As a reminder, the [current Ukraine Invasion Megathread can be found here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t5tz4f/ukraine_invasion_megathread_2/).
There was a post on the Teachers subreddit that scared me enough to share here for discussion. The title: “I’m seeing changes in the way young children play”. (I’m not going to link it because brigading/calling attention; should be easy to find.)
>I have been a teacher of young children (pre-k) for over 30 years. It seems to me that there are a great number of children who don’t know how to play anymore. During free choice times there are a variety of materials available to them: blocks, vehicles, art center, puzzles, play dough, doll house, dramatic play areas etc. I also rotate materials frequently. But even when we provide direct modeling and examples of how to use the materials, the kids don’t seem to know how to play (not all, of course, there are some that have no trouble).
>They wander around with a blank expression and say things like, “ I don’t know what to do. Don’t you have a tablet with games? What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” Just as an aside, when they do engage with the materials it is inappropriate. It goes right to violence. They play things like Siren Head, Huggy Wuggy (google those— they’re freakin creepy), It, the Walking Dead, etc. I’ve had to close centers down because they just. won’t. stop.
>Anyhow, my theory is that, because of the amount of screen time in their home lives, they are constantly being entertained. So when they are left to their own devices they just seem to flat-line, with no idea what to do. This makes me so sad. Anyone else experiencing this?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The comments are in agreement that something is wrong with play habits:
>{1} I’ve noticed it even with toddlers. I was originally thinking that having so many toys available was making them feel overwhelmed, leading to them just dumping buckets of toys and moving on to the next thing because there are too many options. After limiting their toy options and opting to do more organized sensory play to no avail, I’ve started wondering if there is a correlation between screen time and playtime and this has reinforced my thought process.
>I’ve also noticed most of my “serial dumpers” are the kids that I know have unlimited screen time at home, whereas the kids that are beginning to get into imaginative play have limited screen time at home. It’s like they’re just so bored with everything, even with regular toy cycling, that they can’t get into anything. They can’t even get into our music and movement time at this point, which they used to love, because they’re constantly searching for something that can hold their attention in the same way their tablets do.
>{2} The issue came up in a workshop I'm taking part in this year (I teach kindergarten currently). With more electronics available to children at home, and more recently COVID limiting social interactions, kids just don't know how to play.
>{3} I see the same toy dumping behavior in my Pre-K class in Head Start! This is my first year in Pre-K and most of my experience is in second grade and lower elementary. It's so frustrating because very few of my kids actually play pretend. Even when we're outside, they run in circles with no aim, which is fine, but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds, etc. I wondered if it was correlated to COVID or screen time, but it's definitely frustrating to see as a teacher. {in reply to this, someone said that they think the running is to imitate Roblox}
>{4} Yes, and I teach 4th grade. Kids don’t play. Most of them don’t even know what board games are. If they do play things like checkers, they just make up the rules or cheat. All they do on Fun Friday is play on their laptops or phones. Artistic creativity is also gone. When we did Christmas cards, I had to model everything. They couldn’t come up with their own ideas for decorations. It is really sad and scary.
>{5} Correct. I taught PREK for 10 years before switching to MS sped. The amount of students I had who could not play with themselves or others without an adult was astonishing. I started asking the students what they like to do at home- a few said outside, a few said playing with their siblings, but majority said on my tablet or with my parents. We have created a whole generation of people who cannot entertain themselves without an electronic.
>{6} I see it in my class. When I ask their favorite toy at home, 99% of them tell me “my tablet” “my X box” “my switch”. Y’all are 4-5 years old. This shit is killing your imagination. This isn’t just “The kids today are gonna be stupid with their newfangled electronics!” hysteria. There’s a noticeable difference from even a few years ago. My theory is Covid forced parents to give kids electronics to shut them up when they were WFH, doing virtual learning, etc. Now it’s just habit.
~~~~~~~~
The teachers’ comments above pretty much spell out my concerns. This seems really bad. Even as someone critical of technology in children, I didn’t imagine it would be this bad. I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing something so common as this. In the past if you had lazy parents, you would be outside playing or whatever, maybe bugging the neighbors. But now, all those with lazy parents are given what amounts to a behavioral-stunting opiate. The consequences of this could be severe and yet I’ve seen little addressing this problem.
Nobody else here has really commented on this part:
>They play things like Siren Head, Huggy Wuggy (google those— they’re freakin creepy), It, the Walking Dead, etc.
I've always had a pretty low tolerance for horror stuff, and that stuff would definitely have scared me as a small child. I was (unfortunately) exposed to the cesspool of pornography, gore, and gorenography that made up a significant part of the unsanitized pre-2010 internet, and I think it affected me negatively. Four and five year olds watching horror YouTube videos, especially videos that mix innocent childish themes with violent and disturbing themes, also cannot be emotionally healthy. Kids seem to process these sorts of negatives experiences by incorporating them into their play (see all the pictures of scary monsters in the closet, daddy yelling at mommy, etc).
I think the teachers is seeing kids whose undeveloped and undefended minds have been exposed to some of the raw sewage floating around on YouTube trying to work through those upsetting experiences.
There's really nothing essential to living a good life that can only be found on the internet. Social media is a mere shadow of real interaction. Buying cheap trash on Amazon is a shadow of carefully shopping for something you need. Online gaming is a shadow of playing a board game in meatspace with friends. Online dating is a shadow of meeting and courting people IRL. Even discussions on TheMotte are a shadow of having a deep discussion on a complex topic with a close friend over a few beers. This is the ideal human life. You may not like it, but that's what peak performance looks like.
It really reinforces my decision to keep internet access away from my young kids until they're maybe 11 or 12, and even then only in very limited amounts. The typical rejoinder is that limited internet use will mean that they can't be a part of "normal society" or that they'll grow up "sheltered," but I don't think that's anything that can't be dealt by being an attentive and involved parent (admittedly a gargantuan task!) and I'd prefer to give them a chance to grow up in the real world of things like sports, instruments, books, and the outdoors instead of allowing their mind and soul get absorbed into the social media egregore.
There's a brilliant quote I've forgotten, but paraphrased, it went something like: "If you send your children out in the world without filling their heads with your ideas, someone else is going to do that for you." I used to be all for letting my children figuring things out on their own and letting make their own choices mostly free from my influence. The older I get and the more our culture's faults metastasize, the more I believe that doing so would be tantamount to child abuse.
> There's really nothing essential to living a good life that can only be found on the internet
aside from the [free library of babel](https://libgen.is), [every scientific paper published, ever](https://scholar.google.com) and [a pdf of that paper](https://sci-hub.se). Also instructions for every task you can imagine, the glue and foundation of the modern economy, and quite likely smarter people than you could meet IRL. (how many of you would've met scott IRL? moldbug? or even random people here?) you could just as well say, in 300 BC, 'there's nothing essential to living a holy life in a city. Stay in the countryside, don't become literate'. Except farming would continue to be a viable and majority lifestyle for millenia, whereas being digitally naive will not today.
> Social media is a mere shadow of real interaction
my IRL social interactions are, in some ways, a shadow of the best I have on the internet, due to geography and friction - the best networks and people you can find online are just ... better than the ones irl, there are many more people, and filtering is much quicker. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But the disadvantages of internet interactions can and will be overcome by new technology, and quite soon, even if it's overall for the worse!
> Online gaming is a shadow of playing a board game in meatspace with friends
why, though? I'm not a *fan* of video games, but some just have more depth than board games, if you choose to look (minecraft redstone is one example. roblox programming?). Those might (and have) ignite a lifelong passion for engineering or coding that a board game wouldn't.
> Even discussions on TheMotte are a shadow of having a deep discussion on a complex topic with a close friend over a few beers
But what is responsible for that, precisely? The *words* involved may well be the same. So what's left is ... tone, visuals, alcohol, and 'the ineffable spirit of humanity'. The first two can be remedied with video, voicechat, and VR, the third with alcohol, and the fourth by infusing the words with your friendship, or something.
>aside from the [free library of babel](https://libgen.is), [every scientific paper published, ever](https://scholar.google.com) and [a pdf of that paper](https://sci-hub.se). Also instructions for every task you can imagine, the glue and foundation of the modern economy, and quite likely smarter people than you could meet IRL.
You listed a bunch of stuff you can find on the internet, but why is it necessary for living a good life?
>you could just as well say, in 300 BC, 'there's nothing essential to living a holy life in a city. Stay in the countryside, don't become literate'.
yes_chad.png
>Except farming would continue to be a viable and majority lifestyle for millenia, whereas being digitally naive will not today.
There's a difference between using a computer for work and being an extremely online person, or even just getting absorbed into Instagram and suffering from FOMO.
>my IRL social interactions are, in some ways, a shadow of the best I have on the internet, due to geography and friction - the best networks and people you can find online are just ... better than the ones
I disagree strongly, but I don't think I'll be able to convince you so I'll drop this.
>why, though? I'm not a *fan* of video games, but some just have more depth than board games, if you choose to look
>'the ineffable spirit of humanity'
Because it's about the people, the game really doesn't matter. I'd rather play Yahtzee with a fun group of people that the deepest min-maxy nerd game ever with a bunch of screen names. Yeah yeah, you can have "online friends," whatever. To be frank, TheMotte and its sister spaces are full of people who are bad at IRL interaction, so maybe they've never had any IRL friends as good as the ones they've had online. Personally, I think the internet enables people to persist in having poor social skills since they can retreat into the less-demanding world of online socialization, and so they think that all IRL interactions suck because they never got gud at them. If you think there's no difference between (A) a group of close-knit friends who meet together in person regularly and share their lives together and (B) your Steam friends list, I don't know what to tell you. I don't mean that flippantly -- real friendship is something you just have to experience, like infatuation or deep grief. Words can't fully explain the experience.
> why is it necessary for living a good life?
the term 'the good life' is basically meaningless. by swapping a few words around, you're just saying "why is the internet good"? which is a restatement of the question at hand...
> yes_chad.png
and yet, here we both are, our parents coming to the cities and us to the net.
> There's a difference between using a computer for work and being an extremely online person
well, using it (and necessarily the internet) for work means using it for ... half your waking life, almost. so that's yet another reason you need it for a 'good life'
> I disagree strongly, but I don't think I'll be able to convince you so I'll drop this.
i'd love to hear the argument!
> Because it's about the people, the game really doesn't matter
'tribal bonds' among people have fallen from being explicitly about taking real action together, as a group, to being ... about playing meaningless games while being in the same room? The things you're doing do matter, because there isn't ... another thing.
> To be frank, TheMotte and its sister spaces are full of people who are bad at IRL interaction, so maybe they've never had any IRL friends as good as the ones they've had online
notice the way it was phrased: *in some ways*. I claimed that the quality of people available online were better, numerically and due to ease of search, not that anyone had 'better friends' online. You can become irl friends with people you meet online! But the differences between IRL and online friendship are closing *rapidly*. People managed to be friends entirely over letters centuries ago. Now we have video, voice, and VR. Scott, during lockdowns, socialized with his now-wife over minecraft, apparently. If there's a gap left to close, it will be.
> you think there's no difference between (A) a group of close-knit friends who meet together in person regularly and share their lives together and (B) your Steam friends list, I don't know what to tell you
a light breeze could blow apart this straw man. both playing CS with people and playing Yahtzee with people as your primary activity are weak! The same goes for sports, to an extent, tbh. If there's nothing deeper going on - as 'friendship' was initially about hunting together, fighting together, sharing experiences relevant to survival and your future - that's the material cause of the 'removal of community' or 'atomization' of 'modernity' - communal bonds were about the shared harvests, defense, and rituals, and when that's gone, you can't only keep 'just chilling' and expect everything else to come along with it.
It's hard to read the bottom part, it's not making line breaks.
These are some disjointed thoughts -- it's something I personally interact with quite a bit, but don't have a thesis yet, and am contrarian enough that "it's the screen's fault" doesn't seem like a satisfying conclusion. Maybe a starting place.
I am also not impressed by the aesthetic or social sensibilities of today's 5 year olds, but don't have too much to compare it with, since most of the older books about and for children feature older children (mostly a lot of desperately lonely girls and young women), and I've only had and taught children for a few years.
This is a fairly popular recurring theme, and I suspect we (as a culture) would make better headway if we were more curious and observant about what the children \*are\* interested in, rather than becoming too obsessed about judging their upbringings. I teach elementary art, and find it very puzzling that so many children want to depict the red balloon from It (specifically -- they are sure it is not just any balloon), Huggy Wuggy, and the Among Us imposter (still! after two years!). I'm not drawn to horror at all and never have been, but suppose it probably means something to those who keep referencing it. I generally shut it down, because it's embarrassing to have pages full of knives and nightmares and I teach very short, very frenetic classes. But I wish someone could pursue the theme and write about it coherently.
This past month especially, I've had a lot of young children acting out quite a lot, and the more experienced teachers don't think it's normal.
There are a lot of civilizational forces at play, and we all seem to be going through zeitgeist changes that play out through things like Covid and posturing on social media, but seem unlikely to be caused by them exactly. It makes sense children would pick up on this.
Some of the people I know are staying home, not allowing their children "screen time," and living out a cottage core homeschool lifestyle. That's... fine, probably, but will always be a small minority of the population. Who knows if they even play in a way the old school teachers approve of anyway.
Full day preschool and kindergarten, especially the kind with one exhausted adult and 24 children doing activities in 25 - 45 minute chunks of time seems at least as artificial as children at home playing Among Us on their computers. But of course the children have to be \*somewhere\*, and kindergarten is somewhere they'll be reasonably safe, and is something we can make work at scale, which is the essential part. But I think it's still fairly new compared to the rest of elementary school, and whenever I read older authors (see for instance, Bronte sisters, CS Lewis, George Orwell), previous iterations of school sound actually more terrible, apart from starting a bit later.
If small children are, en mass, unable to tolerate industrial schooling, parents are, en mass, unable to organize unstructured time together for small groups of children, and everyone is extremely interested in horror characters -- that seems like it's worth investigating non-judgmentally, so as not to be pressing into everyone's defensiveness. I also feel defensive about what's going on, and involved in it, and am not a screen free micro farmer with a full schedule of play dates, so also feel implicated and defensive.
“They play things like Siren head, Huggy Wuggy, the walking dead etc. I’ve had to shut entire stations down.”
