmotter, the second one I tought was from another user. Thanks again for your (and the rest of the mod team, even if I sometimes not see eye to eye with amadan) work.

It’s unfortunate because I don’t think most of the content they’re posting is even particularly inflammatory. Sure, it’s ideologically unpleasant for the majority of commenters here, but there’s nothing inherently inflammatory about anti-Trump content. I thought that many of the posters in questions brought up very salient and valuable points, and that a strongly and well-argued anti-Trump perspective is sorely lacking in this community. It’s a real pity that so many of the individuals who come here to post such content appear to either have ulterior motives, or to otherwise be unwilling to stick it out and defend their positions in a persistent manner.

I personally are fine with anti-conservatives content IF it is something true or reasonable. But more often than not the post is a thinly veiled screech and the poster is Darwin's clone #346322 with no intention of engaging in good faith. This last tactic of deleting top level comments is just anoying, I didn't even know what the 2 deleted posts were about, just something Trump related; which is the reason for my question (plea).

I don't think no one who does that is really looking to engage in good faith.

Has anyone here seen the recent German documentary on Leni Riefenstahl?

Link?

It's not that I'm asking for a link if that is what you're implying :). As far as I can tell, it has only rather recently been released in theaters outside Western Europe so I doubt it's available on streaming anywhere yet.

The title is simply 'Riefenstahl'.

I have a very weird question for you all. I think it's too much of a question to fit the wellness thread, but it doesn't fit in well anywhere. That said, this is the most intelligent forum I'm aware of.

Why would I waste into nothing and die if I followed my natural inclinations? How did darwinism possibly select for that?

I have to use my willpower and overwrite what my body, ego and drives want, in order to have a good life. Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower? Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?

There's times where there's a lot of wisdom in the body too, when it actually knows better, and when overwriting it with your willpower is stupid. But I have hurt my own progression a lot by focusing too much on these cases, as the opposite cases are even more common.

So, why? The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body. The only theory I have is that life requires resistance in order to grow strong (trees grown without wind do not become strong enough to support themselves, for instance). So, human beings fight themselves in order to create this resistance when it does not exist externally (which is why people who don't know real struggle seem to become insane and invent problems where none exist). When I had my depressive episode, I noticed that it felt like my body was trying to kill itself, but also to stay alive at the same time. And like how a fever hopes to kill the bad parts in your body before it kills the healthy parts, what profound suffering does it that it increases internal pressure hoping that the weakest part breaks first (leading to those turning-ones-life-around stories). But hedonism and other such tendencies do not seem to bring any advantages at all.

The tendency to mediocrity does not make sense to me. It does not seem beneficial. Humanity is capable of so much greatness, but 9 out of 10 end up quite pathetic, seemingly by design or by choice (rather than actual external limitations). Are we sick? Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.

Civilization can be construed as a hack programmed onto our collective evolutionary codebase — a codebase that has very finite space and is rewritable. The language used is complicated and easy to misunderstand.

Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower

Truthfully, I’m not 100% sure what willpower means. Is this when we convince ourselves that the immediate thing in front of us has salvific importance, or that the failure to pursue it opens the gates of hell, metaphorically? In that sense this it’s a kind of meta-social managing of ourselves, what Marcus Aurelius did in his Meditations and what Goggins does in his podcast. There’s a great Louie CK bit on Goggins that I adore: “it’s hard to be that guy — you can be that guy, and then you’re tense all the time, and then you die. It’s not like you become that guy and then you break into some infinite perfection. You just become that tense guy and then you die”. We can see why people don’t become that guy: (1) it’s unpleasant and humans are designed to pursue pleasure; (2) the pleasure which Goggins receives as compensation for his pain is a hyper-socialized glee at his superiority which is instantly diminished the more that people become like him. In other words, who is going to watch him carry the boat? Who is there to yell at? Jocko has one kid, by the way; the fat comedian has two.

Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?

Nature has its own consideration of success. We don’t have a say in it. All we have is our hacks, and there’s little telling whether our hacks are better than the hacks the previous coders came up with.

The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body

A wise man once wrote:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

You have competing instincts. There’s a bunch of social instincts, which in their optimal form will make you do the prosocial behaviors which you’re complaining that you don’t do (this includes exercise, diet). Then there’s more animal instincts: not waste energy, to eat more, and so on. Then there’s the omnipresent antisocial super-stimuli which are a virus to your social instincts. This is the algorithm that shows you a bunch of social information, some validating, some alarming, etc. Video games. Etc. If you feel important, high-ranked, competitive, engaged, desired online — or chasing these regardless — then why would you go to the gym to be Goggins? You would have to exercise for eight months to maybe get a few more likes on an Instagram post, and it’s questionable whether that will really lead to anything, and besides, maybe women online are more attractive? This is reality without Goggins-tinted goggles. What a lot of weight lifters will do to increase motivation is (1) look down on everyone else, (2) believe that exercise has cosmic import. The first is morally bad, the second is Frank Yang. In any case, you would need to continually convince yourself of this motivation with reminders, cues, variability, pilgrimages, dark nights of the soul…

To continue the quote above,

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

We can interpret this atheistically. The flesh, the sinful body, this is all of the lower anti-social instincts and viruses. The Christ, the Lord, this is the hyper-social, omni-social exemplar, the pious and continual thinking of whom acts as an antivirus which can free the codebase and allow us to implement our own hacks again (which may or may not be better than the original hacks).

