Commenter Archive

People are complicated, and have complex motivations and feelings. That doesn't seem unusual; I'm sure you've experienced this as well.

Personally, when I see something about Teslas getting torched, my first thought is also, "Cool!" but then I think, "Actually, this is probably not helping, and risks escalation. People should come up with more productive ways of making sure Musk experiences consequences for buying the presidency and using it to destroy the federal government. But still, the pictures are great."

What she said, in 5-word tweet, has long been a cancellable offense in this country, and can now get you deported if you're not a citizen (how long before it can get you detained even if you are?). I am sure she knew their could be a cost. To argue that she didn't mean it, then, requires a bit more than, "I can recognize it when I see it, based on how I was raised."

Her.

This has got to be a mis-threaded reply, but it's absolutely hilarious as currently threaded.

I assume this happened often enough on the early internet (like BBS's with a private message function, AOL Instant Messages, or whatever the direct messages were called on CompuServe), but the difference was that back then, the ratio of men to women on the internet was like 3 or 4 to 1, so every woman would have been getting these messages from like 10 guys at once.

Almost enough to make me vote for a Democrat, if I lived in her district.

This.

Because her opinions on Israel are very different from the opinions of many of the residents of the district on Israel.

It's a very Democratic district, with a relatively large Jewish population, who still make up a minority of the district (~10%). Assuming that the non-Jewish population of the district looks like the Democratic Party nationally, and that every Jewish person in the district voted Democrat (a ridiculous assumption, but this is just to make sure we've got a conservative estimate), then with 68% of the district voting for Harris, take away the 75-80k Jewish voters (obviously, some of them can't even vote, but again, we're being conservative), then with Dems nationally sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis at about 3:1, we'd still have a majority of Dem voters sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis. When you throw in Republicans, who sympathize with Israelis at about 8:1, this is still less than 50% of the total electorate, but it's pretty close. Considering that there are probably at least some Jewish residents who are either anti-Zionist or are pro-Israel but oppose the genocide, I bet it's probably right about 50:50. I'm not sure it's at all unreasonable for her to run, but then, that's why we have elections, right?

I'm confused about why you think she's a poor representative of a district that, while it does have a sizeable Jewish population, is still overwhelmingly non-Jewish, and more than 40% non-white.

Looks like it's ~10% Jewish, though the statistics I found are a bit outdated.

The talk about not wanting to "bail out Europe again" was a pretty big clue they were dilettantes.

In 2023, I listened to a discussion/interview with a well-known American philosopher and a couple philosophers outside of the U.S., mostly about his most recent book (which has little to do with politics, and nothing to do with American partisan politics), but they ended with talk of movies and then current American politics, and they all, the American philosopher and his non-American interlocutors, agreed that Biden was in serious cognitive decline and the Democrats should be holding a primary to find another candidate.

Point being, it was obvious even to random (admittedly leftist, so not big fans of Biden or the Dems) philosophers in other countries, so it must have been obvious to the people in the White House and the Dem national leadership. In a just world, nobody who worked in that administration or in the national party would ever work in politics again. Alas...

There are modernist Zoroastrians, though they are a minority within a very small religious group anyway, so you're unlikely to meet them. There are also restorationists, who reject "recent" (as in, over the last millennium) changes to the original, pure Zoroastrianism of the Gathas, but they're also a small(ish) minority within a very small religious group. I think most Zoroastrians are somewhere in between the two, though the only Zoroastrian I've ever known personally is a Parsi, which is a group known for their conservatism, though they're not restorationists.

It takes two steps: first, you have to send an invitation to someone, and second, when creating a group, you have to put their name in. If you have people in your contacts with very similar names, it's probably pretty easy to include the wrong person in both steps if you're not paying attention to what you're doing. Which, I mean, it's been a while since I last created a national security chat, but I'm pretty sure that if I'd be a bit more careful about adding people than they seem to have been.

A fun possibility is that the initial invite to Goldberg was intentional, because dude was using his personal Signal account and he was just adding a lot of media contacts, but then he used his personal Signal account to talk about national security sh*t.

I knew virtually nothing about the history Near, Middle, or Far East until fairly recently, when I read a couple books with a reading group, became fascinated, and read more. I really feel like Persia, the Silk Road, and China/Southeast Asia were huge holes in my formal education, and I'm trying really hard to fill them.

Also, at least after it became the center of the Muslim World before 1000 CE, the Middle East, trade with which made the Vikings and Venice great powers, while shaping Eastern Europe (including Russia), and intellectual exchange with which made the great European advancements in philosophy and science of the late Middle Ages possible.

There are many problems with using the Dark Ages as an analogy, not the least of which is that the Dark Ages, to the extent that they were really a thing, took place in a part of the world that, outside of the Italian Peninsula, Greece (and the surrounding areas), and Turkey, had effectively been a global backwater since the extinction of the Neanderthal. Sure, Rome had conquered much of it, but it's not like Roman technological, military, or political advances were coming out of Gallia, Hispania, Germania, or Britannia (or to the extent that they were, they were coming from Romans campaigning there). Things looked very different for much of that thousand years in, say, Persia or East Asia, where the world was doing just fine.

Since the end of the world, the West has seen the rise and fall of more than one great power, and the East has seen its millennia-old great power fall and rise again. There are likely better lessons about the end of a great power in a highly globalized world in the last 600 years than in anything before it. We're not Rome, as much as we'd like to think we are, because the rest of the West is not merely barbarians.