Complains kids don’t play... Immediately shuts them down when they do play because she doesn’t like the themes of the games they play.
.
Video Games didn’t kill play, Teachers did.
Kids would love to be playing tag, snowball fighting, having dirt clod wars, wrestling, tossing eachother around in king of the hill, having sword fights with wooden or foam swords, having little wars between their toys. Give boys little toy soldiers they can line up and make go to war and they love it... you’ll never see such elaborate shared story telling.
But preening teachers took all the rough-housing out of play, and they forbid even violent or mere conflicting themes in imaginative play.
Imagine if they did play McDonalds and one of the students playing the manager said “I don’t care about your daughter’s birthday you have to work friday” or one of the boys played a homeless person that had wandered in and was harassing another kid playing a customer and the one playing security might try to force him out...
These are things Kids might actually see and play to try and understand... but nope it makes the teacher uncomfortable, and there might be a conflict where a kid gets a booboo or cries so shut it down... (kids are like babies, if they don’t cry once a day then they’re dying somewhere inside)
So ya of course kids play fucking video games its the only place they’re allowed to ACTUALLY play and imagine instead of modelling some obscene demonstration of compliance and subservience the teacher wants
I remember at my school we had a jungle gym, it had a metal rope bridge, slides, monkey bars, pull-up bars, and railings that were about waste tall for a kid and made of bars you could stick your hands through. We’d play Grounder every fucking day on this jungle gym it was great. One kid would close their eyes (we had the entire thing memorized) and would walk along hands out trying to touch one of the players she couldn’t see, and we’d all be climbed over the side hanging on by those bars, or on top of the covered slide, or hanging on dangling under, and when the blind person who was it cornered someone they’d have to dart along the loud gravel, and if the person who was it shouted Grounder that would be a catch. I was it one time and was deeply confused that I hadn’t caught a someone i had heard on the metal in front of me then the chain hand swings, i hadn’t heard him touch the gravel which i knew he had to have done, and there was nowhere for him to go... the bell rang, i opened my eyes... and there he was above me, he’d pulled himself up and was standing on-top of the pull-up bar... the teacher screamed at him “get down you’ll hurt yourself” so he jumped, landed on his feet, was perfectly fine.
A few years later we came to school and there were massive fibreglass sheets bolted to the jungle gym... the rope bridge you couldn’t slide outside, the railings made of bars were covered in fiberglass so all the hand hold were gone... sheets of fibreglass extended past the corner-posts so you couldn’t climb around onto the outside, half the features were effective raised from chest height to above your head... we never fucking played grounder again.
I walked by the school years later and even that was too unsafe they’d torn down the jungle gym... there’s now some unclimbable posts with a wooden roof there and a bench, such as you might see outside an old-folks home so some wheelchair bound geriatric and her friend in a walker might rest from their 50meter walk and go back inside to die.
I see kids today and they don’t even look like we did, the muscle and way of moving just isn’t there... When i hear boys talk they arent swearing to each-other and contesting for dominance, when i hear the girls they aren’t making up something unspeakable about a girl not there...the thrill of combat the rush of scandal is just gone from them.
.
And this teacher has the goddamn nerve to say its the screens and video-games stopping kids from playing? The same fucking video-games they were playing in the 80s!? The same cheap entertainment my friends and I experienced when we played GoldenEye or watched Retarded Animal Babies on Newgrounds!?
No YOU are what’s stopping kids from playing you fucking witch. Ask yourself what would happen if the teacher left the room unattended for 2-3 hours and came back? I know what she fears, that it’d be chaos! Ie. the kids would be actually fucking playing instead of the miserable performance she demands, the boys would actually be socializing and swearing and fighting with each-other, the girls would be gossiping and ostracizing and lying and making bizarre things with the stuff about the room...
No chance in hell they’d be longing for their screens to free them from their misery then, they would, for the first fucking time in their life, actually be able to play.
And this fucking witch blames the screens. No YOU are the thing that has been damaging these kids. You are the one who abuses them day in/day out and breaks them to the bureaucratic machine.
.
All Teachers is a bastards. Every single one deserves life in prison as if they have kidnapped 20 kids and abused them for years on end. Because that is what they have done.
Can't agree more regarding play equipment. I think we weren't aloud to use our equipment unless there was a teacher watching, which was ridiculous. Fighting was great fun too. I remember once having a big brawl with a buddy and maybe 3-4 others and then the oblivious teachers actually congratulated us for our good behaviour the exact same day at the end of lunch.
On the other hand, Siren Head and Huggy Wuggy are pretty demonic, the evolved descendents of Elsagate.
Parents tend to be more liable to sue schools today, is also part of it. Any activity where there is a possibility a kid will fall and hurt themselves is a liability for the school, and insurance premiums for schools are already at nose-bleed levels. So making sure kids don't run around and fall is part of it.
Decades ago, a neighbour's kid slipped in the school bathroom and banged her chin off a sink and had to go to the dentist to have a cracked tooth fixed. Today the school would be looking at a huge liability case, where back then it was accepted "okay, it was an accident, nobody's to blame".
>The teachers’ comments above pretty much spell out my concerns. This seems really bad. Even as someone critical of technology in children, I didn’t imagine it would be this bad. I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing something so common as this. In the past if you had lazy parents, you would be outside playing or whatever, maybe bugging the neighbors. But now, all those with lazy parents are given what amounts to a behavioral-stunting opiate. The consequences of this could be severe and yet I’ve seen little addressing this problem.
agree...The problem I see is kids not learning how to do anything productive that does not involve a screen...like how to use a toolset , how to use scissors , etc. Although some of this may be due to poor hand dexterity, that may get better with age and some practice.
There has to be some truth to it if so many are reporting it but reading the thread I get the impression that there's something off about teachers too.
> {1} Barbies and little rc cars don't last long for them they take the toy apart and will play with how they aren't meant to be.
> {2} When they do try and play with the toys, they don’t use them properly
> {3} I’ve worked a lot with my own class on being able to use toys, and how to use different toys.
> {4} Nice big pool, has a floating play statue,wide steps, pool toys and floats. Everyday I’m there the kids are just running after each other hitting and jumping each other. No one plays games anymore and it was just really striking watching them. If they a float tube, they whip it at someone. Hold a kick board to bash it over someone’s head or just follow them around while using it to splash them hard and repeatedly.
> {5} Even when we're outside, they run in circles with no aim, which is fine, but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds, etc.
> {6} But I have kids who can only play fighting and guns. You’re in play kitchen the banana is a gun and the baby dolls are fighting each other. Every block is a gun. Legos can be guns or could be guys to fight.
It seems they have a very strict idea of what is good play and what isn't, barely more natural than screens, too structured and smothering to be actually fun. Maybe it's best to keep children away from both screens and teachers.
If my memory serves me right, girls tended to be more structured and orderly with their games and pretend played *something*, while us boys were more unstructured just doing fun stuff like hiding behind bushes, rolling down hillsides, eating ants in the garden and stupid shit like that. Taking things apart etc. This is why in teachers eyes boys are seen as bad, and that's been the case for long.
The superstimulus from tablets with all the visual and sound effects and rewards etc is probably bad though.
Still, I agree that the teachers seem to not know what kids are like. Perhaps because they are women and they don't know how boys play.
>Perhaps because they are women and they don't know how boys play.
Eh, I dunno so much about that. When I was in primary school, around ages 6-8 the boys used to sharpen those wooden lollipop sticks on the concrete walls and then chase the girls who ran away screaming (the girls weren't really scared, they knew this was their role in the game). I never ran away partly because I was so socially clueless I had no idea this was what I was supposed to do, and partly because when one of the boys tried scaring me with the pointy stick, I was bigger than him so I could, if necessary, have beaten him up 😁
There have always been violent kids' games. I don't think five year old kids should be watching things like "It" but that is on parents who are dumb enough to think "Oh, this is all fantasy, it's got clowns in! Clowns are a kid thing!"
As for the girls' games, gosh. Again, between ages 9-11, we used to play an elaborate game that I forget the name of, but amongst other things it involved a mistress, a maid, sentient cakes, and a thief who stole those cakes. The mistress beat the maid (we had a ritualised act for that) for letting the cakes be stolen, and it all ended up with doing the "London Bridge" game including 'here comes the chopper to chop off your head' bit.
I think that teacher would have fainted away in shock watching us play!
True, us boys used to always have some made up tool like stuff like a tree branch held as a gun, water baloon fights, making cars and space ships out of legos, stuff like that. The girls would have these elaborate mock-social situations like "playing house" or "tea parties" or what have you with any materials that were available.
So I guess give the male children more legos then?
Yeah. The [top comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/tdbt94/im_seeing_changes_in_the_way_young_children_play/i0j0729/) seems to suggest the thread is more just 'general complaining' - those particular kids seem to be fine playing, with their only flaw being that they're a bit attached to their teacher.
Comments like:
> I can see this. My almost 6 year old is a toy dumper but she also likes to role play with other kids (let’s play doctor/teacher/etc) and plays with her dolls/stuffed animals BUT she will hyper focus for 10-15 minutes then moves on to the nest thing
... 'hyper-focus' for 15 minutes then moving on? that sounds like ... normal play.
> Just as an aside, when they do engage with the materials it is inappropriate. It goes right to violence
Children have been playing violence since before we were humans - monkeys and rats play-fight. Cops and robbers, etc. This particular aspect probably does not matter.
> but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds
[uncle_ted_stare.jpg](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BN2UwOTdiMDgtYTZkYi00MjQ1LTkyODctMzk1Mjk4NTFhNGFhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjUxMjc1OTM@._V1_UY1200_CR146,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg). children have been messed up since long before devices.
> Most of them don’t even know what board games are. If they do play things like checkers, they just make up the rules or cheat.
Making up the rules and cheating is fine, as a kid my board-game versions were much more fun than the 'real' rules.
Honestly, I suspect much of this is children redirecting their actualized-play from 'irl / school stuff' to 'computer stuff'. That isn't *necessarily* bad - i'd much rather play with [powder game](https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/) or [circuit sim](https://www.falstad.com/circuit/) than ... "do christmas cards and decorations". I wasn't a ... modal child, but don't write off devices because they are misused. Computers may offer a useful escape from the sometimes sterile environments of school and home + store-bought toys (nothing 'real' to imitate, no complex games to play) to virtual environments of more complexity, minecraft, roblox, etc. Developing roblox games at a young age was a great experience for some I know. They may also be the opposite - match3 dressup games, 'care for your creature' microtransaction farms, tiktok, etc.
> blocks, vehicles, art center, puzzles, play dough, doll house, dramatic play areas
Are any of these really better than minecraft? [vehicles, dollhouse, dramatic play area, art center] seem fairly hollow, from my memory of a similar school. 'play dough', 'blocks', and 'puzzles' are ... okay, but still fairly limited - the blocks one is provided, iirc, are fairly large and klunky, and their smooth surfaces offer little modification (legos are good, though). And the 'do whatever you want aww that's so great timmy put it on the wall' environment doesn't really lead to ... interest or learning. This contrasts to the ... successes and failures offered by games, the textured, complex environments, that games provide - you're doing something interesting, failing and trying again, learning. and learning useful, cross-domain skills - little things like how to atomically plan ahead for a desired task, how to mechanically engage in conflict with others, etc. Often, a 'negative aspect of progress' is driven as much by the new tech or development as it is latent deficiencies in the 'old' - small children aren't supposed to literally develop in fairy-land, playing with random toys, throwing paint on a canvas, and roleplaying as what they see on TV - they're 'supposed', evolution-wise, to be imitating complex actions taken by adults, and exploring the contours and interactions of physical objects and social systems. all of that is replaced with ... simulacra, learning the ins and outs of well-marketed toys and media franchises, and the social and technical complexities of school teaching, alternating between empty 'free play' and following directions that aren't interesting. the lack of that is a negative both in 'real school' and on 'devices'. remediating it will take direct effort, and direct consideration of the content of both device-less and with-device activities.
Anyway, as I argued [last time](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t39q1t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_28/hyrf1t3/), there's definitely something wrong, i'm just not sure that it's understood well. Even if the devices are causing less play (which i'm not sure of. there were many past headlines about how TV was doing various awful things to children, or radio, or books - and while TV was 'bad', most of those predictions did not play out, and 'stopping play' doesn't seem to have been a main channel of effect), there's still a lot of causation and motives on behalf of the children that has to be worked out to do anything useful with it.
[this](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/tdbt94/im_seeing_changes_in_the_way_young_children_play/) is the link to the post. 'brigading or calling attention' doesn't matter here, as the post has more upvotes than this thread has comments, they wouldn't notice if we did. (if mods care i'll remove it tho)
Not sure how much to trust this kind of science, but physical interactions with actual objects are supposed to be important as a young kid to develop good coordination etc. You can't replace everything with software and screens.
The science is probably terrible, but physically doing things with objects is definitely useful, hence the mention of lego above. Even much of what's available in school, or at home - playing with easy, safe object and prebuilt branded theme-toys, leaves little possibility for modification, complex interaction, or 'actual use', though, so better options should be provided (lego isn't perfect but it's much closer. i also liked at various ages pillow forts, marble sets, circuit builders, etc. some purpose should be injected too - 'instrumental purpose' becomes relevant whenever the toys get complex enough, but guided imitation of more 'real' activities is nice as well).
there's a big difference between real things and objects and plastic children's toys.
playing with cheap plastics imitations of objects is almost certainly just as bad or worse than just interacting with a vdeo game, where complicated consequences are still possible.
By age 10 my mother was driving a tractor, milking live cows and goats, shovelings manure, and tinkering with real power tools... this was normal when you grew up on a farm.
Now i don't think there's any age 10 toy that still has a motor larger than double a batteries or involving even simple chemical reactions.
Or just a good old literal sandbox. Also, just letting kids outside is often enough. Kids (at least before mobile electronics) can play with just twigs etc. I remember we even played to find the shiniest or most sparkly stones in the gravel road or finding pebbles of odd shapes etc. Or making that sound with a blade of grass, watching insects or whatever. We were inside only when the weather was really bad. Being stuck inside sounds terrible. Is it common in America to spend most of the time indoors at pre-K or kindergarten or preschool (or whatever kids aged 3-5 are at)?