I don't think you have to be in a constant unpleasant state to grow. Growth is unpleasant in some ways, but pleasant in others. It's especially pleasant when you cash in on it, for example becoming rich and then going on vacations a lot. But I do generally agree that "suffering is the root of growth", meaning that it requires great conflict between yourself and the world, or between yourself and other parts of yourself, to grow the most. The greatest growth also puts the individual at risk of destruction.

I'm not puzzles much by competing instincts. Even craving dopamine seems somewhat justifiable to me. It's the craving for what destroys you, or the craving for nothingless, which seems weird. The former might be a way the body is forcing itself into growing, but this mechanism seems more destructive than constructive. The latter seems like the "death drive" or nihilism, but it might be similar to going into a coma, with the body simply wanting rest.

I read in some of Nietzsche's work that people keep themselves ill, and that this triggers healing. Kind of how fasting and cold showers increases longevity. If this is true, then it makes sense that people keep themselves in a constant "just barely surviving" situation. It just seems irrational from the outside, since it's less pain overall just to do something about ones problems.

Your comment seems correct overall, but I don't think that pro and anti-social instincts explain everything. I'm autistic, so the social instincts in me just aren't that strong. I don't care too much what other people think, and I don't even do good things because I felt that I should. I just do what aligns with my sense of aesthetics.

I don't like the idea that the body is bad. I have to agree with Nietzsche that instincts should be tamed rather than suppressed, and that he who says human nature is bad or evil is merely projecting. Rather than "If you're a good person, you will be happy", Nietzsche's stance is "If you're happy, you will be a good person". Merely being in a good mood tends to make you treat other people better. So when other people fear my nature, they fear parts of themselves which they perceive in me. Anyway, this would be the "good/evil" perspective. My confusion is about the "good/bad" perspective. A good way to put it is "One seeks that which tends to be bad for them, and in nature, this works out, because it's gated by that which is good for them". For instance, you want to relax, but you must first work. You want to waste resources, but you must first accumulate them. You want peace, but you must first win it through war. In the modern world, wire-heading, self-hacking, artificial rewards, etc. become possible, and we sometimes manage to solve some of the problems which exist to make us healthy. "We did it, we overcame the need for hard physical labour!" excellent, but if exercises is no longer required, what will stop your body from breaking down? We're meant to try to win, not to win. We're meant to fight for peace, not to achieve it. But I guess this partly answers my original question, thanks for your thoughts!

You are not just your genes. You are your genes reacting with the (current) environment. Since this environment is miles different from the historical norm there's a massive potential for danger.

Are you weak to modern chemicals? Mold? The food you're eating? Lack of exercise? Lack of physical danger? Lack of responsibility? C-section? Parasites?

I am currently very depressed due to accidently (or rather, in overconfidence, assuming this would not occur, due to having felt oh so great for so long) taking too much glycine last night which screwed up my methylation (but I did sleep like a baby). I have a very similar reaction to choline in eggs. 1 egg is fine, 2-3 makes me melancholy, 4+ and it's a good thing I don't own a gun. I've spent many years unknowingly poisoning myself this way trying to eat healthy earlier in life.

Why do you desire to be a loser? Losers are usually not attacked. Perhaps it knows you cannot defend yourself? Is it because it senses that it's sick? Or because you've never tried before?

Or perhaps your genes just suck. But if I were you I would make sure that was the case (by changing your environment is as many ways as possible) before taking questions like the ones you asked seriously.

Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower?

Willpower was developed later on. It's also very expensive biochemically. Lots of things related to it can break. But ignoring that, high willpower is also quite dangerous. If you don't give in to your desires there's no guarantee of creating tiny ones. You might spend all your days working on (non-)esoteric math. Or sacrifice yourself to a cause. Or eat too many eggs because you are convinced it's good for you despite the horrible taste. Higher intelligence is fantastic. We should convince the fungi to adopt it.

Have you ever looked at the outer layer of the brain? Any interface, no matter how complex, can be exploited given sufficient computation. But that does not mean it's a good thing for anyone involved.

I like to think that I'm a bit of an arrogant person, but that could just be a defense mechanism against the fear that I'm not. And I suppose that our environment used to force us towards being healthy using things like necessity. I have a bit of royal aesthetics, and most people on this forum are intelligent, so it's likely that we all have family members who used to be rather important people. That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".

You make a good point that it isn't ideal to say "I don't fit into society, I must be sick", for it might be that society is what's sick (or at least poorly calibrated for man as a species). Just like there's environments in which a cynical person would fare better than a naive person, there's also socities in which other healthy traits are disadvantageous, while unhealthy ones are advantageous and thus appear good.

I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)

Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.

By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)

That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".

High intelligence means high resource (nutrient) usage by the brain. The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.

I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)

Figuring out what is (and how much, it's not binary) external and what is internal is very difficult. Hell a problem can have many solutions. Sometimes you find the root cause, sometimes you find something good enough (for now or forever). Just try as many and as varied ones as you can (as long as the risks are low).

Side note: I took a psychology class a long time ago. I asked a lot of why questions and for a lot of definitions of terms. I was not given a lot of answers. But I was given a lot of looks. From my observation it was probably the least rigorous subject I ever took (and that's saying something). But the teachers seemed to be very sure about themselves. And the students liked the fact that they were participating in the process of higher education so the wheel kept spinning. The harder it is to evaluate the truth, the more likely...

Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.

Life is pain on the extreme ends.

By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)

Yes. Yeah, it knows more than I do.

The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.

