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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30317 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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I think you can literally ask LLM's to summarize. Though I recall someone mentioning that Hegel broke Bing AI's brain, so maybe Yarvin will be the same.

This is what Bing told me about this essay:

Here is a summary of the article you requested:

The article is about the conflict between Israel and Gaza, and how it relates to the concept of nomos, or the order of the world

The author argues that the current nomos is based on the Westphalian system of nation-states, which is incompatible with the reality of non-state actors like Hamas

The author suggests that the Westphalian system is collapsing, and that a new nomos is emerging, based on the principle of sovereignty as responsibility

The author claims that Israel is acting as a responsible sovereign, by defending its citizens and territory from Hamas’s rockets and tunnels

The author criticizes the international community for applying double standards to Israel, and for failing to uphold its own responsibility to prevent terrorism and human rights violations

The author concludes that the conflict in Gaza is a symptom of a larger crisis of the nomos, and that the world needs to embrace a new order that recognizes the rights and duties of all actors

After the Dark Elves article I just lack the ability to convince my brain that reading Moldbug articles and thinking about them seriously is worthwhile at all.

You can’t make sense out of Hegel because Hegel doesn’t make any sense. It’s like asking AI to explain gibberish. It’s impossible. There is no information there.

Oppressors Bad, Oppressed Good, Oppressor and Oppressed classes exist in a quantum supposition largely based on the sympathies of the observer/whoever's assigning the labels.

That might sound flippant and low-effort (it honestly kind of is) but it's still pretty close to his genuine thesis near as I can tell.

That's just one of his ideas to be fair. I'm really not a fan of that one, but Hegel's contribution to philosophy, whilst esoteric, is not this empty.

Chiefly the one thing that's often (though debatably) attributed to him is dialectic and the alchemical view of history as the distillation of the perfect society, and though I don't like that one either, it's massively influential and makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

Dialectic isn't really that impressive, smart, or original though. It's basically just "Conflict between thesis (feudalism, capital, whatever) and antithesis (labor unions, whatever) result in new synthesis (communism, whatever)."

Most landmarks of philosophy can be described in this reductionist way, it makes them no less significant.

I'm a bit torn on this question. On one hand I do want to show respect to philosophy, and artistically analyzing all the things it analyzes, but on the other I can't escape the impression that a lot of what it does is formalizing what people were already saying, thinking, and doing, adding a layer of obscurantism, and pretending you invented the thing yourself.

A common and valid critique of philosophy.

But I shall take your thesis and anti-thesis and synthesize them:

Philosophy is in large part the art of taking things people are already saying, feeling, thinking and doing and putting them in a coherent framework that can be used for further analysis and propagation.

We wouldn't charge mathematicians who create theories of existing fields of being bereft of insight. Why do we do so for philosophers? Is it just because they look a lot more pretentious? Or because they're talking about questions sufficiently exoteric that everyone has an opinion on them?

We wouldn't charge mathematicians who create theories of existing fields of being bereft of insight. Why do we do so for philosophers?

Pure maths people weep tears of blood as I type this, but having a practical application helps a lot.

Or because they're talking about questions sufficiently exoteric that everyone has an opinion on them?

That might be a part of it. See it's not that I want to dismiss philosophy as a field, it's the insistence that I should see the contribution of particular philosophers as valuable that something in me rebels against. I can tip my hat to Pythagoras, Leibniz, Boole, and the lot of them, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to come up with what they came up with. If I jog my noggin, I could probably name some philosophers that made me go "huh, I never thought of that this way" and I can tip my hat to them too. But the ones that first make me go "I don't get it", and then, when someone explains it to me, makes me go "wait, that was it?", these guys make me rather annoyed. Why should their contribution be seen as more valuable than the local schizo at the pub? Because they were friends with aristocrats? Because they went to a fancy university?

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