I'm sure I've recommended it here a few times before, but The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi is a great look at the cycle of the decline of a great Western power, the interegnum, the ascendance of another power, and its reign, since the late middle ages (starting with Renaissance Florence). There's much to disagree with in there, and he gets predictions about who will come after the U.S. wrong, but it's full of great historical insights.

I don't think they are being endlessly held hostage. I don't think they ever were, and to the extent that they were, it was very brief and highly localized.

This feels a lot like the people saying Portland is a war zone in 2020 as though the vast majority of Portland wasn't going about its business as though nothing was happening.

There's a simple way to stop the "never ending Palestine party," just as there was to end the "never ending Vietnam party" 55 years ago.

I think this is true of virtually any serious philosophical, political, or scientific ideas, though. I don't know what it says about them other than that they are difficult to master and most people are intellectually lazy.

In the last century, I was in a jazz group that played coffee shops and local festivals and such, and we did an arrangement of that song. I continue to believe it's a great tune, and will vote for anyone who vows to fight such an Executive Order!

You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.

I mean, good for them if they do, but I don't think you have many students going straight into intentional unemployment unless they have enough money that student loans probably aren't an issue.

I think he's right that people broadly conflate critical theory with Marxism, and are particularly afraid of critical theory, even if I am quite certain that they know as little about critical theory as they do about Marxism, and perhaps less.

From early in its radio history through its early television days in the 1960s, Bertrand Russell was a fixture on the BBC, including doing segments in which he would talk about philosophical ideas, particularly those of the first half of the 20th century (famously lampooned here). It would be amazing if we could have someone come on TV and talk about major intellectual movements of the last century or so, including critical theory. I think more people would like it if they knew more about it.

The conversation we should be having, but are not, because it's a difficult conversation to have, is what do we want universities to be for? Should it serve a purely intellectual purpose (in which case, the "bad actors" are inevitable, and I think a feature, not a bug)? Should it prepare young people for careers (generally or specifically)? Should it be the home of the vast majority of our research, from basic to applied? Should it have a broad or narrow collection of majors? Etc.

Some of these are highly compatible purposes for a university, and some are significantly less so, or even contradictory. Currently, at least in practice, universities are trying to be all of them and more, or at least big tier 1 public schools and the bigger private universities are.

American conservatives have been increasingly hostile to the university's intellectual purposes, either desiring to get rid of this purpose entirely, or reset it to some time in the past when, they believe, it was just teaching the important ideas of the past, and not innovating in any way (except, perhaps, in interpreting the ideas of the past). Basically, the American conservatives who think the university should have an intellectual function at all are the most rigid of the Scholastics.

While I think there are plenty of faculty at universities large and small whose own academic work is terrible, and virtually all university faculty teach from a particular perspective, some of which are better, or more flexible, than others, I genuinely believe that the general public's view of the university as "ideologically captured," or overrun with "postmodernism" (as a general rule, the more a person uses that word, the less they understand it), are wildly blown out of proportion. In fact, I think something very different is happening at universities, in some ways the exact opposite of what so many people ignorantly (as in, they don't actually know what's going on at universities) criticize for: 1) The ever-increasing size of university administration, and in particular, upper-level administration, which is both a financial burden to the universities and pretty significantly alters the way universities function; 2) The philosophy of university administration, which has increasingly dominated university administrations and boards since the 90s, of treating the university like a corporation/business generally, which has also changed the way universities function, and resulted in an increased focus on schools, departments, majors, and even individual faculty who have a good "R.O.I.", particularly those that increase post-graduation salary numbers (STEM for the last decade or two, but also business, science, econ, and the practical majors); 3) related to both (1) and (2), the increased adjunctification of the university, so that whereas people who freak out about universities are freaking out about some tenured professor somewhere they heard about on the internet, who is teaching undergrads radical ideas, most of the professors kids will actually have, especially at state schools, will be low-paid adjuncts who have absolutely no job security or academic freedom, and generally toe whatever line the department/administration wants them to or risk losing their poorly paid, over-worked position.

If you want to fix universities differently, and have them produce better, more well-rounded educations, instead of focusing on "pomo" professors and Marxists*, you'd focus on those 3 things, which are rapidly destroying universities as they existed even when many of us were there (for me, that's the mid-to-late 90s, when people were already lampooning them as P.C.U., but still).

*If you have never seen the Zizek-Peterson debate, I recommend not watching it, but there is a funny moment in which Zizek asks Peterson to name some Marxist professors, and of course, Peterson is unable to do so. Then Zizek says he knows of two (one of whom was David Harvey; I can't remember the other). I know of maybe half a dozen in the U.S. (more elsewhere), and I suspect Zizek knows at least that many, but of the half a dozen I know of, none excluding Harvey actually teach Marxism or from a noticeably Marxist perspective. One of the ways that American universities have failed so many is in not teaching them what Marxism is, which means for so many of y'all, Marxism is merely a poorly seen and completely misunderstood spectre haunting academia.

Having spent still more than half of my adult life around universities, I just don't think things are bad there. Granted, I'm not in any way culturally conservative (except that I think 80s post-punk is better than 2000s post-punk, and you can't convince me otherwise), so it may just be a general philosophical difference.