But the genius of the human race are the kind of people who have seemingly limitless energy (PDF warning). So I don't think it's harmful for the brain to expend a lot of energy (that said, it could be that less energy is needed to study topics that you care for. That it's not just your brain being more receptive to these areas, but that it processes them in a less costly way - for instance, without anxiety, without judgement, without keeping track of time and without evaluating the external environment. In this case, it makes sense that you'd want to isolate yourself before you start studying, because only in a basement or a similar room would it be okay to lose one self in the task and turn off any peripheral perception)

I took a psychology class a long time ago

I've never taken one! But I was a better psychologist than the "professionals" around me already at 10 years old, and I read a lot of Jung and such in my teenage years, and ran a lot of experiments on myself as well. I also had the bad luck of encountering most types of mentally ill people and having to deal with them (don't piss off borderline women, by the way). I also experienced symptoms from every cluster of mental illness myself, so I probably wouldn't lose out to even Buddha in experience and self-reflection. I have no respect for 90% of psychologists, even the PhDs seem absolutely clueless. I used to bully the mods on /r/psychology before I was perma'd from Reddit. (Their 'hot' section now has an article about how women value kindness the most in men, and that supportiveness and intelligence were more important than looks. Not a single thing in that sentence is true. Every post I can find on the sub at the moment is garbage, actually). JP is alright, as is thelastpsych.

Life is pain on the extreme ends.

Yeah, but extreme ends have their own opposites. The spikes of positive emotions I experienced when I was severely depressed are much larger than the ones I feel now. Overall, I feel better now that the depression is gone, but I'm actually making fewer meaningful memories now. The subjective parts of life have a tendency to balance themselves like this. It's only objectively that my life has improved a lot.

It knows more than I do

This is what made me listen to my brain, emotions, instincts, etc. but now I've realized that there's areas where it's unreliable and where I have to overwrite it with willpower. It's not so much that I "know better" than my brain, but I do have way different priorities. My brain is too stingy, it doesn't want to invest. It's also too cowardly. It's also hard to modify, it doesn't care for conformity, it's immune to hypnosis, it won't let me lucid dream, and it resists when I try to reprogram it.

Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.

But that is the long and short of it. Consider humans before the fairly modern era we have:

  1. Food is more scarce
  2. You have to work way harder for it (physically)

Because food was scarce, it was advantageous to survival to store up calories as fat. And because you had to exercise just to eat, everyone had to exercise. So there was no selection pressure pushing humans to develop in a direction where the body would maintain its health without exercise.

You have to work hard for food, so if you felt like staying home instead of going out to hunt or pick berries, wouldn't that be a bad thing? I think there's a point where this laziness can be said to be pathological.

I'm quite thin, but even in overweight people, laziness seems dominant. I think optimism and confidence "ought to" modulate laziness (since it would hint at abundance, or tell ones body that one is the pack leader). But personally, my appetite is low no matter my mood.

Sure, it would be a bad thing. But it's only going to be weeded out by natural selection to the extent that you're so lazy that you die off. Presumably people with genes that made them that lazy are long since dead, but everyone else got to work (because they had to) and so they passed on their traits to us.

No it's basically like predators resting a lot in between hunts, it conserves calories if you sit with your clan.

Why would I waste into nothing and die if I followed my natural inclinations? How did darwinism possibly select for that?

Doesn't immortality get in the way of adaptation to changing conditions?

Yes. Perhaps I should have phrased my question better, I just wanted to keep it short.

I know why death exists. But I don't know why people become hedonists by default. Why you have to fight against yourself in order to wake up early, in order to study, in order to exercise, in order not to get distracted. The body seems to want to do nothing at all, or to do the bare minimum when things have to be done. It seems that, if you follow what your body wants, you die. Isn't this terrible design? Anyone can become a great person, you just have to steer yourself manually, while your body yells at you to do otherwise. It's like our bodies want us to live in poverty, to not become anyone special, to be too weak to be helpful to others, and to die without realizing our dreams. How did Darwinism cause this? I don't understand.

I know why death exists. But I don't know why people become hedonists by default.

Oh, that's easy as well. In an evironment of scarcity, that's what keeps you alive and reproducing! We just got too good at eliminating scarcity.

Were they ever so scarse that people would be "lazy" like the modern human? It seems even more wasteful to let your own body decay and die than it does to take at least some care of it. It could also be that I still have some lingering depression, or that something else is wrong with me. After all, despite having food, I don't have much desire to eat.

It's good that I do have a strong willpower. I've just listened too much to my body since I expected it to be a little more trustworthy with my future than what is the case. This is after all the same body which can wake up 2 minutes before my alarm because it knows the time so well, and which can tell me insights about my problems in dreams just because I ask nicely.

I'm still a little puzzled, by the way. I think I waste 500 calories a day just being anxious, so it's not all about energy reduction.

Were they ever so scarse that people would be "lazy" like the modern human?

Quite the opposite. Scarcity would cause laziness to be a transient state, a high you'd be constantly chasing like All Bundy ruminating on that highschool football game where he scored 4 touchdowns.

What's the deal with the social media features of this site? WIP or defunct feature?

I noticed profile pics/avatars a long time ago, but only recently noticed the following/follower features on the user profile page. I "followed" some people to see what would happen. I expected a deluge of orange bell icons which would have me revert, but nothing happened. Am I blind and this is an old, half baked feature I missed (very possible) or is this an ongoing development for the forum to finally unseat Myspace as king of social media (very possible)?

