The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Excellently.

I got invited to an interview at an absurdist variety show with these weird ethnic undertones (this would be a hassle to explain, just imagine that part of the show is that everyone there is putting on an exaggerated redneck act). They apparently got wind of some scientific publication I was involved with and for some reason decided it would be a great piece of entertainment to have me on. My colleagues were thrilled about this ‘now or never’ opportunity but I had a strong gut feeling that these people weren’t about to laugh with me. Thought about it for a minute and then responded nope, hard pass. Still probably one of the best decisions of my life.

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

What a disingenuous comparison. This woman didn’t start an insurrection. This is like if Putin had prevented Prigozhin from running, which he would have been completely in his rights to.

The write up Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments explains the underlying dynamics pretty well: by saying “I like this one thing Peterson said”, you assign him karma points and now everything else about him will be viewed more positively. That’s just how people work, and people will assume you know that and are exploiting it.

For example: by linking that post, I effectively supported the effective altruism movement – even though I’m really not a big fan of it – whether I like it or not, because the author is heavily associated with them. That’s how it works, sadly.

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

Bringing up the USS Liberty incident, like bringing up crime statistics in the US, is less the great argument you think it is and more of an ideological calling card. Anyone who actually cares about morals, decency, and the best interests of the civilized world wouldn’t honestly decide that the discussion would be best guided forward by going back in history to cherry pick this one incident that occurred nearly 60 years ago.

EDIT: The upvote / downvote ratio on this comment should tell you everything you need to know about the population breakdown here. People who criticize Israel because of the actual things that Israel does will bring up the '67 expansion, or the high blood price paid in Gaza, or the blockade, or the current extremist government, or whatever else. The USS Liberty is a cynical rhetorical instrument, not a building block of any sane person’s actually, honestly held opinion. Anyone who posts or upvotes this 60 year old incident that Israel has apologized and paid reparations for “because oh isn’t it worrying, isn’t it telling how bad of an ally Israel was to the US that time” is concern trolling and hiding their power level. Simple as.

I understand your anger, but I feel compelled to make some remarks.

The IDF did personally pull the trigger to shoot and kill three of the hostages who were, at the time, waving white flags made from their shirts. This event is surely very telling, and was also immediately considered a catastrophe, with Israeli responses on all ends of the spectrum. On the more sane end you have the official statement by the IDF chief of staff, who didn’t mince words about this:

“You see two people, they have their hands up and no shirts — take two seconds,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi told soldiers in Gaza on Sunday. Halevi said a day earlier that the soldiers who shot the three had opened fire in breach of IDF protocols.

“And I want to tell you something no less important,” Halevi continued. “What if it is two Gazans with a white flag who come out to surrender? Do we shoot at them? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

“Even those who fought and now put down their weapons and raise their hands — we capture them, we don’t shoot them. We extract a lot of intelligence from the prisoners we have; we have over 1,000 already,” he told the soldiers.

Halevi added: “We don’t shoot them because the IDF doesn’t shoot a person who raises his hands. This is a strength, not a weakness.”

Now, given the actual event which speaks for itself, there is obviously a very deep disconnect between what the chief of the IDF touts as policy here and what the soldiers end up doing in practice. You could posit that the chief is speaking out of his ass, but the more probable theory is that higher up on the hierarchy some officers are sincerely convinced that they are leading the charge of the Most Moral Army in the World™, and meanwhile some hefty portion of the boots on the ground have decided to, like you’ve phrased it, kill everything that moves and fuck the rules of engagement. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say this proves such a grand statement such as “genocide is the goal of the Zionists”. Do the events of Oct 7 prove that “genocide is the goal of the Palestinians”? What are we supposed to do with this conclusion? Does it lead anywhere productive?

The hostages are not political pawns for Netanyahu, they are a huge headache for him. Netanyahu could very well easily continue the military campaign just on the promise of dealing with Hamas alone; he would in fact much prefer this, and would like nothing more than to be rid of the constant shouting about the hostages. It’s an open secret that the hostage families have effectively thrown in their lot with Netanyahu’s most fierce opposition; they’re constantly shouting for “a deal NOW” and “negotiate with Hamas NOW”, to the degree that this has become somewhat of a wedge issue in Israel, you’re expected to be a “bring back the hostages, stop the war, reach a deal now, kick out Netanyahu, left winger” or a “push on, let the chips fall where they may, destroy Hamas, keep Netanyahu, right winger”. I am exaggerating but really not by much, and some paper op-eds have written on this topic extensively. The state, for what it’s worth, evidently cares about this issue a lot more than Netanyahu himself does, or you wouldn’t have had the first ceasefire in the first place.

I encourage anyone to read the Wikipedia page on this issue, it provides a lot of sources and goes over whatever evidence the Israelis did claim to have, and how several pieces of it were dismissed as insufficient. I am not arguing with your conclusion here, it’s just that “HA! THIS HEADLINE SETTLES IT” makes for a lousy mental habit.

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

Israel says it has two goals: destroy Hamas and rescue the 129 hostages still held by militants […] but some families of hostages worry that the bombing endangers their loved ones. Hostages released during a weeklong cease-fire last month recounted that their captors moved them from place to place to avoid Israeli bombardment. Hamas has claimed that several hostages died from Israeli bombs, though the claims could not be verified.

I have to believe that everyone in Israel knows that “continue this balls to the wall military campaign to destroy Hamas AND free all the hostages! These go hand in hand” is cakeism lip service. Every minimally rational person should be able to understand that when facing a foe who is holding hostages, if you commit to destroying that foe by military means then you have effectively forfeited the lives of the hostages, barring an outstanding stroke of tactical genius or a lucky break (so far Israeli soldiers have been able to rescue one hostage by force). Conversely, if you decide to sit down with that foe and say “all right, score one for you, let us cut a deal and get all our hostages back”, then your foe will make sure to negotiate terms such that you will not be destroying anything or anyone (Hamas mistakenly thought they had this sorted out with the first ceasefire, which is why now they demand total cessation of all hostilities as a precondition for any further deal). But speaking this truth out loud in Israel these days is just not palatable; instead the public demands to hear these “do this and that” fairy tales.

I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. Having said that, I’m pretty sure GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

no ethical people without explainable people

white supremacist

Lol. Lmao, even.

None of the 54 people who upvoted this have the first idea about how Israeli internal politics relates to white supremacy. None of them know how Likud got elected in '77, on top what of ethnic tensions. None of them know the names “Dudi Amsalem”, “Miri Regev”, “Galit Distel”, who are high ranking ministers in the current Israeli govt (Distel quit recently), and how they built their political capital and support base on top of repeated scorn and derision for “the white tribe” which in Israel is traditionally identified with the secular liberal elites, who vote for left wing parties and try to promote left wing policies. Listen to some of the stuff that this wing of Likud says, ironically they don’t sound far off from the BLM movement who of course they will tell you that they oppose in their capacity as staunch conservatives. Don’t underestimate how much of Likud’s power comes from exactly that fault line in Israeli society.

Go ahead and call Israel bigoted, a settler state, a colonialist project, all of these start off an argument that often Israel is going to look not so great coming out of – but “white supremacist”? People make the surprised Pikachu face because this take is detached from physical reality. Out of what I want to believe is good intentions, you ended up shoving the square peg that is this conflict into the convenient round hole that is this narrative about colors vs. whites which has not applied since decades before the turn of the century.

FWIW I don’t personally have the taste for any of this. I wish I could stop hearing about the imaginary applications of colors to Israeli internal and foreign policy, and instead start hearing more about practical plans of how to ensure security in the region and how to aim for a future where millions of Gazans don’t starve. But clearly no one is asking me.