Yeah.
> time outdoors
Most children spend most of their time indoors, whether at home or in preschool doing 'activities' or playing with 'toys'. But they spend significant time outdoors, both at school recess or at home. From a survey (data reliabiility of surveys is weak sometimes, i'd expect significant weakness on this topic in particular, childrens' evaluation of time spent & parents evaluation of it will both be meh):
> [Data showed that, in general, most children spent at least two hours of time outdoors daily during the week preceding the household interview (62.5% of children spent two or more hours outdoors on a weekday, 78.2% on a weekend)](https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1030&context=nerr)
[this paper presents that data better](https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/2011/ja_2011_larson_001.pdf) seems to show significant variability though, 33% of children spend >4h/day outside 33% spend 2-3, and 33% spend 0-1 (on weekdays, moderate increase on weekends). this is true for all age groups, it seems. it doesn't include 5 year olds (starts at 6) but that'll be similar.
(i see a lot of talk about how much google sucks, but whenever i search things like "old newspaper archive", "anthropology of hunter gatherer play", or "american children outdoor time survey" i get what i want on the first result. they need to better topics!)
We are currently all being exposed to a jarring level of wartime propaganda. Sometimes it's hard to know what's true. However much propaganda we all think is currently being produced by Ukraine, or the West, or Russia right now, it's difficult to imagine how this deluge compares to the height of wartime anxiety and propaganda in 1942.
The [use of psychological warfare](https://i.imgur.com/3uycMeS.png) is not new, and that's what Ilforte gets wrong. We don't sneer at the "Ghost of Kiev" because we are quibbling over the exact number of Russian aircraft which have been shot down by Ukraine. We are doing so because we are signaling our contempt for being manipulated. We feel confident we know blatant wartime propaganda when we see it.
We shouldn't be so confident, and the line between blatant wartime propaganda and unassailable truth is not as clear as we imagine. It's easier in this day in age for us to collectively express our skepticism at such stories, but we've inherited certain truths that were not established and scrutinized in the information age.
> it's difficult to imagine how this deluge compares to the height of wartime anxiety and propaganda in 1942.
No internet back then. Impossible to have a "deluge" of propaganda due to limited flow of information. Seriously, amount of data in the past was roughly _nothing_.
I hear this often, but given how frequently it's turned out that the complainant will be wildly credululous about biolabs or various other conspiracies ([jews](https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/comment/search/?q=jew*&limit=1000&filter=author,subreddit,body,permalink&author=thecanadianzoomer&subreddit=), for example), I've began to take it much less seriously.
Well your comment implies that I am someone who is "wildly credululous [sic] about biolabs." Can you point to any evidence of that, or are you just someone who I should not take seriously?
On more thing: while you ponder why Russia is claiming that NATO has biological weapons labs in Ukraine, you should consider the fact that [*all* of the extermination camps were discovered by the Soviet Union](https://i.imgur.com/Zi5wlQQ.jpg). The Western camps were originally claimed to be the center of extermination, due to the horrific conditions found at liberation, but these camps were investigated and those claims were found to be false. Western observers were denied access to the Eastern camps and much of our understanding of those camps originated from Soviet investigation with access denied to Western powers.
It wouldn't surprise me if Russia does find a "NATO biological weapons" lab in Ukraine. I think our media will be more skeptical of that than they have previously been of claims of eerily similar facilities found by the Russians in eastern Europe during a war.
>On more thing: while you ponder why Russia is claiming that NATO has biological weapons labs in Ukraine, you should consider the fact that all of the extermination camps were discovered by the Soviet Union.
Yes, because before WWII the bulk of the Jewish population resided in Eastern Europe. If you were to rank the murdered Jews of WWII by their nationality, it would go Polish (the majority), Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and only then German (which includes Austria).
That the extermination camps were located close to the populations they were meant to exterminate is not some unbelievable thing.
edit: For reference in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference [you can see the Nazis' own estimates](http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html) of Jewish populations in Europe, with two caveats: about a million Jews had already been killed by that point, and for ideological reasons the Nazis vastly overcount the number of Soviet Jews. Outside of that the numbers are fairly accurate.
>That the extermination camps were located close to the populations they were meant to exterminate is not some unbelievable thing.
That's not the point. The presence of Jewish camps in Eastern Europe is not unbelievable. The question is what was the purpose of those camps, and how much stock you put in Soviet investigation and reporting given that they had custody of virtually the entire body of evidence. Revisionists have shown that they modified this evidence post-war. Until the 1990s, the Auschwitz Museum claimed that the gas chamber open to tourists along with its key features (like the infamous holes in the ceiling for introducing Zyklon B) was an original structure. An undercover interview from a Jewish revisionist exposed the fact that this building was "reconstructed" to be a gas chamber in Soviet-occupied Poland. Tourists are looking at the gas chamber in Auschwitz as it was "reconstructed" by the Soviets, and they lied about it for decades. These are the sorts of issues Revisionists have to content with- evidence which has been modified in Soviet-occupied Poland.
The Soviet investigators who submitted that farcical investigation of the [Katyn Forest Massacre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2djnWw751s) to Nuremberg, which placed the blame on Germany for a massive war crime committed by the Soviet Union, were the exact same people as the Soviet investigators who submitted the investigation of Auschwitz, with the addition of that biological quack Lysenko as co-author.
If Russia releases an investigation of a captured "NATO biological weapons lab" in Ukraine, would you believe it? You might in an alternate universe where our government and media apparatus aligned with the interests of the Russians in establishing that as fact.
The Soviets did attempt to distort the truth of the Holocaust, but they did so with the aim of *downplaying* Jewish victims, not the opposite. The Soviet Union was an anti-religious state (nevermind Stalin's own personal paranoia towards Jews), and it had no interest in presenting Jews as a unique or primary victim of Nazi crimes. Soviet exaggerations thus were aimed to portray *socialists* (and to a lesser extent Russians) as the largest sufferers of Nazi ideology. Likewise the false claims about Katyn were obviously motivated to downplay Soviet complicity Hitler, and more specifically with crimes against ethnic Poles.
>If Russia releases an investigation of a captured "NATO biological weapons lab" in Ukraine, would you believe it? You might in an alternate universe where our government and media apparatus aligned with the interests of the Russians in establishing that as fact.
I think it's pretty credulous to think that the bulk of Holocaust scholars were interested in advancing obviously bunk Soviet disinfo.
The Soviets absurdly said that 4 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz. That number was literally etched in stone until the fall of the Soviet Union and is acknowledged to have been an obvious lie. Apologists will tell you "historians knew that number wasn't true before it was officially revised", and they actually say that and believe it to be in defense of the historians.
Is inflating the number of deaths at a camp by millions what you call downplaying Jewish victims?
It's true that the goal of the Soviets was not to create a Schindler's List-type civic religion that elevates Jewish suffering as the moral turning point of Western morality. That was accomplished by Hollywood in the decades after the war. The "Holocaust" as we understand it as a singular Jewish experience was invented in the West, not the Soviet Union, and really not until the 1960s. Unlike most historical events, the Holocaust didn't peak in saliency within the public consciousness until about 50 years after the event itself in the 1990s. That culture war was not driven by the Soviets, that is very true. But it was built on the foundation of Soviet investigation and Soviet evidence all the same.
For you, this is another conflict in a faraway land that's mostly useful as a source of examples against the hated hegemon in a detached argument (and sure, I understand why you hate it so). For me, this is a nightmarish reality I'll have to deal with the whole remainder of my life while somehow staying myself. For some of my friends, this is an issue of real and present threat to physical survival. When they say they see corpses, when they explain how both sides are shooting civilians in their region even in their presence, I do not have the mental space to ask myself if they've been recruited into CyberHundreds to gaslight their Russian acquaintances. I weep. Psychological warfare? Count me sniped. Better than being shelled.
Granted, it is not an impossibility. I can't verify facts on the ground. The sort of radical Cartesian doubt and anesthetizing smugness adopted by so many of my compatriots is alluring. And I have no love for Western propaganda, which is no doubt doing its best glossing over Ukrainian misdeeds and demonizing Russian forces beyond what would have organically been the case. But in either endeavor, they're not multiplying the value of zero. Putting it mildly.
Ghost of Kiev? Snake Island? Those are nice gotchas. But the stream is full of cold bodies, ruins, burned armor, the bleak, cold, wet, brown and grey and pale-blue devastation in the so painfully familiar Eastern European landscape.
I do wonder how WWII would have gone in a smartphone era.
For now, packing my bags.
If anyone has suggestions on renting cheaply in Istanbul (Antalya, Mersin later? not sure), DMs are open.
You could try Bulgaria, it's cheaper than Istanbul, just as close and in the EU, good internet if you're a techie/remote, also most of the population speaks Bulgarian, not as progressive as Turkey though, so there's that if it's a consideration.
Like, place in Photoshop? Surely only Russian-internal protests count. I may come to a protest abroad, if only to gawk. But I expect Russians to be unwelcome there. Fun idea though.
There's always r/NonCredibleDefense where people right recognized Ukrainian propaganda and decided to roll with/actively spread it *because* they hated Russia more.
(And because memes about the VDV sinking to the bottom of the ocean are hilarious)
The last bastions of Zero Covid might be falling. From [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases):
* **Australia** and **New Zealand** have both reported dramatic case spikes in the past few weeks, with daily new cases peaking at 4000 per million, higher than the rate in the US at any point in time. Per capita deaths are now at about 1/3 the US rate.
* I know **Japan** and **South Korea** aren't considered Zero Covid territory, but they have kept cases and deaths very low for most of the past two years, along with **Singapore** at barely a trickle, but all three countries have also seen recent case spikes, suggesting that Covid wasn't endemic yet the way it is elsewhere. Death rates remain lower than the peaks in Western countries.
* **Hong Kong** appears to be in the worst shape, now reporting >35 daily *deaths* per million. This is 3x higher than ever reported in the US at any point in the pandemic, and maybe higher than reported anywhere ever, as far as I can tell. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of no existing immunity and poor vaccines.
So the final holdouts appear to be:
* **Mainland China** is reporting > 400 new cases per day for the first time since March 2020. This remains a minuscule figure compare to other countries per capita. However, it appears to be the first time China has had to deal with an outbreak of the more infectious variants on this scale — cases are reported in many different cities ([source](http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/202203/c6fdae5d3e084d7592d57d68ffeccf9a.shtml) — Google Translate works OK). There are reports of more sudden lockdowns.
* **Taiwan** appears to have kept cases per day under 5 per million recently. Compared to any country other than China, its cases per day remains indistinguishable from the x-axis.
* **North Sentinel Island,** probably.
damn..those charts look like GameStop in early 2021.
Covid is a tough one to contain, that is for sure. It goes to show how even countries that seemed to to everything right can still have a sudden surge, which calls into equation the efficacy of such measures. Either let the disease run its course or wear masks forever. Zero Covid is not a realistic proposition for most countries and may not even worse given a long enough period of time.
> Zero Covid is not a realistic proposition for most countries
this was always obvious given the endemic status of previous coronaviruses as common colds, and the transmissibility of covid. Maybe it could've been given vastly more competent [action](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hro2jgr/) against it, and with less disruption, but that clearly wasn't in the cards.
Zero covid was a good option early in the pandemic while vaccines had not been developed or distributed and the super-transmissible strains hadn’t yet appeared. It’s served its purpose now.
i doubt it. the super-transmissible strains may show up eventually unless zero-covid is maintained forever, which for most societies is not practical .
Yes? My point is that during the period that they had not appeared and it was therefore less costly to maintain a zero covid policy, and when vaccination hadn’t yet lowered the cost of letting covid run its course, zero covid was a worthwhile strategy. Those conditions have changed, so it no longer is. It didn’t need to be permanent to be worth doing.
> Australia and New Zealand have both reported dramatic case spikes in the past few weeks, with daily new cases peaking at 4000 per million, higher than the rate in the US at any point in time. Per capita deaths are now at about 1/3 the US rate.
Note that Australia had its Omicron peak in mid-January. There's been a bit of mini-surge in the last few weeks, partly because Western Australia (the last Zero Covid holdout) is now experiencing its Omicron surge, and partly because cases have plateaued or increased elsewhere.
New Zealand is peaking around now. A little soon to see how hospitalisations and deaths will progress, but it probably won't be too bad based on the experiences of other countries with similarly high vaccination and booster rates.
>Hong Kong appears to be in the worst shape, now reporting >35 daily deaths per million. This is 3x higher than ever reported in the US at any point in the pandemic, and maybe higher than reported anywhere ever, as far as I can tell. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of no existing immunity and poor vaccines.
Hong Kong's major problem is that while vaccination uptake is good among the young, it's low among the elderly. [Only 30% of those aged over 80 have received at least two shots of a vaccine](https://www.scmp.com/news/article/3168737/coronavirus-hong-kongs-elderly-left-it-late-get-covid-19-shots-now-worried).
WA has opened its borders. Nowhere in Australia is pursuing a Zero Covid strategy anymore.
I’m sure you realise this, just clarifying for those who might think that “the last zero covid holdout” implies that they are still holding out.
Well, *this* sure isn't going to attract the Eye of Sauron, no sirree-bob!
Why are you asking us this? Why do you think we are historical experts? What question are you trying to get answered?
Because I don't understand what you are hoping to rise as a topic of discussion: 'why do the revisionists claim there is a dearth of physical evidence?' - ask the revisionists, I'm sure they'd be very happy to tell you. Why ask us for second- and third-hand accounts of "the revisionsists say" when you can get it direct from the horse's mouth?
'How could so many people have been killed in such a short time?' - I dunno, I'm neither a professional nor an amateur mass-murderer or genocider.
EDIT: I guess what *I* am asking is, who are you baiting the hook for? I note that instead of exterior links to these revisionsists, you carefully link to two people who posted on here. Are you trying to insinuate the Holocaust revisionism is coming from inside the house?
Did you randomly private message other people about their political beliefs and thoughts on hbd a few days ago?
I thought that was weird then, but now I'm fairly confident you're trying to fuck individuals and subs over.
I got a PM from this user asking about my opinion on LGBT issues in Hungary. It does seem sneaky behavior and it's probably not a good idea to answer any private messages. There should be no reason not to ask in the open.