Vestigial limbs from the rdrama codebase. They’ve also got a bunch of gif and css support that didn’t make it over, I think.

The only ongoing features we’ve got are related to moderating, like the volunteer system.

I believe the follow feature only posts notifications when the person you've followed makes a standalone post on the front page. Even top level comments in the main CWR thread are technically subposts.

As mentioned below, there are things from the rdrama code base that aren't fully implemented, such as themes. They probably work fine for a normal user, but using anything but the default breaks things in annoying ways if you're an admin like me.

My guess would be that it's something from the rdrama code base which either was not fully implemented there, or it got broken when we removed various other features (there were a lot). And in either case was never fully excised.

Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.

I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.

Sean Munger is a YouTube historian and seems pretty left wing but I can tolerate his dives into recent historical events (Watergate iran contra etc).

most sane (...) centrist or left-leaning

Underdefined. These days even the boring centrists seem certifiably insane, and who even counts as "left"? I like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese, the Red Scare girls are ok as well, but this is because our worldviews aren't in that much of an opposition, so... are they "left"? Am I?

Hasn't Angela Nagle already had her 15 minutes of fame due to her book after which she was ostracized by her tribe for appearing on Tucker's TV show? This was many years ago.

Yes, but I think she was at her most interesting after that. For a while she was going various dissident podcasts, then she started a substack that was also quite interesting, but fell off in terms of frequency of activity. I recently saw her starting a podcast there with some dude I never heard of, the podcast is again quite good, but the last episode was published a month ago.

I would have recommended glenn greenwald (System Update), max blumenthal & aaron mate (The Grayzone), and matt taibbi (Racket News) as leftist journalists with good video/audio backlogs. But that may not be what you're looking for here, as these are the types who feel the modern left moved away from them over the last 10 years, and don't necessarily have many takes that the motte disagrees with. So it's largely critical of israel/neocons/neoliberals, and often defenses of trump against the establishment.

Aside from what has already been suggested, I listen to Derek Thompson's podcast, which while not always political, when it is, it's solidly center-left blue.

Yglesias, as long as you follow closely enough to catch all his "haha I was actually lying to you about that the whole time, aren't I clever" admissions. He embodies the zeitgeist better than anyone.
The Economist used to be ok, although it's gone downhill. (And wow they've even paywalled the front page, that's crazy. Never mind)

Can't recommend podcasts because I'd rather read with focus for five minutes than absent-mindedly listen to someone's propaganda for five hours. That seems absurdly dangerous for your mental hygiene imo.

Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube are great places to start.

Is Contrapoints still relevant? They seem to put out maybe 1 video per year for the past 4 years. The right used to feel obligated to respond, but the last time I even heard about Contrapoints is the cope response to the Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

Also, she's hardly a centrist, I think.

The Ezra Klein Show and Noah Smith's Econ 102 are two that I listen to occasionally if I want to get the liberal technocratic elite's position on things.

I'm still unsure that Trump is paying very much attention to Canada. The timing of the first delay in response to Canada offering basically the same thing they'd already started doing in December really made it look like someone had to remind Trump about Canada after already delaying the Mexico tariffs.

What I've seen of the meeting with Zelenskyy similarly just reinforces the impression that Trump is governing on broad emotional direction and really doesn't keep any particular details in mind at all.

I end up coming back to what I said last month. After decades of the left talking about the "American Empire," Trump is embracing that view and demanding fealty from his vassals. In Canada, at least, the incumbent thinks they'll do better in the upcoming election by leaning into the anti-Americanism, so the best hope for delaying or canceling the tariffs seems to be that Trump forgets he's mad at Trudeau the way he forgot he called Zelenskyy a dictator.

Stefferi’s explanation fits my mental model of Trump. He rewards his friends, and he doesn’t think those countries have been very friendly lately. Thus, they deserve the short end of the stick.

As for goodwill? Mine lasted from the election until about 90% of the way through his inauguration speech. You can identify the exact moment my expectations started sliding.

I personally resent the guy, and I despise the way he encourages political tribalism. I’m sick and tired of listening to smart people jump through hoops to explain how he’s actually totally aligned with their principles. FCfromSSC has suggested that the last decade is something like a distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup; while I don’t want to believe it, no one exemplifies the idea better than our President. He will continue to trample the commons and loot the treasury, sometimes literally. He will collect immunity to the various consequences which apply to us little people. And he will be praised for any damage he does so long as he hurts the right people.

The Republicans are going to do fine in 2026.

And I'm a little sick and tired of certain people ignoring the last four years of blatant looting, forgiving or just denying leftist violence and tribalism as you did in that linked post, and then smugly acting as if they're principled and above it all rather than active partisans.

What part of that was a denial?

I made predictions: no Democrat equivalent to 1/6. Harris concedes. Riots possible, but without any objectives.

What was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to include a CHAZ land acknowledgment?

I think that the best way to see it is like: Trump likes tariffs. In the ideal Trumpworld, there's basically a high tariff against most every country, with lower and nonexistent tariff rates being a special favor for pliant loyalists, not the basic starting point. He can't implement this right now in its entirety, since it would still be bit too harsh a hit on economy, but he can start implementing it against those whose negotiating position isn't particularly good, ie. weaker neighboring countries much more dependent on US than US is on them.

Is Anthropic (Claude) the most overvalued AI company today?

Despite being a customer of Anthropic, I'm not really sure what the place of Anthropic is in today's market. They don't have the mindshare of OpenAI. They don't have the cheapest API. They don't have the biggest cluster.

They feel very much like an also ran, the Lyft of AI, doomed to be either subsumed or ground down by bigger rivals.

And, at least in one way, they are very badly run. Let me explain.

Anthropic charges me $3 per 1 million output tokens. But I am rate limited to 8000 tokens per minute. It would take me 2 hours just to spend $3 on their API. And if I want a bigger limit I have to "contact sales". This is just 💀 for people who are trying to build real things. I don't want to contact sales, I just want a bigger limit. What I think this means is that they are resource constrained, so they trying to pre-filter their customers to find the ones who will deliver the most long-term value and ignoring ones that won't. This is a fool's errand. It's better to make a self-service platform that scales. Startups start small, but grow until pretty soon they are paying millions a year to AWS. Claude is stopping this process before it even gets going.

So why do I still use them? For now: inertia. But I can't build with this 8000 token limit and I don't do sales calls so long term I'm going elsewhere.

It says rate limits rise automatically as you deposit more money:

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits

Your organization will increase tiers automatically as you reach certain thresholds while using the API. Limits are set at the organization level. You can see your organization’s limits in the Limits page in the Anthropic Console.

But I am also trying to build with them, I pressed the contact sales button and they apparently don't accept gmail email addresses, it has to be businesspeople. Their customer service takes ages to respond to you. Their service was been down for about an hour. Everything they do outside AI research is a clownshow.

I don't have stats to hand but they serve a lot of enterprise customers now. Maybe they see serving end users as a sideshow.

I recall similar, a graph in one of TheZvi's roundup's showed they were rapidly gaining on OpenAI's enterprise marketshare and were comfortably second place. The Lyfts are more like Google and Facebook

Claude, at least past the 2.0 models, has been excellent. 3.0 Opus was good, 3.5 Sonnet was great, and 3.7 Sonnet only continues the hot streak. Given that GPT 4.5 is a resounding meh (look at those prices dawg, they're back to early GPT-4 days and don't beat even OAI's reasoning models in price or performance), I don't think Anthropic is doing poorly. They've released a reasoning model (3.7 can do it and standard output), and have plenty of good talent.

That being said, the way they treat paying users, both through subscription and the API, is terrible. I can only hope that they're simply strapped for GPUs, especially for inference, and are using the bulk of their compute on the 4.0 models they're cooking. Hopefully they take a page out of DeepSeek's book, those buggers aren't GPU poor, they're GPU beggars in comparison, but outside of when they're being DDOS-d, they practically throw tokens away for free.

I can only hope that they're simply strapped for GPUs, especially for inference, and are using the bulk of their compute on the 4.0 models they're cooking.

This is somewhat unlikely. The GPUs that you need for training cost a fortune (or rather, NVidia can charge a fortune for them since they have almost zero large scale competition) while much cheaper ones can be good enough for inference.

In the mean time, I just swapped out my API to use DeepSeek v3 via together.ai. It was easy. So add that to Anthropic's problems. Low switching costs!

For me it's an easy win. I get lower costs, good enough models, and no limits. Death to the sales call! Death to "call for pricing"!

Claude is the best coding LLM. Perhaps not by far, but noticeably enough that I almost always use it exclusively at work. This is not very controversial for most devs.

i've heard claude is good at coding but i don't understand how people are using it

what programs are people using to feed context to claude?

If openrouter's top usage charts are to be believed, Cline, Roo-Code (itself a fork of Cline apparently?) and Aide (before 4chan unsustainable pricing killed it) are/were the most popular choices. I haven't tried those because those seem like a bottomless pit of token usage and I'm too poor, but I believe how those work is that you integrate them straight into your IDE, give them file access so they can "see" and edit your entire project, and prompt accordingly from there. Curious if anyone has experience with those.

If you need a simpler frontend, big-AGI is a good general-purpose one despite many superfluous bells and whistles.

"Nobody goes there, it's too crowded".

It's not that they have too much demand, it's that they can't serve even the limited demand they do have.

Claude name recognition is basically zero compared to ChatGPT or even Deep Seek.

For the parents: How do you introduce/talk about yourself and your spouse to your kids friends? Are you on first name basis? Do you go by Mr/Mrs so-and-so?

My sense is that Mr/Mrs so-and-so makes it easier for young kids to understand their relationship to you and that they need to respect your decisions. Some of my peer group, however, goes by a first name basis. Most parents never even broach the subject with their kids' friends, and so the friends are in an awkward limbo where they don't know how to address parents.

Mr so-and-so, with wide tolerance, particularly for older siblings.

"Hi! I'm [insert your own kid's name]'s dad. Who are you?"

Hello! How do I go about deleting my account and everything I ever posted? Is that possible? I’m done with the Motte and want to wipe my account.

Edit; after further conversation, I’ve changed my mind and I’m, in fact, not done with the Motte.

  • -23

Your perception is so wrong it's a bit comical, pardon me saying. I don't participate on other debate forums and I certainly have never typed that sentence anywhere on the internet.

  • -11

This is such exquisite bait that I will bite it.

What is, exactly, the point of this post?

Ostensibly you've asked a normal question, but tb entirely h I don't buy it, not considering your bio/poasting history - especially now that you've voiced your actual complaint downthread when prompted. At a glance it really scans like you recently entered a thread full of things you do not like (discussion of the recent Trump/Zelensky cockfight, I assume), got annoyed, and now took to vagueposting to bait people into asking for the reason (as sensible people are wont to do), so you can express your perceived ick without actually having to engage with pesky chuds Russian shills directly.