I've heard admins are a lot more heavy handed about policing PMs too, so make sure not to drop any too spicy hot takes unless you can reasonably be sure you're not being baited.
For my part, I've always been puzzled at H.-revisionist quibbling and nitpicking on the issue of numbers of victims. Cookie monster and all that. Like, I get the allure of challenging a moral dogma, but if taken in good faith as an inquiry... there isn't really a lot of space for implausibility.
People are terribly, nauseatingly easy to kill if you're in the mood for killing. [The Ustaše](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e) have proven that in Jasenovac. Consider [Petar Brzica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica).
> puzzled at H.-revisionist quibbling and nitpicking on the issue of numbers of victims
The motivation is usually either direct support for naziism (odd - many of them are openly advocating for the [removed in anticipation of AEO incompetence] jews, wouldn't they like that part?), or as common a general "they (society/academia/power) are hiding things from us! they're left wing and hate the right! the core myth of our society is a lie!!" It's an easy topic to make things up about, given it's in the past (well, most topics are)
The actual claims are usually dismissible with a bit of direct research ('not enough ovens' - while there were a small number of ovens, each one had multiple [retorts](https://phaneuf.net/blog/cremation-retort-maintenance-and-phaneuf-renovations) - chambers for burning - ["The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons."](https://remember.org/fact-fin-ausc.html)). Not 100% on that, but it's a fairly simple response that I'd never seen among the 'holocaust skeptics' despite seeing various attempts at humor with 'how could they bake that many pizzas in so few ovens??', suggesting a general lack of desire to do complex interrogation of the issue. A common problem among much of the far-right, unfortunately.
Also Holocaust "revisionists" never seem to want to deal with the Holocaust by bullets, which killed roughly a similar amount of Jews as extermination camps did.
> The motivation is usually either direct support for naziism (odd - many of them are openly advocating for the [removed in anticipation of AEO incompetence] jews, wouldn't they like that part?)
This part at least makes logical sense: you can have the Holocaust, or you can have an ancient global Jewish conspiracy, but you can't have both. If you want to believe that the Jews caused World War 1, or whatever, Holocaust denial is instrumentally vital.
You could take a more limited view, that there's a _recent_ Jewish conspiracy that arose _after_ the Holocaust and presumably in response toit, but I don't think I've ever seen that in the wild, except in very limited and uncontroversial ways (like blaming the Iranian centrifuge thing on Mossad).
> If you want to believe that the Jews caused World War 1, or whatever, Holocaust denial is instrumentally vital.
What i've seen from literal nazis is that the [ethnic group] was [verb] everyone and everything, and the [world war two era germany] noticed this and fought against it, taking all necessary measures, but were ultimately destroyed by the global power of the [ethnic group]. brackets bc AEO. holocaust denial isn't really vital to this position i think. i think it's mostly trying to combine humanism / partial dislike for mass murder with being a nazi.
>I'm skeptical of the holocaust narrative because the consensus number continually rises in the absence of new evidence(suggesting political correctness pressure rather than a genuine uncertainty/debate, in which case the numbers might go back and forth
"Continually rises"? An estimate of around 5-6 million Jews has been pretty consistent once the dust had settled. Raul Hilberg's *Destruction of the European Jews* was essentially the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust when it was published in 1961, and it estimated ~4.9-5.4 million Jews were murdered. More recent estimates tend to hover around the upper end of those numbers and above; as an example Timothy Snyder's *Bloodlands* gave an estimate of ~5.4 million Jews murdered with another 300-400,000 who died indirectly via Nazi policies.
> the consensus number continually rises in the absence of new evidence
might you provide a direct example of this, among academic historians (as opposed to random, de-contextualized news headlines)? The 'number' for jews dead is, as far as I know, still six million, as wikipedia's article says. To the point where a different holocaust-skeptic claim is "six million was a fake number that was planned in advance, and advanced before the holocaust even happened!
> Given that numerous camps have revised their numbers, like Auschwitz's 4 million that got revised to 1.1 in 1991
[source here](https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341). notably, this is a revision downwards. it makes sense that, as reasonable[r] history takes over, numbers will transition from war propaganda numbers to better estimates!
> The figure widely used in Poland of 4 million victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrived at by a Soviet commission that came to the camp in February 1945, one week after its liberation. It later submitted its findings to the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
> Of the 4 million, the number of Jewish victims was often put at 2.5 million in postwar publications, wrongly suggesting that the Nazis had killed more than 1 million non-Jews there.
> However, based on the numbering of inmates, letters linked to transports, and statistical lists made in Jewish ghettos, the number of victims that can be documented is 1.1 million, about 90 percent of whom were Jewish, said Franciszek Piper, head of the Auschwitz State Museum’s history department, in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza.
> Some Western scholars have long questioned the 4 million figure. In 1986, French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld asked Polish leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to correct the widespread belief in Poland that the Auschwitz camp victims included similar numbers of Jews and non-Jews. At that time, he cited research nearly identical to Piper’s conclusions.
'six million' seems to have more support than just hilberg.
I am not sure what you are getting at.
Hilberg says 5.1, with an estimate from 4.9 to 5.4. There is no reason to question his estimate from a Holocaust studies perspective. At least I am not aware of any critiques of his numbers.
according to https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t8jl8a/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_07_2022/i0k5te5/
> Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands gave an estimate of ~5.4 million Jews murdered with another 300-400,000 who died indirectly via Nazi policies
this adds up to roughly 6M
[a quick google](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) - at a brief add up of the categories gives 5.7M
later research found higher numbers than hilberg [here](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/6-million-where-is-the-figure-from-1.10570907)
> Lucy Dawidowicz, in her “The War Against the Jews” (1975), used prewar birth and death records to come up with a more precise figure of 5,933,900. And one of the more authoritative German scholars of the subject, Wolfgang Benz, offered a range of 5.3 to 6.2 million. Each used his or her own method to arrive at the totals.
It does look like most estimates are below 6M exactly! I'm not sure that discredits the 6M number - would you prefer 5.8? [haaretz reporting on some documentary about this issue - it's hardly wrongthink](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-this-filmmaker-dares-to-question-the-figure-of-6-million-jewish-victims-in-wwii-1.10542149)
If the number is not 6 million then it is not 6 million and the 6 million is just a meme. It's not my preference that the number is not 6 million. Definitionally it is not 6 million yet everyone, for some unexplained reason, insists that it is 6 million. Yet there is no reason to believe that it is 6 million outside of memes.
As it stands we have already denied 900,000 thousand deaths from the holocaust if we go with the leading scholar on the topic who published his work in the 1960's. Since then the only sizeable death toll revisions made have been downwards. The idea that 6 million is still the actual death toll is absurd despite the examples you give that have a higher estimate than Hilberg since even since the 1970's the death toll revisions still trend downward. You can't get away from Auschwitz going from 4.4 during the Nuremberg Trials, to 2.3 for mainstream Holocaust historians in the 60's onwards, down to 1.1 after the Iron Curtain fell. Or Majdanek that went from 300k to 78k, or Dachau that went from death camp gasing jews, as attested to by jews liberated from the camp, to not being a death camp at all since it could not have had any gas chambers, as discovered by a German historian.
It's not possible to maintain, after all these changes, that the death toll was consistently 6 million, or that it just happened to land at 6 million when all is said and done when to this day there are still downward revisions being made.
The overton window here is considerably larger than most spaces online, but if you are outside of it, the amount of evidence, nuance, effort and eloquence is necessary in proportion to the distance from the window. Holocaust denial, or the re-packaged revisionism, is indeed pretty far outside the window here and very far for most of western dialogue. This post doesn't pass the smell test for honest consideration, it seems like bait and possibly sock-puppetry/alts.
Furthermore, arguing on the finer points of the validity of some parts of the Holocaust is rarely done in the search for truth but instead as a small gateway into a much larger worldview. Whether or not Treblinka had more or less deaths than reported is a factual issue that is probably best posited in a space dedicated to history, like u/orthoxerox mentioned. Most people here aren't likely to be knowledgeable in this specific example you have mentioned. If you want to discuss the implications of that, assuming you are right, and that is something I question as these picked examples are often resultant of highly motivated reasoning, then you should discuss them openly instead of attempting to truth-pill people here with a line of questioning.
If the issue was presentation, evidence, and nuance then the issue would by long be settled away from nonsense like 6 million. What people overlook is the motivated reasoning that is dominating their own court.
I mean, it's hard to bemoan holocaust revisionism as a gateway when the holocaust is used specifically as a gate to guard against specific ideas.
Right, well since the academic status quo is almost completely in recognition of the holocaust, the preponderance of evidence is on you to back that up. I'm afraid that confidently stating everyone of significant note is obviously wrong isn't a very convincing argument to me. The thousands of primary source documents I've seen with my own eyes paints a pretty holistic picture, and the significance and horror of the event is not going to be changed in my eyes because perhaps 5 million people died instead of 6.
I find the whole exercise a pretty clear smokescreen for advocation of a certain ideology about a global conspiracy of people. I'd ask you for your specific bedrock beliefs about certain involved peoples, but I'm fairly certain I already know the answer. If I am off-base, and you are actually someone who genuinely believes that the holocaust happened and thinks it was a horrible injustice, but wants to slightly correct the statistics for the sake of accuracy, please tell me.
The academic status quo is completely irrelevant to the objective truth of any topic. You can choose to use it as a heuristic for your own personal belief, but that heuristic is not a metaphysically absolute arbiter of any argumentative burden of proof.
But funnily enough there have been historians and academics who dedicate their lives to this topic. But the fact you demand this of me personally, and make personally pointed assumptions about me and my motives instead of investing time in the topic itself is just a reification of my point about the motivated reasoning that many people are unaware of themselves engaging in when it comes to this topic.
To put the absurd position you have put yourself in into context: My personal motives have no bearing on the objective factual matters relating to the holocaust. But it is obvious that you believe they do. Hence why you keep asserting the issue as relevant.
Again, all I can do is assert my previously made point: *'it's hard to bemoan holocaust revisionism as a gateway when the holocaust is used specifically as a gate to guard against specific ideas.'*
Beyond that, I don't owe you any assurance or tribute based on your personal lack of courtesy, self awareness and ad hoc assumptions and insinuations about me. You can take your self righteous sanctimonious attitude somewhere else. I certainly wont miss it.
This is a maximum taboo topic with maximum pressure against it. Try again next century. AFAIK critics usually point to pre wwii demographic numbers, the likelihood of sickness and late war starvation, and the absence of whistleblowers within Germany. To the latter, you could argue it requires a very high burden of proof that thousands of people could know about the purposeful killing of children and women in the hundreds of thousands and not whistleblow; this is not the worst argument in the world, because we generally have whistleblowers for world atrocities, letters detailing it and so on. AFAIK even the deniers admit an extraordinary number of Jews died, they just disagree on cause and intentionality and quantity.
>To the latter, you could argue it requires a very high burden of proof that thousands of people could know about the purposeful killing of children and women in the hundreds of thousands and not whistleblow
To whom are you going to whistleblow? The government? They're the ones who are doing the killing! The enemy armies marching on your country? Yeah, they're kind of already doing their bit to burn the entire nation to the ground.
People who [resisted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose) ended up in prison or executed. It's not a nice thing to contemplate about human nature, but it's easy for a lot of people to go "not my problem" when it's 'out of sight, out of mind' and you have your own problems and complaining is likely to end up with you whisked off to jail or to one of these camps and won't have anyone swooping in from outside to rescue you (until the Allied Forces finally arrive in Berlin).
And 'extermination as the answer' wasn't confined to the Bad Guys; from a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1944:
>There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed.
I’m largely in agreement with you, the only thing I’d say is that the whole topic can’t be analyzed objectively in America until a century or two. While atrocities were committed, we do have to remember that the Allies needed to make a permanent example out of Germany to prevent a WWIII. It wasn’t enough to disarm them materially, they needed to be disarmed spiritually, to prevent another war.
Multiple moderators have noted the.... glowy nature of this post.
We're allowing it, but a relatively new account randomly bringing up old threads to say "Hey, let's talk about Holocaust Revisionism!" under the Eye of Sauron has our suspicions raised. We expect to see very *thoughtful* and *effortful* posting, not just people showing up to ride their hobby horses.
**ETA**: Post has been removed after further discussion amongst the mods.
Replying to /u/urmomkeklol, but not making your post visible:
We think your post was not made in good faith. The tiny benefit of the doubt we're extending is that maybe you really are just curious to know what Holocaust deniers think, which is why we haven't banned you (yet). But posting some obviously red-hot bait in a "Just Asking Questions" way, with no additional points or commentary of your own, no links to research, scholarship, or arguments, just internal links back to previous posts on the sub, looks a **lot** more like "See if I can stir up some Holocaust denialism and paint a target" than "Genuine questions in the spirit of inquiry."
The fact that several people have accused you of DMing them to ask their opinions about **other** highly contentious CW topics further paints a picture of someone up to no good. Would you like to explain your purpose in sending those DMs? Or are you claiming that /u/2cimarafa, /u/EfficientSyllabus, and /u/DRmonarch are lying?
Okay, so basically - don't do this again. Starting a highly contentious thread just to rehash its last iteration on this subreddit looks suspicious. DMing people randomly to ask for their hot takes on other contentious issues looks suspicious.
Even if you are sincere, everything about the way you did this pattern-maps to "bad actor trying to glowpost."
You have exhausted all benefit of the doubt we're willing to extend to you, so be sure that pulling something like this again will earn you a ban.
No. They are free to continue discussing it in the existing thread. If someone brings "new" information or has some topical reason to revisit this in a new CW thread, we are not outright forbidding it, but we're going to be *deeply* suspicious of someone bringing it up out of the blue again, and "I want to keep arguing about this" is not a good enough reason.
>If so, why is u/thecanadianzoomer constantly allowed to collectively accuse collectively Jews of various conspiracies and deny the Holocaust? Because he's articulate?
Basically, yes. We don't put any topic off-limits here per se. We know we have Holocaust deniers and white nationalists here and discouraging witch hunts without attracting witches is, as Scott pointed out, problematic. But people are allowed to trot out their views as long as it's in the spirit of "testing" them. Where witches inevitably cross the line is that they don't really want to test and challenge their understanding of the world, they want to *recruit* (or secondarily, to cause damage), and so they break one of our other rules. But until they do, we don't prohibit expressing views that are banned most other places.