I'm not usually that much of a conflict theorist, but this is such a lazy, passive-aggressive and - yes - stereotypically female mode of engagement (I'm mad and no I won't say why, except actually I will, you just gotta ask properly first) that I can't possibly think of it as being done in good faith, much less a point made "reasonably clear and plain". Functionally indistinguishable from trolling, even.

edit: Fascinating thread, probably the first real dent in my previously-immaculate impression of the mods.

I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush. I'm not a huge fan of people announcing their exit, but this is certainly preferable to past users who have decided to end their time here with a long whinge about why they're leaving, complete with accusations about the mods not acting fairly since most of them were skirting perma-bans anyway.

I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations

What's bad about it is that telling people "you have icky opinions" on a forum devoted to discussing ideas is going to be annoying when told directly, and it's doubly so when vaguepisted. No, it's not more annoying than what he did (you basically conceded the substance of his accusations).

and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush.

Are you saying there are no broad differences in behavior between men an women?

Generally we don't delete accounts. You can leave if you like. If you want to delete all your posts (we'd prefer you didn't) we won't do it for you.

Except Ra****y_An***m?

(Name partially removed lest there's some reason they can't be spoken about)

No, she has not been Voldemorted, and we didn't delete her account.

But it was renamed and set to private immediately after all her content was apparently removed by a mod (according to both the moderation log and the message displayed if you try to look at any of it).

Pretty sure she set her own account to private. If Zorba actually deleted her content, I was not aware of it, or I've forgotten.

The username now redirects to retired_user, I believe.

Seconding grognard in suggesting "leave your comments and just stop reading or posting here".

If you decide that you really do want to delete all your stuff, there is no special tooling for that. That said, LLMshave gotten really good at writing code lately, and if you ask an LLM for a javascript snippet which will press the "delete" button on every comment you wrote, ChatGPT or Claude can probably provide that to you.

I really appreciate you informing me of this. Pardon the newb, but what is an LLM? And how would I execute the javascript?

  • -14

On the tiny chance this is not bait, LLM stands for "large language model" and is the sort of thing that ChatGPT and Claude are. It's an AI you can ask questions to, like "what is an LLM" or "how would I execute a snippet javascript on a web page". It will often (not always) provide useful and accurate answers, and you can ask follow-up questions.

If you build a habit of reflexively asking your LLM of choice to explain anything you don’t understand in plain language (e.g. contracts, legalese, poorly written comments from the internet) I think you will find it's pretty nice for your quality of life.

what is an LLM?

HUUUHhhhh ????????

To be fair that's way less inexplicable than "what's Ethiopia". I'm still surprised by that.

Ahaha thank you for this comment, has me dying laughing. lol.

Never presume that knowledge is universal. Someone always manages to live on the far side of the moon somehow.

If you're posting on an obscure internet forum, it's trivial to open a browser new tab, go to google.com, and search "what is an LLM?"

taps sign

  • -17

What upset you?

Why can’t you leave your posts up so threads you participated in make sense? You didn’t use your real name.

In my perspective there’s a lot of Russian propaganda talking points popping up in the Culture War chat and it’s kinda made the whole thing boring for me now. I’d like to keep my personal syntax on the internet down to sites I actively use.

  • -18

You've commented this (or something similar) multiple times without any concrete examples. Obviously "Russia is a good traditional Christian country trying to restore her rightful borders and we should support them against Nazi Ukraine" is maximum propaganda, but what does an edge case look like?

Is simply talking about Ukrainian corruption enough to be propaganda? How about bringing up the suspended elections without the context of past suspensions under total war?

Yes. “Ukrainian corruption” is a dog whistle for Russian propaganda.

Thanks for responding.

What makes any mention of Ukrainian corruption automatically propaganda? Is it the conspicuous worrying about dollars and cents when flesh and blood should be the focus?

If I said "We must support Ukraine against Russian aggression. After (and only after) we secure Ukraine's future against external enemies, we should help them root out internal corruption," would you assume me to be a propagandist?

What if I were a Ukrainian refugee, or an active soldier posting from the warzone? (I'm not. I'm a thoughtful loser with too many questions.)

If I had to guess, and apologies if I get it too wrong: You think that securing Ukraine from external threats must be completed before we even think about petty little things like corruption. Obviously every nation has nonzero corruption, but you'd be a ghoul to worry about it when people are dying. It's like checking a restaurant's accounting while the place burns down.

Again, that's only what I think you think. I do not claim to be correct about what you think. I only type it so that you can tell me how wrong I am.

And finally: Do you think I'm a Russian propagandist? Feel free to give a flat yes/no or give a percentage.

I think that if Russia takes Ukraine, the entire country will look like the Bucha massacre. Matters of corruption will not be possible because the country will be massacred; it is literally a matter of survival to them. To allow Russia to take Ukraine is to condemn its citizens to Bucha; therefore, arguments that have implications of reducing aid to Ukraine lead to only one result; Bucha.

So I think that securing Ukraine from total annihilation must be completed before we even think about petty little things like corruption. No, I don’t think you are a Russian propagandist for thinking Ukraine is corrupt. I think you’d be a propagandist if you think because it’s corrupt it deserves Bucha, which is what will happen if Russia takes the territory.