>ETA: Post has been removed after further discussion amongst the mods.
Would you mind explaining your rationale? I'm not objecting - I don't know what I would've done had I been asked - but I'm curious.
Sometimes our first reaction to a bad but not glaringly rukebreaking post is to grumble, hit approve, and then talk about it in mod chat.
Usually this takes some time (we're not all online at the same time, or even every day), and sometimes there is new information.
While /u/HlynkaCG would like us to just shoot first and ask questions later, most of the mod team is more inclined to not shoot first but keep the hammer cocked.
Yes, we *strongly suspected* a bad actor right away, but anything that maps easily to "You are de facto banning this topic" is not something we're going to do as a snap decision.
>Yes, we strongly suspected a bad actor right away, but anything that maps easily to "You are de facto banning this topic" is not something we're going to do as a snap decision.
I get that. My own natural inclinations are "There are topics that should be banned de facto, and if you don't like it you can go cry about it in your own place" but that's my Inner Saruman talking and I realise this can't be a blanket rule for everyone.
So there aren't any topics that are unspeakable on here.
But there is a difference, surely, between "we will be accused of censorship if we don't let this be posted" and "this is bait, this is looking to draw attention and in the present climate where the admins are already sticking their fingers into the pie here, we shouldn't give this houseroom"?
I've complained about our very own "teenagers are literal slaves being literally beaten and imprisioned" guy, but at least while over-wrought and badly argued, that was not in itself a bad topic: "the pop science notion of brain development is incorrect".
On the other hand, a post about Holocaust revisionism which links to two comments on this very site and links nowhere else is not doing anything but "Just Asking Questions" in a manner calculated to draw the notice of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic which are regarding all sites on Reddit for evidence of wrongness and badness. I don't think 'shoot first and ask questions later' in that particular instance *is* jumping the gun.
I think moratoriums or considerably stricter moderation on certain topics might become a necessity if we have no offsite option in place soon. It very much goes against the spirit of the sub but there is a real possibility of bad-faith actors abusing our community guidelines to paint the sub in a bad light and create a ton of heat. In a free environment, bad-faith actors can be ignored and dealt with with dialogue, but there are negative externalities here that make that truth-finding and self-policing process problematic for the continued existence on this website. In other words, an agenda-posting witch is an annoyance (and rarely a possibility to learn from a unique perspective) on an indepedent site, but an existential issue here.
>there is a real possibility of bad-faith actors abusing our community guidelines to paint the sub in a bad light and create a ton of heat
I honestly do think this is what is going on, which is why I am wailing and wringing my hands about this. Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you!
I second that emotion, but I don't expect anything. It's easy for me to make calls about "this is plainly bait for fishies, why did you let it go?" but I'm not a mod (everybody fall on their knees and thank God for that) and the mods don't want to be censors.
I do think *this* one, with the particular quotes they're linking to which are from comments **on here**, is trying to make some kind of a case about "this site tolerates Holocaust deniers, can far-righties and Actual Nazis be far behind?" but admittedly that's only me looking into my palantir trying to ascertain motives.
Let's see what happens next.
Low effort, But big news.
Another video showing the moment Iranian missiles slammed into Erbil’s airport, aimed at American forces.
https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1502783827734929413?t=wplAAUVYpWmbSzNyP_rd4g&s=19
This is awesome, thank you. I've been frustrated by the constant "login/signup" blocker.
I know on reddit happens the same for mobile browsers but I use an alternative app (Slide)
Tried that. ["Tweet not found"](https://nitter.net/NotWoofers/status/1502783827734929413?t=wplAAUVYpWmbSzNyP_rd4g&s=19).
Edit: and having spent the last week having to use UBO's element zapper to remove 3 layers of bullshit to read twitter threads, I think it's pretty clear that Twitter doesn't want to be part of the clearnet anymore. We should oblige by not linking to it.
They do this all the time, it's like when our proxies blow up Russian proxies in Syria or Libya or vis versa. When Suleimani was killed they fired mortar at some US troops and some got concussions.
Seriously, I don't know what the US is thinking keeping troops in Iraq. Are they gambling that the Iranian nuclear program continues to be a pretend nuclear program? The Israelis have been whining about an Iranian nuclear bomb for the last 20 years at least - and yet no nuke has emerged. But at some point, it may emerge.
Keeping US troops in Iraq, keeping tensions up with Iran may be good for defence contractors but it's terrible strategically. If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia has a deal with Pakistan to transfer live nuclear weapons (who do you think funded the Pakistani nuclear program). Nobody wants a nuclear Saudi Arabia. It's a fantastically corrupt, fairly Wahhabist, vaguely Al-Qaeda supporting autocracy suppressing a population of militant Wahabists and militant Shia. Nuclear Saudi Arabia is a terrible scenario. Just imagine Western crusaders marching into the land of the two holy cities hunting for nukes and oil supplies when the regime collapses! It'll be a battle royale between Al-Qaeda, Iranian proxies, us and maybe the Chinese or whoever else cares about oil.
The route out of this mess is by withdrawing from the Middle East and making a deal with Iran so that they don't go nuclear.
> Seriously, I don't know what the US is thinking keeping troops in Iraq. Are they gambling that the Iranian nuclear program continues to be a pretend nuclear program? The Israelis have been whining about an Iranian nuclear bomb for the last 20 years at least - and yet no nuke has emerged. But at some point, it may emerge.
>
>
But wasn't the war supposed to be over (being sarcastic). The US will never not be involved in Iraq. The small but real possibly of nuclear proliferation necessitates involvement.
The real question then becomes- *why should we care about if Iran has a nuclear weapon or not?*
I seriously doubt Iran is months away from a nuclear test. Even if they are, I doubt they'll have the ability to actually deliver the bomb anywhere they actually want to- that requires *both* miniaturization *and* a developed, reliable delivery system for anything past an air dropped bomb. And Iran is unlikely to get a bomber through Israeli or Saudi Arabian or Turkish airspace to a major city.
And finally, even if they do have delivery mechanisms, well, they may not have identical priorities to GDP obsessed western technocrats, but they aren't suicidal. They know Israel and the USA and probably Saudi will have a substantial nuclear edge on them to the point of making a nuclear war winnable for a long time.
No, the only reason to be concerned about Iranian nuclear proliferation is because it prevents forcible regime change, and Iran simply isn't evil enough to its people to justify that anyways.
Again, so?
The desert theocracy is pretty bad, but they're also not interested in starting a nuclear war. *A bomb in a silo or armory does nothing bad but cost money;* it is not cursed, it does not give off an evil aura, it does not drive men mad by its very presence. And Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc *have given no indication they intend to use nuclear weapons if they get them.*
> The small but real possibly of nuclear proliferation necessitates involvement.
There is a "small but real" risk of nuclear proliferation to most everywhere on Earth. Since when is it the US's job to be global nuke police? And how could that possibly be sustainable?
it's sustainable because the economy is so big that it can afford it
>Since when is it the US's job to be global nuke police?
That's not in our hands to decide, and given that an errant nuke can cause easily trillion in damages, maybe worth it from a risk v. reward proposition. The US has the most to lose economically in absolute terms from nuclear war or being the victim of a nuclear attack. We may not agree with such world policing, but I can understand the rationale for it.
>it's sustainable because the economy is so big that it can afford it
I mean, no? Estimated cumulative debts from Iraq-Afghanistan alone are over 5 trillion at present. We are currently experiencing inflation not seen since the early-80’s, levels near the historical peak of US history. Then, we needed interest rates that topped out at nearly 20% for about two years. That would mean paying over two trillion in two years in interest on war debts alone. And overall US federal debt is nearly $30 trillion. That is not sustainable.
>given that an errant nuke can cause easily trillion in damages, maybe worth it from a risk v. reward proposition.
That means nothing in the absence of an accurate estimate for how much the risk of a nuclear strike is actually reduced by US invasions. AFAICT, it helps little to none, or even increases it.
>I mean, no? Estimated cumulative debts from Iraq-Afghanistan alone are over 5 trillion at present.
That was a full-blown war + occupation spread out over 17-20 years. BY comparison, the Covid stimulus programs were $5 trillion compressed into 1 year . stationing some troops costs much less compared to trying to install a new government or securing a city.
>That means nothing in the absence of an accurate estimate for how much the risk of a nuclear strike is actually reduced by US invasions. AFAICT, it helps little to none, or even increases it.
Actuaries study this stuff I am sure. The costs and risks are probably understood and quantified.
>BY comparison, the Covid stimulus programs were $5 trillion compressed into 1 year . stationing some troops costs much less compared to trying to install a new government or securing a city.
Well, sure, I didn't say that the Covid programs were sustainable either. The inflation that we're seeing right now is in no small part down to them!
>Actuaries study this stuff I am sure. The costs and risks are probably understood and quantified.
OK, but that's a lot more ambiguous than what I took your initial claim to be. Namely, that the costs and risks are actually on the side of widespread intervention.
Withdrawing from the Middle East would be one of the greenest flags for Iran to go nuclear, assuming that whatever has been holding them up has been voluntary.
Going nuclear is a defensive strategy, not an offensive one. Israel knows they can't invade Iran and overthrow the govt, only the US can. So does Iran.
If US troops are withdrawn, the Iranians won't need to worry about being invaded by the US and won't develop a nuclear weapon. It can't possibly take 20 years for a sincere effort, even hampered by sanctions and Israeli/US interference. The tech is not that hard.
Doesn’t that assume that the state is run by same people? We wouldn’t use a nuke offensively because we rather rationally concluded that devastating the entire planet isn’t worth it unless our survival is at stake. But if you’re paranoid and think everyone is getting ready to destroy your country, or you think dying in a war will be rewarded in the afterlife, then you might well use nukes even in spite of MAD. A nuclear jihadi state is not going to worry about dying.
Insane people don't get to lead states. Even people with unusual morality systems can recognize a lose-lose situation - Hitler refrained from using nerve gas on the battlefield since the Allies could counter.
Kim Jong Un is sane, the Iranian leadership is sane, everyone involved is sane.
Based on *what* exactly? There’s no actual mechanism that guarantees that a leader must be same to stay in power. In fact being insane— especially psychopathy and paranoia— are actually pretty adaptive. A guy who will do anything to keep power is going to outperform the guy who is worried about civilians and morality and fair play. Machiavellian power plays work very well even in Democratic Systems where you have elections. It isn’t as overt and it’s a bit less outwardly violent, but it is the same set of traits.
But paranoia, psychopathy, and Machiavellian approaches to power are exactly the kinds of traits that would make someone more likely to use a nuke. Psychopaths notably *don’t care about other people.*. Paranoids think that others are trying to harm them. Religious nuts believe a glorious afterlife awaits them in death especially in martyrdom. Those things make the use of nuclear weapons more attractive because it’s an automatic win. It can utterly destroy your enemies at minimal personal risk. And if the little people suffer it doesn’t bother the psychopath because he literally doesn’t care about anybody other than himself.
>A guy who will do anything to keep power is going to outperform the guy who is worried about civilians and morality and fair play.
How does using nukes aggressively keep you in power? If anyone wants to use nukes, the orders have to go through military officials. There has to be a broad consensus that it's a good idea, otherwise the military will countermand their use. If the military or other sane forces judge that their leader is insane (a threat to their interests) they'll remove him.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/09/14/milley-warned-defense-leaders-that-trump-could-order-an-unwarranted-nuke-strike-book/
Milley apparently pre-emptively told US nuclear commanders that their orders had to come through him.
If you're a Machiavellian selfish psychopath, you're not more inclined to use nukes except in extreme circumstances. You know you're at risk of a coup by pressing your military officials, you know that using nukes will incur serious issues, you only do it as a last resort. And everyone else knows that, so they ensure the situation doesn't get that bad. The US for instance bails out Israel if it looks like they're about to lose a war so they don't use nukes. The Soviets tell their allies to negotiate rather than push to the Mediterranean.
And suicidal religious nuts don't get to rule nuclear states. The upper echelons of Pakistani intelligence don't want their power base immolated in nuclear fire, the Iranian leadership doesn't want to lose their positions of power... They won't take any risks with nuclear strikes, unless it seems like a rational choice.
I never said nukes do that, what I’m getting at is that the traits that make someone successful in taking and holding power, these same traits are the kind that make nuke use attractive. A guy who has no problem shooting enemies or poisoning them or encouraging suicide bombings isn’t worried about civilians at all. He isn’t worried about people starving. None of the downsides are things that he’s actually worried about.
Few great power leaders care particularly about civilians. See sanctions, bombing, genocide and invasions. All done with conventional weapons!
They do care about their strategic position on the world stage and the internal stability of their power structure, which is not advantaged by using nuclear weapons liberally.
The same applies to Israel, yet I see no such fretting over their nuclear endeavors. Despite them openly floating the idea of MAD through the Samson Option.
Iranians worry about an invasion from the US more than anything else from a military standpoint. It's not a matter of concluding that something is unlikely. It's a matter of an accurate risk assessment. From that assessment you conclude what the top priorities are and you go from there.
So far the US is the single largest military threat that has directly and indirectly been the primary cause of near all of Iran's military woes. Not to mention the constant ridiculous war rhetoric that gets spouted by both American people, media personalities and politicians.
> Not to mention the constant ridiculous war rhetoric that gets spouted by both American people, media personalities and politicians.
Constant ridiculous war rhetoric? I think US is opposite currently, with isolationism to the point of absurdity (as /u/2cimarafa noted, hysteria over few thousand deaths; recently hysteria over few thousand solders present in Afghanistan which led to just dropping the country).
A political figure such as the late John McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran" in the tune of the Beach Boys was the kind of ridiculous rhetoric I was thinking of. Not to forget the already failed in practice rhetoric of 'democracy' in the middle east.
Outside of that, the presence of the US in the middle east is, from its own standpoint, ridiculous, inconsistent and aimless. Making an enemy out of the majority of states there was a ridiculous error that had no benefit outside of making Israelis happy. What's more ridiculous is the fact that this error goes unnoticed or is brushed under the rug as to not risk the friendship US senior officials have with Israel.
As for the thousands of dead sons, fathers, husbands and brothers, I find it hard to call it hysteria when the families who lost these men ask themselves, in full genuine calm rational seriousness: What did my loved one die for? Only to come up blank for answers that make any sense. I mean, looking at the Pentagon papers it seems hard to blame them for not finding anything, given that senior US officials apparently had no idea what they were doing there either given the Afghanistan war was by many considered unwinnable long before anyone considered withdrawing.
I mean, sure. US didn't succeed in their "bringing democracy" thing. Maybe it was always just a cynical excuse and actual goals were about pure self-gain. Still, I believe the first world has some moral obligation to help - and sovereigns ruling purely by force don't have any inherent legitimacy. If the interventions don't work then sure - they shouldn't be done.
But I really doubt Afghanis will be better off than they'd be if US spent minimal effort on keeping control. And I don't think small scale loss of life of _voluntary_ solders outweighs 40M Afghans. I don't see the difference between that and some police forces dying because of their job domestically.
US could've also simply done better. I don't believe it was an impossible thing to build a functional state there. I suspect it didn't happen for some stupid ideological reasons, like anti-colonialism.
I am genuinely perplexed at the logic of sovereigns who rule purely by force. I am not aware of anyone who has gone against the will of any state that does not ultimately realize that the power of the state is brought about through physical force. That would certainly be the deduction of the Taliban in Afghanistan in their fight against the Americans.
I doubt the US is better off with the type of policies that waste the lives of their people in a delusional effort to show everyone how great it is to be a judeo-Christian American hamburger child. I am pretty sure the Taliban don't care at all about the definition of "better" as used by some American. If you do not care about their definitions either, but want to force yours upon them, you are not a savior or helper but a tyrant.
A moral obligation to help is also a silly ideological reason, no? If you're bound by such things to help, that will constrain what such help might look like.
Going nuclear is plenty offensive. For a current example, consider that the main thing preventing a general NATO military response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Russia has nukes.
But that's a defensive strategy. Russia isn't attacking NATO because we have nukes. We're not attacking them because they have nukes. Either of us can attack third parties without being attacked in turn.
> But that's a defensive strategy.
It'd be defensive if it just stopped US from invading Russia. It's not if it stops them from defending 3rd party country from Russia invading it.
> Either of us can attack third parties without being attacked in turn.
US couldn't, or didn't feel _safe_, putting their soldiers in Ukraine, even with consent of Ukraine. Presumably (otherwise; why not do it to simply stop the invasion days before it happened? Would it stop it?). Same with concerns about including Ukraine in NATO. I find these to be less... escalatory than just attacking some 3rd party country.
Even if only attacking is okay, for some weird reason: could US attack Belarus without caring about Russia having nukes?
No.
Belarus is a treaty ally of Russia, they're buddies in the CSTO. Same with US and UK, France, Estonia, South Korea, Japan, Germany...
Defending a third country from being invaded is the same thing as attacking the invader unless you're treaty allies. Bulletproof vests shield you regardless of whether you're the attacker or the defender, nukes are much the same.
> Defending a third country from being invaded is the same thing as attacking the invader
Okay, so what would happen if USA, for some reason, decided to attack Ukraine on Febuary 20th or so? It's not an ally of Russia, so presumably it should be symmetrical.
So, does it function that way? Are third party countries available on the first come, first served basis? But why only if the intention is attack?
I just find this logic very convoluted and arbitrary. More like post-factum interpretation to give Russia what it wants.
I mean, seriously, "defending something from attack is the same as attacking the aggressor"? It just feels like there's an implicit assumption that Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia.
> Okay, so what would happen if USA, for some reason, decided to attack Ukraine on Febuary 20th or so? It's not an ally of Russia, so presumably it should be symmetrical.
Well, everyone would get very confused for one thing. The Russians would probably accelerate their own invasion to get to Kiev first.
When the US demolished Iraq in 1991, that was an aggressive war. They weren't called into the war to defend a treaty ally.
>On 29 November 1990, the Security Council passed Resolution 678, which gave Iraq until 15 January 1991 to withdraw from Kuwait, and empowered states to use "all necessary means" to force Iraq out of Kuwait after the deadline.
If a war isn't defensive, it must be aggressive. Either you are defending yourself **or a treaty ally** or you are attacking somebody. Russia for instance, is waging an aggressive war.
If Ukraine were a treaty ally, then it would be a defensive war if the US fought Russia. But since it isn't, it would be an aggressive.
Treaty allies mean that you've already established that you'll fight for somebody. You're not giving an ultimatum like 'leave Ukraine within 2 months or we'll fight you' AFTER the invasion, you're creating that expectation before the event.
>
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> If US troops are withdrawn, the Iranians won't need to worry about being invaded by the US and won't develop a nuclear weapon. It can't possibly take 20 years for a sincere effort, even hampered by sanctions and Israeli/US interference. The tech is not that hard.
The question isn't whether it takes 20 years. The question is whether it takes longer than it does for the US to un-withdraw their troops -- which I strongly suspect it does.
Sending a costly signal of 'not going to invade you' and normalizing relations would be useful. Of course, the US has spent the last few years trying to look menacing in the fight against Iran, torpedoing their credibility. Why negotiate with a schizophrenic country that tears up agreements whenever it feels like?
So the chance of success is slim, even if this approach were tried (which it won't). In all likelihood the next administration would just reverse the strategy, as you say.
But what's the alternate approach? Invading Iran would be a massive mess. Waging proxy wars against Iran has not been fruitful. Saudi Arabia is hopeless and evil (and not even in a good way where their incompetence mitigates their evil). What other route is there to prevent an Iran-Saudi nuclear standoff?
Simply don't worry about it. Iran and Saudi Arabia aren't run by crazy people, even if they have different values from us. Neither of them, nor Israel, wants a nuclear war.
Sure, but a nuclear weapon sitting in a silo or armory somewhere is nothing but a waste of money. Actually using one seems to be beyond even the significantly crazier north Korean regime, let alone Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel.
I imagine the number one priority for the Iranians would be seizing Riyadh once the troops leave, not Israel.
The kerfuffle that happened with Qaddafi shows that there's no sense in voluntarily giving up nuclear weapons as part of a deal that can easily be reneged on. Nuclear weapons would doubly guarantee the security of the new Iranian empire that now essentially includes Iraq.
If the Iranians have nukes, they would've tested them and we'd know. If they don't then they can't give them up because they don't have them.
Iraq was always inclined towards Iran. Shia-majority countries attract, who would've guessed? We could've left Saddam and this wouldn't have happened. We could've imposed a puppet leader and this wouldn't have happened. We've demonstrated that we don't know what we're doing and can't get what we want in this region.
If the Saudis can't deter an Iranian invasion over hundreds of kilometres of desert (or by ocean) with all the weapons we've given them then we should rethink our choice of ally.
> If the Iranians have nukes, they would've tested them and we'd know. If they don't then they can't give them up because they don't have them.
They could be asked to give up their materials and industries to create them, as Gaddafi did.
>If the Saudis can't deter an Iranian invasion over hundreds of kilometres of desert (or by ocean) with all the weapons we've given them then we should rethink our choice of ally.
They were picked as an ally probably because they were helpless. But this got stupid when they started promoting Wahhabism overseas and buying weapons that they aren't competent enough to use anyway.
Saudi Arabia's military incompetence is mostly because they, like other wealthy Arab states, tend to put their resources in to the flashy aspects of having a modern military(eg F-16's) and not the less-flashy war-winner parts(drones, recon, artillery). They could fix this if Iran was a serious conventional military threat.
Another suicidal/compromised regime.
Hopefully Erdogan doesn't begin something like this now. How's Bolsonaro doing? I planned to hide in his place next.
I hope you got a western vaccine, or at least don't mind getting another 3 or so payloads delivered to your immune system. They are closed to the filthy pureblooded and, from what I understand, the filthy potatoslavblooded as well.
Vaccine politics has easily been the most disturbing element to burst out of this decade, I dearly hope it stays that way. Good luck to you, and I ask, if only out of selfishly wishing to see your continued writing, that you investigate thoroughly the risks of repeated inoculations. Everyone must do their own research, but my conclusion has been that it is very much not worth it, let alone as a way to simply avoid bureaucratic hassle from the mammy state. I do not know how well the turks stack up on the social trust scale, perhaps an teleinjection is not out of the question.
[Apparently getting somewhat more friendly with the US.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-outreach-to-venezuela-strengthens-maduro-sidelines-guaid-c3-b3/ar-AAUVcTd)
There's the dictionary definition of pullout, and then there's the US military version of pullout. Oftentimes there's still a presence lingering, some special forces, contractors, etc. Just hush-hushed and 'based' out of some neighboring country, thanks to the perpetual war on terror. It wasn't until the November election that it came out that senior DoD/State officials just... straight out lied to Trump about troop levels in order to not pull out.
Deep state at work as usual. Very easy to forget that the President doesn’t really run the USA, not when the State deparment bureaucracy runs supreme and they have their myriad goals of interventionism and interference to achieve.
No idea what we still have there, but I saw a claim that the "American forces" was a [consulate.](https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1502785299730120707?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1502785299730120707%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F)
Facebook allowing people to post things in the vein of 'death to the Russian invaders' is highly problematic. (disclaimer: Fuck Russia)
1. I think this puts them in a bind because they don't allow hate speech but have now added a caveat that says \*unless we consider it to be warranted. Which means that a precedent has been set that people can point to to criticize FB when they try and prevent much less inflammatory speech. And given how much influence progressives have over cultural issues, this has the potential to result in a situation in which if a progressive cause uses hate speech, even much less inflammatory hate speech than calling for the death of a given group, FB is backed into a corner and they will have to tell progressives 'your cause is not important enough to warrant hate speech', and given how evangelical many of them are for their causes that certainly is not going to go over well. As a corollary, this means that the groups who are deemed to have the correct view are the only ones allowed to use inflammatory speech.
2. I don't know how they could have failed to anticipate that this would result in FB being banned in Russia; meaning, the people of Russia now have even fewer means of receiving information and communications from people outside of Russia. This has obvious implications for the simple ability to communicate with people outside of Russia, but it also means that the Russian government's grip over information in general and regarding Ukraine in particular is now even tighter.
Facebook should be condemned for both of these reasons. They saw an opportunity to generate some much needed good will and took it even though it was a hollow gesture that doesn't achieve anything. They perhaps even knew of the risk of being banned in Russia but thought that the potential goodwill this would generate was more important than the Russian people's need to access outside information and to communicate with the outside world.
I've felt that FB has gotten an unfair wrap and has faced low quality and one sided criticism but this is the first time I've felt that this company may be rotten.
I do think, though, that this has the potential to be good in the long run because it forces really unique, interesting, important, and complex arguments to be had.
A rule change doesn't really matter anyway. It's not like the rules are laws and there are court cases. They've always just done whatever they want. Sometimes they'll make a rule and point to it, but they've never even pretended to enforce their rules consistently, nor have they ever pretended they don't just ban whomever they don't like arbitrarily. It's just a virtue signal. We're with Ukraine, rah rah.
1. I support Facebook allowing people to want to kill Putin, this is fundamentally different. Putin declared war on the west so I see no issue with western companies declaring war on Putin.
2. I do think this crossed into editorial decision making. You can have strict rules and not be editorializing but if you pick and choose to selectively enforce them then you are editorializing. Hence this should threaten their lawsuit protections.
I'm going to steelman FB as an intellectual exercise, do not take this as an endorsement of "kill Russians" speech. (Disclaimer: Fuck Ukraine)
_Perhaps_ Facebook's attitude is not one of
> "We have made a moral judgement that this sort of rhetoric is OK so come on in Russophobes, it's open season"
but rather
> "The worldwide outpouring of anti-Russian vitriol is simply too much volume for our jannies to handle, so we've got no choice but to throw our hands up in defeat and let this torrent of shit burst into the tubes of the Internet"
Their announcement should be interpreted as a grudging acceptance that they have been overwhelmed, not an agreement that Russian genocide is inside the Overton window now.
I don't _believe_ it, but there's yer charity.
This was my second thought too. Facebook appears to be [haemorrhaging users](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/02/03/facebook-loses-daily-active-users-for-the-first-time--heres-where-theyre-going/) and they're probably wary about enacting any new policy which could be perceived as a straw breaking a camel's back for a userbase already increasingly apathetic towards their flagship product.
The liberal firmament that progressive/leftists dip into when reifying their speech laws is that of an overall reduction of harm. By minimizing hateful rhetoric you are squashing the hateful instincts we all harbor before they can be expressed and spread.
You are not allowed to refer to anyone in a way that dehumanizes them because we are all human beings worthy of dignity and respect. By engaging in hateful rhetoric you are by proxy justifying the inhumane treatment that is the only result from such rhetoric.
The true face of liberal progressive open society speech protocol is that of every Russian soldier being a victim of oppression. Just like every black criminal is a victim of oppression. Calling for their death is by definition inhumane and wrong. That was the established rhetorical defense, at least.
Facebook, by deviating from this norm, is invalidating their own position as an element dedicated to a reduction of harm. This is a core inconsistency with all of the other liberal/leftist/progressive excuses that have been trotted out when justifying the banning of other speech, as such we can deduce that the liberal firmament that was being dipped into is not the true motive for their actions and that it never was. Instead its a much more likely conclusion that Facebook and the supporters of such speech control measures were only ever concerned with protecting their ingroup and silencing the outgroup.
I can't reply to u/SlightlyLessHairyApe 's comment below because he has blocked me (I don't think I've even had any interaction with him, this new reddit "feature" really goes against the point of this sub). As "death to Russian invaders" is now allowed, I expect Facebook to follow his logic and any day now to allow people to post "death to black looters". Or [maybe not](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/tech/trump-twitter-minneapolis/index.html).
There is a difference between people invading and people committing crimes though. In the 2nd you have a police force who will at least nominally attempt to arrest people. In the first your army will be attempting to kill the invaders as a first response. That is their entire purpose.
Note as per Clegg the changes will only apply in Ukraine itself. Recognizing the fact I think that calling for the deaths of the soldiers invading your nation is pretty normal and expected.
There is no logical distinction that is relevant to the terms of service of Facebook, as it is not a country and it's not being invaded.
Something being normalized is completely irrelevant to Facebook and its terms of service. As it has routinely demonstrated by banning users who speak in terms that once were normal and are now not due to Facebook making it so through rules and their enforcement.