I think that if Russia takes Ukraine, the entire country will look like the Bucha massacre

I think you’d be a propagandist if you think because it’s corrupt it deserves Bucha

There's the whole disagreement right there. You cannot justifiably assume that other people share the former assertion, and if they don't share that assertion, then talking about corruption makes sense. After all, if it's a normal (meaning non-genocidal) war, then asking where the money is going makes sense.

If I told you that I think Russian victory leads to Bucha 3000, and that I were more worried about corruption, you could fairly assume that I don't give a shit about Ukrainians. However, I have never seen anyone imply that set of beliefs.

I don't think it's fair to treat all discussions of Ukrainian corruption as Russian propaganda. It would be like me claiming that the statement "Russian victory = megaBucha" is invariably Ukrainian/Western propaganda. The symmetry between that position on yours might be worth meditating on.

The hardest symmetry is that if you want people to seriously consider whether they've been hit by Russian propaganda, you need to seriously consider if you've been hit by Ukrainian propaganda, and you have to be real about it.

Cards on the table, I have no idea what's true.

Lunch break's over so I'm hitting "comment."

That sounds a bit like "talking about free speech means you're a Nazi". You can worry about corruption in Ukraine without wishing Russia to win. In fact, I think people wishing Ukraine to win should definitely worry about corruption in Ukraine because it's a drain on their resources going to somebody's pocket instead of going to get weapons and supplies. Of course one could dishonestly pretend to care about corruption while having a true aim of cutting off all aid to Ukraine and thus make them lose, that happens, but that's not the only possible option at all. Just as being a Nazi is not the only reason to want free speech, being a Russian propagandist is not the only reason for talking about Ukrainian corruption.

I’m sorry, but you are a deeply unserious person. Ukraine was widely recognized as a highly corrupt country (as was Russia) by neutral international observers for a very long time before this war began. It is simply verifiably the case that government in Ukraine, from the federal level on down, features a ton of shady money changing hands, graft, oligarchic patronage, etc. You would easily identify these features as “corrupt” in the Russian context; why are you so willing to excuse or overlook them in a Ukrainian context? It’s completely possible — trivially easy, even — to acknowledge that Ukrainian government was (and still is) corrupt and ineffectual, without thinking Russia is any better or that it gives Russia a legitimate mandate to invade.

This is the second reason why I am quitting the Motte. I am so bored of low-effort insults at my character instead of dealing with the subject of my arguments, which is directly against the rules on the sidebar. Constantly having it done with very little moderation shows me this place is not for debate, it’s to dunk on leftists. I’ve said the moderation here is not for me, and it really is.

  • -10

Report people when they break the rules, don't argue back at them. This is like, rule 0 of the Internet. Also, it's been not even an hour since the comment you are complaining about was made. It takes time for one of the mods to be online, see the report, and decide what to do with it.

I agree with you that calling you an "unserious person" is a violation of the rules. But the rules aren't a magic wand that prevents breakage. Bad comments need to be reported (especially in a thread as old as this one), and you need to be patient to let the process work. You can't hold this post up and say "see, this is why I'm quitting" when the moderators haven't even had a chance to respond yet.

I don’t have faith that my reporting is going to be met in good faith. I have a history of comments calling me trans, insulting my intellect over my gender, and general potshots at me being unserious, a troll, someone who just hates conservatives and doesn’t want to listen to other arguments, straight up mocking at my lack of knowledge despite the rules literally saying “leave the rest of the Internet at the door”. Where is the moderation there? And for a site full of people claiming they want to debate, why is there a constant stream of rule-breaking not-debating happening aimed at me?

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You didn’t even make an argument to critique, though! You just said that any discussion of Ukrainian corruption is ipso facto Russian propaganda. There’s no attempt to justify this with evidence. (Was nobody discussing Ukrainian corruption before Russia said we should? What if there’s counter-evidence of neutral parties acknowledging corruption within the Ukrainian government, regardless of anything that Russia has to say?) There’s no attempt to grapple with why somebody who is not Russia-aligned might independently arrive at the conclusion, based on observable evidence, that Ukraine’s government is corrupt relative to Western standards. It’s just “These conversation topics give me the ick.” That’s not a valuable contribution to this forum.

So, if someone makes an argument that you personally think is not valuable, it’s okay to insult them? Can I start calling you unserious for claiming to want to debate and discuss while undermining the entire ethos of the site and driving away the very people you want to argue with with low-effort pot shots? No. Because that’s against the rules, and I would be rightly moderated.

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Isn't that a bit like saying "greenhouse gasses" is "environmentalist propaganda"?

No. Saying that Ukraine deserves to be invaded and the massacre at Bucha was warranted because they didn’t have an election during wartime where parts of the country can’t vote because they are occupied by Russia is Russian propaganda.

But that's not what you said in the previous comment?

Huh? I’m confused.

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I would offer you a different viewpoint. This is just Ethiopia all over again. A clash between Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views.

Realpolitk says that Putin is entitled to half of Ukraine, because saving it whole is not worth it.

Wilsonian's says it's immoral so we should go all in.

Russian propaganda in its core is closer to Realpolitk so a lot of opinions may be viewed by this lens.

Also the European equivalent of woke have put so much of their capital and emotions into Ukraine side. And their foaming at the mouth alone is making the loss of Ukraine worth it.

I don't want Putin to win. I want Brussels to lose badly.

If Woodrow Wilson were drawing up a new Fourteen points for today, he would emphasize the right to self-determination of the people of Crimea. Western war aims include conquering Crimea to annex it into a Ukrainian land empire, perhaps as some kind of successor to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wilson would denounce that as immoral.