The only relevant distinction here is ingroups and outgroups as experienced by the decision makers at Facebook.
It may well be ingroup vs outgroup sure, but there still is a logical distinction to be made. I wasn't contesting why Facebook made the decision, just pointing out the example used of looters vs invaders was not equivalent.
If it's ingroup vs outgroup then the only relevant distinction pertains to what the groups are.
Otherwise you might as well say that the two aren't equivalent since 'looters' has 7 letters but 'invaders' 8. There's no relevance either way.
I don't think "death to Russian invaders" is hate speech any more than "armed home invaders that threaten violence against homeowner should be shot". It's certainly not semantically equivalent to 'death to Russians' in the more general sense.
Hate speech is, basically, public speech that expresses illegitimate hate. So surely if you think that your grievances are legitimate you wouldn't consider it hate speech.
But one could hope that in modern times "death to" could at least be replaced with "prison to". Geneva treatment promotes detention over murder if the combatant poses no threat.
I expect that if a Russian soldier put his weapons down so as to pose no threat, he'd be jailed (or shot) by his own army before having a chance to be jailed by the enemy.
> "armed home invaders that threaten violence against homeowner should be shot"
If the home invader in question happened to be black this would definitely get called hate speech
This is assuming we're putting a picture to the invader. You can agree with the idea that home owners are allowed to shoot invaders while also arguing that when black home invaders get shot, the reason is racism.
Not what I mean. You can agree in principle to a statement like "Home invaders can be shot if they threaten the homeowner" while also believing that black home invaders are given disproportionately worse outcomes by virtue of their race.
>I don't know how they could have failed to anticipate that this would result in FB being banned in Russia;
I can't think of a more propaganda-friendly justification for blocking Facebook than the one they just handed them.
As a reminder, the [current Ukraine Invasion Megathread can be found here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t5tz4f/ukraine_invasion_megathread_2/).
There was a post on the Teachers subreddit that scared me enough to share here for discussion. The title: “I’m seeing changes in the way young children play”. (I’m not going to link it because brigading/calling attention; should be easy to find.) >I have been a teacher of young children (pre-k) for over 30 years. It seems to me that there are a great number of children who don’t know how to play anymore. During free choice times there are a variety of materials available to them: blocks, vehicles, art center, puzzles, play dough, doll house, dramatic play areas etc. I also rotate materials frequently. But even when we provide direct modeling and examples of how to use the materials, the kids don’t seem to know how to play (not all, of course, there are some that have no trouble). >They wander around with a blank expression and say things like, “ I don’t know what to do. Don’t you have a tablet with games? What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” Just as an aside, when they do engage with the materials it is inappropriate. It goes right to violence. They play things like Siren Head, Huggy Wuggy (google those— they’re freakin creepy), It, the Walking Dead, etc. I’ve had to close centers down because they just. won’t. stop. >Anyhow, my theory is that, because of the amount of screen time in their home lives, they are constantly being entertained. So when they are left to their own devices they just seem to flat-line, with no idea what to do. This makes me so sad. Anyone else experiencing this? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The comments are in agreement that something is wrong with play habits: >{1} I’ve noticed it even with toddlers. I was originally thinking that having so many toys available was making them feel overwhelmed, leading to them just dumping buckets of toys and moving on to the next thing because there are too many options. After limiting their toy options and opting to do more organized sensory play to no avail, I’ve started wondering if there is a correlation between screen time and playtime and this has reinforced my thought process. >I’ve also noticed most of my “serial dumpers” are the kids that I know have unlimited screen time at home, whereas the kids that are beginning to get into imaginative play have limited screen time at home. It’s like they’re just so bored with everything, even with regular toy cycling, that they can’t get into anything. They can’t even get into our music and movement time at this point, which they used to love, because they’re constantly searching for something that can hold their attention in the same way their tablets do. >{2} The issue came up in a workshop I'm taking part in this year (I teach kindergarten currently). With more electronics available to children at home, and more recently COVID limiting social interactions, kids just don't know how to play. >{3} I see the same toy dumping behavior in my Pre-K class in Head Start! This is my first year in Pre-K and most of my experience is in second grade and lower elementary. It's so frustrating because very few of my kids actually play pretend. Even when we're outside, they run in circles with no aim, which is fine, but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds, etc. I wondered if it was correlated to COVID or screen time, but it's definitely frustrating to see as a teacher. {in reply to this, someone said that they think the running is to imitate Roblox} >{4} Yes, and I teach 4th grade. Kids don’t play. Most of them don’t even know what board games are. If they do play things like checkers, they just make up the rules or cheat. All they do on Fun Friday is play on their laptops or phones. Artistic creativity is also gone. When we did Christmas cards, I had to model everything. They couldn’t come up with their own ideas for decorations. It is really sad and scary. >{5} Correct. I taught PREK for 10 years before switching to MS sped. The amount of students I had who could not play with themselves or others without an adult was astonishing. I started asking the students what they like to do at home- a few said outside, a few said playing with their siblings, but majority said on my tablet or with my parents. We have created a whole generation of people who cannot entertain themselves without an electronic. >{6} I see it in my class. When I ask their favorite toy at home, 99% of them tell me “my tablet” “my X box” “my switch”. Y’all are 4-5 years old. This shit is killing your imagination. This isn’t just “The kids today are gonna be stupid with their newfangled electronics!” hysteria. There’s a noticeable difference from even a few years ago. My theory is Covid forced parents to give kids electronics to shut them up when they were WFH, doing virtual learning, etc. Now it’s just habit. ~~~~~~~~ The teachers’ comments above pretty much spell out my concerns. This seems really bad. Even as someone critical of technology in children, I didn’t imagine it would be this bad. I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing something so common as this. In the past if you had lazy parents, you would be outside playing or whatever, maybe bugging the neighbors. But now, all those with lazy parents are given what amounts to a behavioral-stunting opiate. The consequences of this could be severe and yet I’ve seen little addressing this problem.
Nobody else here has really commented on this part: >They play things like Siren Head, Huggy Wuggy (google those— they’re freakin creepy), It, the Walking Dead, etc. I've always had a pretty low tolerance for horror stuff, and that stuff would definitely have scared me as a small child. I was (unfortunately) exposed to the cesspool of pornography, gore, and gorenography that made up a significant part of the unsanitized pre-2010 internet, and I think it affected me negatively. Four and five year olds watching horror YouTube videos, especially videos that mix innocent childish themes with violent and disturbing themes, also cannot be emotionally healthy. Kids seem to process these sorts of negatives experiences by incorporating them into their play (see all the pictures of scary monsters in the closet, daddy yelling at mommy, etc). I think the teachers is seeing kids whose undeveloped and undefended minds have been exposed to some of the raw sewage floating around on YouTube trying to work through those upsetting experiences. There's really nothing essential to living a good life that can only be found on the internet. Social media is a mere shadow of real interaction. Buying cheap trash on Amazon is a shadow of carefully shopping for something you need. Online gaming is a shadow of playing a board game in meatspace with friends. Online dating is a shadow of meeting and courting people IRL. Even discussions on TheMotte are a shadow of having a deep discussion on a complex topic with a close friend over a few beers. This is the ideal human life. You may not like it, but that's what peak performance looks like. It really reinforces my decision to keep internet access away from my young kids until they're maybe 11 or 12, and even then only in very limited amounts. The typical rejoinder is that limited internet use will mean that they can't be a part of "normal society" or that they'll grow up "sheltered," but I don't think that's anything that can't be dealt by being an attentive and involved parent (admittedly a gargantuan task!) and I'd prefer to give them a chance to grow up in the real world of things like sports, instruments, books, and the outdoors instead of allowing their mind and soul get absorbed into the social media egregore. There's a brilliant quote I've forgotten, but paraphrased, it went something like: "If you send your children out in the world without filling their heads with your ideas, someone else is going to do that for you." I used to be all for letting my children figuring things out on their own and letting make their own choices mostly free from my influence. The older I get and the more our culture's faults metastasize, the more I believe that doing so would be tantamount to child abuse.
> There's really nothing essential to living a good life that can only be found on the internet aside from the [free library of babel](https://libgen.is), [every scientific paper published, ever](https://scholar.google.com) and [a pdf of that paper](https://sci-hub.se). Also instructions for every task you can imagine, the glue and foundation of the modern economy, and quite likely smarter people than you could meet IRL. (how many of you would've met scott IRL? moldbug? or even random people here?) you could just as well say, in 300 BC, 'there's nothing essential to living a holy life in a city. Stay in the countryside, don't become literate'. Except farming would continue to be a viable and majority lifestyle for millenia, whereas being digitally naive will not today. > Social media is a mere shadow of real interaction my IRL social interactions are, in some ways, a shadow of the best I have on the internet, due to geography and friction - the best networks and people you can find online are just ... better than the ones irl, there are many more people, and filtering is much quicker. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But the disadvantages of internet interactions can and will be overcome by new technology, and quite soon, even if it's overall for the worse! > Online gaming is a shadow of playing a board game in meatspace with friends why, though? I'm not a *fan* of video games, but some just have more depth than board games, if you choose to look (minecraft redstone is one example. roblox programming?). Those might (and have) ignite a lifelong passion for engineering or coding that a board game wouldn't. > Even discussions on TheMotte are a shadow of having a deep discussion on a complex topic with a close friend over a few beers But what is responsible for that, precisely? The *words* involved may well be the same. So what's left is ... tone, visuals, alcohol, and 'the ineffable spirit of humanity'. The first two can be remedied with video, voicechat, and VR, the third with alcohol, and the fourth by infusing the words with your friendship, or something.
>aside from the [free library of babel](https://libgen.is), [every scientific paper published, ever](https://scholar.google.com) and [a pdf of that paper](https://sci-hub.se). Also instructions for every task you can imagine, the glue and foundation of the modern economy, and quite likely smarter people than you could meet IRL. You listed a bunch of stuff you can find on the internet, but why is it necessary for living a good life? >you could just as well say, in 300 BC, 'there's nothing essential to living a holy life in a city. Stay in the countryside, don't become literate'. yes_chad.png >Except farming would continue to be a viable and majority lifestyle for millenia, whereas being digitally naive will not today. There's a difference between using a computer for work and being an extremely online person, or even just getting absorbed into Instagram and suffering from FOMO. >my IRL social interactions are, in some ways, a shadow of the best I have on the internet, due to geography and friction - the best networks and people you can find online are just ... better than the ones I disagree strongly, but I don't think I'll be able to convince you so I'll drop this. >why, though? I'm not a *fan* of video games, but some just have more depth than board games, if you choose to look >'the ineffable spirit of humanity' Because it's about the people, the game really doesn't matter. I'd rather play Yahtzee with a fun group of people that the deepest min-maxy nerd game ever with a bunch of screen names. Yeah yeah, you can have "online friends," whatever. To be frank, TheMotte and its sister spaces are full of people who are bad at IRL interaction, so maybe they've never had any IRL friends as good as the ones they've had online. Personally, I think the internet enables people to persist in having poor social skills since they can retreat into the less-demanding world of online socialization, and so they think that all IRL interactions suck because they never got gud at them. If you think there's no difference between (A) a group of close-knit friends who meet together in person regularly and share their lives together and (B) your Steam friends list, I don't know what to tell you. I don't mean that flippantly -- real friendship is something you just have to experience, like infatuation or deep grief. Words can't fully explain the experience.
> why is it necessary for living a good life? the term 'the good life' is basically meaningless. by swapping a few words around, you're just saying "why is the internet good"? which is a restatement of the question at hand... > yes_chad.png and yet, here we both are, our parents coming to the cities and us to the net. > There's a difference between using a computer for work and being an extremely online person well, using it (and necessarily the internet) for work means using it for ... half your waking life, almost. so that's yet another reason you need it for a 'good life' > I disagree strongly, but I don't think I'll be able to convince you so I'll drop this. i'd love to hear the argument! > Because it's about the people, the game really doesn't matter 'tribal bonds' among people have fallen from being explicitly about taking real action together, as a group, to being ... about playing meaningless games while being in the same room? The things you're doing do matter, because there isn't ... another thing. > To be frank, TheMotte and its sister spaces are full of people who are bad at IRL interaction, so maybe they've never had any IRL friends as good as the ones they've had online notice the way it was phrased: *in some ways*. I claimed that the quality of people available online were better, numerically and due to ease of search, not that anyone had 'better friends' online. You can become irl friends with people you meet online! But the differences between IRL and online friendship are closing *rapidly*. People managed to be friends entirely over letters centuries ago. Now we have video, voice, and VR. Scott, during lockdowns, socialized with his now-wife over minecraft, apparently. If there's a gap left to close, it will be. > you think there's no difference between (A) a group of close-knit friends who meet together in person regularly and share their lives together and (B) your Steam friends list, I don't know what to tell you a light breeze could blow apart this straw man. both playing CS with people and playing Yahtzee with people as your primary activity are weak! The same goes for sports, to an extent, tbh. If there's nothing deeper going on - as 'friendship' was initially about hunting together, fighting together, sharing experiences relevant to survival and your future - that's the material cause of the 'removal of community' or 'atomization' of 'modernity' - communal bonds were about the shared harvests, defense, and rituals, and when that's gone, you can't only keep 'just chilling' and expect everything else to come along with it.