I have no idea what Ethiopia, Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views are, sorry lol.

Well, see, Russian propaganda at it's core is just straight up lies, in my opinion, and that's just not fun to argue with. There's no winning to be had, alas.

  • -14

I have no idea what Ethiopia, Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views are, sorry lol.

Invasion of Ethiopia - when the league of nations bickered, so the realistic realpolitik plan - Italy to get the plains and Haile Selasie to keep the mountains never got traction since the LON was brainchild of then president Woodrow Wilson so Italy got all of it.

Realpolitik is the notion that nations should chase their own interests, be indifferent towards the internal structure of the other players and that morality moves to second place.

And well Woodrow Wilson thought that we should sing kumbaya and if we create a league of all nation and outlaw war then all the world will be at peace forever.

So from Realpolitik view invasion of Ukraine from Russia makes sense. How much support should US provide depends on US interests and it is irrelevant what Ukraine wants of needs. And Trump sees probably Ukraine as a chip to gain some favors from Russia or a proxy that just needs enough support to lose the war slowly as to bleed Russia dry.

So saying that Ukraine should take a bad deal now to avoid taking worse one tomorrow is grounded in reality. This could also be said about Palestinians after the US firmly backed Israel during the 20th century. It is Russian propaganda I guess, but it is not a complete lie the way the war is going.

Ethiopia is a country in Africa. No idea what the reference being made is, but I assume some past political event. Realpolitik is the philosophy that in politics, one must deal with cold hard reality. In this case, whether one believes Ukrainians are entitled to get their land back or not, they aren't able to take it themselves and nobody seems inclined to fight on their behalf to get it back for them. So like it or not, they should (according to realpolitik) deal with the situation that exists as best they can, not cling to vain hopes of getting their land back, because they are just going to annoy people and wind up with an even worse deal in the end than if they gave concessions now.

Ahh, thank you for the clarification.

There really are a lot of Russian talking points, aren't there? But don't you find it interesting to see how badly many quite smart people here want to believe in them? It's an endless task to try to engage with or counter all of it, nonetheless, I feel that the more misinformation and distortion I read here, the more I learn!

  • -15

My reaction is the total opposite of yours. I don’t find it interesting; actually I find it quite boring, and I’m afraid all I’ve got left in the tank is disregard.

  • -11

You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.

Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.

For me, discussion here became stale when Russian propaganda began to be seriously debated. I just can't take it seriously; it's like being at a pool party where someone poured that mythical urine-indicator dye and seeing exactly how many people are pissing in the proverbial water.

  • -12

If you don't mind me asking, how did you even find this place? This site is a quarantine site to contain the often toxic political discussions that would otherwise happen elsewhere, and the people who enter the quarantine tend to be those of us who enjoy such things for whatever reason. The site isn't really advertised anywhere, and so usually the only people who come here are the proverbial pissing in the water club.

Coming here and complaining that there are too many bad political takes feels like signing up for a poker strategy forum and complaining that they talk about and glorify gambling an unhealthy amount - arguably not wrong, but how did you even get there?

I read that famous Harry Potter fanfiction by Yud and slippery sloped all the way here.

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So now that you know what realpolitik is, how confident are you in your ability to distinguish it from Russian propaganda?

That's not my problem. My problem is I think Russian propaganda is a pretty boring topic to debate about and I can't take it seriously. I don't know how else to say it without accidentally coasting into "boo outgroup" territory.

  • -10
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I'm just waiting for it to pass, it's currently hot in the news cycle, but we will soon be able to get at each other's throats for something else

I wish I could carry on like that, but for me, it's like a bunch of people in the geography debate club became flat earthers overnight. I just can't get the taste out of my mouth.

So, what are you reading?

Still on a bunch of stuff. Picking up Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Scott Alexander's claim that the book converted a lot of academic Marxists to left-liberalism has intrigued me.

Just got Meditations on the Tarot which is a book on tarot from a Christian hermeticism point of view. Apparently Pope John Paul II kept one on his desk.

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. It's short, with suitably lively prose to paint the picture of unfettered big-R/little-r romantic emotionality. Haven't finished it yet but the closing section kind of reminds me of reading Faust in how it's unravelling into disjointed fragments.

Are you feeling any urge to kill yourself yet?

Oh, I only get that from browsing the Motte.

Lucky you.

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery. A popular nonfiction book written by a practicing brain surgeon, that explores the profession from a medical, historical, and social perspective. Who knew that the surgeons, in order to access the brain, literally drill four holes in the skull, slip a cutting wire through two of them, and saw back-and-forth, repeating on all the holes until a square is cut out? It's a glimpse into a field that is usually inaccessible to outsiders. I'm only about a quarter of the way through but I would highly recommend it.

Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.

Onto Orbán: Europe's New Strongman by Paul Lendvai, as reviewed by Scott. Another book I'm reading for research purposes. About a hundred pages in and it's a very easy read, I'm learning some interesting tidbits about the man himself I can use.

Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.

Was it worth it?

I wouldn't say so. The only reason I read it was to gain an insight into Catharism, but that only takes up a very small portion of the book. The rest of it is dedicated to describing life in the titular fourteenth-century French village in minute, exhaustive detail: how the villagers worked, ate, formed relationships etc. Some of this was interesting, but it wasn't really relevant to the purpose I was reading the book for and hence felt like a bit of a waste of my time.

Understandable. It's exactly what I hope to get out of it, though.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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