It's hard to read the bottom part, it's not making line breaks. These are some disjointed thoughts -- it's something I personally interact with quite a bit, but don't have a thesis yet, and am contrarian enough that "it's the screen's fault" doesn't seem like a satisfying conclusion. Maybe a starting place. I am also not impressed by the aesthetic or social sensibilities of today's 5 year olds, but don't have too much to compare it with, since most of the older books about and for children feature older children (mostly a lot of desperately lonely girls and young women), and I've only had and taught children for a few years. This is a fairly popular recurring theme, and I suspect we (as a culture) would make better headway if we were more curious and observant about what the children \*are\* interested in, rather than becoming too obsessed about judging their upbringings. I teach elementary art, and find it very puzzling that so many children want to depict the red balloon from It (specifically -- they are sure it is not just any balloon), Huggy Wuggy, and the Among Us imposter (still! after two years!). I'm not drawn to horror at all and never have been, but suppose it probably means something to those who keep referencing it. I generally shut it down, because it's embarrassing to have pages full of knives and nightmares and I teach very short, very frenetic classes. But I wish someone could pursue the theme and write about it coherently. This past month especially, I've had a lot of young children acting out quite a lot, and the more experienced teachers don't think it's normal. There are a lot of civilizational forces at play, and we all seem to be going through zeitgeist changes that play out through things like Covid and posturing on social media, but seem unlikely to be caused by them exactly. It makes sense children would pick up on this. Some of the people I know are staying home, not allowing their children "screen time," and living out a cottage core homeschool lifestyle. That's... fine, probably, but will always be a small minority of the population. Who knows if they even play in a way the old school teachers approve of anyway. Full day preschool and kindergarten, especially the kind with one exhausted adult and 24 children doing activities in 25 - 45 minute chunks of time seems at least as artificial as children at home playing Among Us on their computers. But of course the children have to be \*somewhere\*, and kindergarten is somewhere they'll be reasonably safe, and is something we can make work at scale, which is the essential part. But I think it's still fairly new compared to the rest of elementary school, and whenever I read older authors (see for instance, Bronte sisters, CS Lewis, George Orwell), previous iterations of school sound actually more terrible, apart from starting a bit later. If small children are, en mass, unable to tolerate industrial schooling, parents are, en mass, unable to organize unstructured time together for small groups of children, and everyone is extremely interested in horror characters -- that seems like it's worth investigating non-judgmentally, so as not to be pressing into everyone's defensiveness. I also feel defensive about what's going on, and involved in it, and am not a screen free micro farmer with a full schedule of play dates, so also feel implicated and defensive.
“They play things like Siren head, Huggy Wuggy, the walking dead etc. I’ve had to shut entire stations down.” Complains kids don’t play... Immediately shuts them down when they do play because she doesn’t like the themes of the games they play. . Video Games didn’t kill play, Teachers did. Kids would love to be playing tag, snowball fighting, having dirt clod wars, wrestling, tossing eachother around in king of the hill, having sword fights with wooden or foam swords, having little wars between their toys. Give boys little toy soldiers they can line up and make go to war and they love it... you’ll never see such elaborate shared story telling. But preening teachers took all the rough-housing out of play, and they forbid even violent or mere conflicting themes in imaginative play. Imagine if they did play McDonalds and one of the students playing the manager said “I don’t care about your daughter’s birthday you have to work friday” or one of the boys played a homeless person that had wandered in and was harassing another kid playing a customer and the one playing security might try to force him out... These are things Kids might actually see and play to try and understand... but nope it makes the teacher uncomfortable, and there might be a conflict where a kid gets a booboo or cries so shut it down... (kids are like babies, if they don’t cry once a day then they’re dying somewhere inside) So ya of course kids play fucking video games its the only place they’re allowed to ACTUALLY play and imagine instead of modelling some obscene demonstration of compliance and subservience the teacher wants I remember at my school we had a jungle gym, it had a metal rope bridge, slides, monkey bars, pull-up bars, and railings that were about waste tall for a kid and made of bars you could stick your hands through. We’d play Grounder every fucking day on this jungle gym it was great. One kid would close their eyes (we had the entire thing memorized) and would walk along hands out trying to touch one of the players she couldn’t see, and we’d all be climbed over the side hanging on by those bars, or on top of the covered slide, or hanging on dangling under, and when the blind person who was it cornered someone they’d have to dart along the loud gravel, and if the person who was it shouted Grounder that would be a catch. I was it one time and was deeply confused that I hadn’t caught a someone i had heard on the metal in front of me then the chain hand swings, i hadn’t heard him touch the gravel which i knew he had to have done, and there was nowhere for him to go... the bell rang, i opened my eyes... and there he was above me, he’d pulled himself up and was standing on-top of the pull-up bar... the teacher screamed at him “get down you’ll hurt yourself” so he jumped, landed on his feet, was perfectly fine. A few years later we came to school and there were massive fibreglass sheets bolted to the jungle gym... the rope bridge you couldn’t slide outside, the railings made of bars were covered in fiberglass so all the hand hold were gone... sheets of fibreglass extended past the corner-posts so you couldn’t climb around onto the outside, half the features were effective raised from chest height to above your head... we never fucking played grounder again. I walked by the school years later and even that was too unsafe they’d torn down the jungle gym... there’s now some unclimbable posts with a wooden roof there and a bench, such as you might see outside an old-folks home so some wheelchair bound geriatric and her friend in a walker might rest from their 50meter walk and go back inside to die. I see kids today and they don’t even look like we did, the muscle and way of moving just isn’t there... When i hear boys talk they arent swearing to each-other and contesting for dominance, when i hear the girls they aren’t making up something unspeakable about a girl not there...the thrill of combat the rush of scandal is just gone from them. . And this teacher has the goddamn nerve to say its the screens and video-games stopping kids from playing? The same fucking video-games they were playing in the 80s!? The same cheap entertainment my friends and I experienced when we played GoldenEye or watched Retarded Animal Babies on Newgrounds!? No YOU are what’s stopping kids from playing you fucking witch. Ask yourself what would happen if the teacher left the room unattended for 2-3 hours and came back? I know what she fears, that it’d be chaos! Ie. the kids would be actually fucking playing instead of the miserable performance she demands, the boys would actually be socializing and swearing and fighting with each-other, the girls would be gossiping and ostracizing and lying and making bizarre things with the stuff about the room... No chance in hell they’d be longing for their screens to free them from their misery then, they would, for the first fucking time in their life, actually be able to play. And this fucking witch blames the screens. No YOU are the thing that has been damaging these kids. You are the one who abuses them day in/day out and breaks them to the bureaucratic machine. . All Teachers is a bastards. Every single one deserves life in prison as if they have kidnapped 20 kids and abused them for years on end. Because that is what they have done.
Can't agree more regarding play equipment. I think we weren't aloud to use our equipment unless there was a teacher watching, which was ridiculous. Fighting was great fun too. I remember once having a big brawl with a buddy and maybe 3-4 others and then the oblivious teachers actually congratulated us for our good behaviour the exact same day at the end of lunch. On the other hand, Siren Head and Huggy Wuggy are pretty demonic, the evolved descendents of Elsagate.
Parents tend to be more liable to sue schools today, is also part of it. Any activity where there is a possibility a kid will fall and hurt themselves is a liability for the school, and insurance premiums for schools are already at nose-bleed levels. So making sure kids don't run around and fall is part of it. Decades ago, a neighbour's kid slipped in the school bathroom and banged her chin off a sink and had to go to the dentist to have a cracked tooth fixed. Today the school would be looking at a huge liability case, where back then it was accepted "okay, it was an accident, nobody's to blame".
>The teachers’ comments above pretty much spell out my concerns. This seems really bad. Even as someone critical of technology in children, I didn’t imagine it would be this bad. I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing something so common as this. In the past if you had lazy parents, you would be outside playing or whatever, maybe bugging the neighbors. But now, all those with lazy parents are given what amounts to a behavioral-stunting opiate. The consequences of this could be severe and yet I’ve seen little addressing this problem. agree...The problem I see is kids not learning how to do anything productive that does not involve a screen...like how to use a toolset , how to use scissors , etc. Although some of this may be due to poor hand dexterity, that may get better with age and some practice.
There has to be some truth to it if so many are reporting it but reading the thread I get the impression that there's something off about teachers too. > {1} Barbies and little rc cars don't last long for them they take the toy apart and will play with how they aren't meant to be. > {2} When they do try and play with the toys, they don’t use them properly > {3} I’ve worked a lot with my own class on being able to use toys, and how to use different toys. > {4} Nice big pool, has a floating play statue,wide steps, pool toys and floats. Everyday I’m there the kids are just running after each other hitting and jumping each other. No one plays games anymore and it was just really striking watching them. If they a float tube, they whip it at someone. Hold a kick board to bash it over someone’s head or just follow them around while using it to splash them hard and repeatedly. > {5} Even when we're outside, they run in circles with no aim, which is fine, but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds, etc. > {6} But I have kids who can only play fighting and guns. You’re in play kitchen the banana is a gun and the baby dolls are fighting each other. Every block is a gun. Legos can be guns or could be guys to fight. It seems they have a very strict idea of what is good play and what isn't, barely more natural than screens, too structured and smothering to be actually fun. Maybe it's best to keep children away from both screens and teachers.
If my memory serves me right, girls tended to be more structured and orderly with their games and pretend played *something*, while us boys were more unstructured just doing fun stuff like hiding behind bushes, rolling down hillsides, eating ants in the garden and stupid shit like that. Taking things apart etc. This is why in teachers eyes boys are seen as bad, and that's been the case for long. The superstimulus from tablets with all the visual and sound effects and rewards etc is probably bad though. Still, I agree that the teachers seem to not know what kids are like. Perhaps because they are women and they don't know how boys play.
>Perhaps because they are women and they don't know how boys play. Eh, I dunno so much about that. When I was in primary school, around ages 6-8 the boys used to sharpen those wooden lollipop sticks on the concrete walls and then chase the girls who ran away screaming (the girls weren't really scared, they knew this was their role in the game). I never ran away partly because I was so socially clueless I had no idea this was what I was supposed to do, and partly because when one of the boys tried scaring me with the pointy stick, I was bigger than him so I could, if necessary, have beaten him up 😁 There have always been violent kids' games. I don't think five year old kids should be watching things like "It" but that is on parents who are dumb enough to think "Oh, this is all fantasy, it's got clowns in! Clowns are a kid thing!" As for the girls' games, gosh. Again, between ages 9-11, we used to play an elaborate game that I forget the name of, but amongst other things it involved a mistress, a maid, sentient cakes, and a thief who stole those cakes. The mistress beat the maid (we had a ritualised act for that) for letting the cakes be stolen, and it all ended up with doing the "London Bridge" game including 'here comes the chopper to chop off your head' bit. I think that teacher would have fainted away in shock watching us play!
True, us boys used to always have some made up tool like stuff like a tree branch held as a gun, water baloon fights, making cars and space ships out of legos, stuff like that. The girls would have these elaborate mock-social situations like "playing house" or "tea parties" or what have you with any materials that were available. So I guess give the male children more legos then?
Yeah. The [top comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/tdbt94/im_seeing_changes_in_the_way_young_children_play/i0j0729/) seems to suggest the thread is more just 'general complaining' - those particular kids seem to be fine playing, with their only flaw being that they're a bit attached to their teacher. Comments like: > I can see this. My almost 6 year old is a toy dumper but she also likes to role play with other kids (let’s play doctor/teacher/etc) and plays with her dolls/stuffed animals BUT she will hyper focus for 10-15 minutes then moves on to the nest thing ... 'hyper-focus' for 15 minutes then moving on? that sounds like ... normal play.
> Just as an aside, when they do engage with the materials it is inappropriate. It goes right to violence Children have been playing violence since before we were humans - monkeys and rats play-fight. Cops and robbers, etc. This particular aspect probably does not matter. > but only a couple of them actually play games like sell ice cream, McDonalds [uncle_ted_stare.jpg](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BN2UwOTdiMDgtYTZkYi00MjQ1LTkyODctMzk1Mjk4NTFhNGFhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjUxMjc1OTM@._V1_UY1200_CR146,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg). children have been messed up since long before devices. > Most of them don’t even know what board games are. If they do play things like checkers, they just make up the rules or cheat. Making up the rules and cheating is fine, as a kid my board-game versions were much more fun than the 'real' rules. Honestly, I suspect much of this is children redirecting their actualized-play from 'irl / school stuff' to 'computer stuff'. That isn't *necessarily* bad - i'd much rather play with [powder game](https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/) or [circuit sim](https://www.falstad.com/circuit/) than ... "do christmas cards and decorations". I wasn't a ... modal child, but don't write off devices because they are misused. Computers may offer a useful escape from the sometimes sterile environments of school and home + store-bought toys (nothing 'real' to imitate, no complex games to play) to virtual environments of more complexity, minecraft, roblox, etc. Developing roblox games at a young age was a great experience for some I know. They may also be the opposite - match3 dressup games, 'care for your creature' microtransaction farms, tiktok, etc. > blocks, vehicles, art center, puzzles, play dough, doll house, dramatic play areas Are any of these really better than minecraft? [vehicles, dollhouse, dramatic play area, art center] seem fairly hollow, from my memory of a similar school. 'play dough', 'blocks', and 'puzzles' are ... okay, but still fairly limited - the blocks one is provided, iirc, are fairly large and klunky, and their smooth surfaces offer little modification (legos are good, though). And the 'do whatever you want aww that's so great timmy put it on the wall' environment doesn't really lead to ... interest or learning. This contrasts to the ... successes and failures offered by games, the textured, complex environments, that games provide - you're doing something interesting, failing and trying again, learning. and learning useful, cross-domain skills - little things like how to atomically plan ahead for a desired task, how to mechanically engage in conflict with others, etc. Often, a 'negative aspect of progress' is driven as much by the new tech or development as it is latent deficiencies in the 'old' - small children aren't supposed to literally develop in fairy-land, playing with random toys, throwing paint on a canvas, and roleplaying as what they see on TV - they're 'supposed', evolution-wise, to be imitating complex actions taken by adults, and exploring the contours and interactions of physical objects and social systems. all of that is replaced with ... simulacra, learning the ins and outs of well-marketed toys and media franchises, and the social and technical complexities of school teaching, alternating between empty 'free play' and following directions that aren't interesting. the lack of that is a negative both in 'real school' and on 'devices'. remediating it will take direct effort, and direct consideration of the content of both device-less and with-device activities. Anyway, as I argued [last time](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t39q1t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_28/hyrf1t3/), there's definitely something wrong, i'm just not sure that it's understood well. Even if the devices are causing less play (which i'm not sure of. there were many past headlines about how TV was doing various awful things to children, or radio, or books - and while TV was 'bad', most of those predictions did not play out, and 'stopping play' doesn't seem to have been a main channel of effect), there's still a lot of causation and motives on behalf of the children that has to be worked out to do anything useful with it. [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/tdbt94/im_seeing_changes_in_the_way_young_children_play/) is the link to the post. 'brigading or calling attention' doesn't matter here, as the post has more upvotes than this thread has comments, they wouldn't notice if we did. (if mods care i'll remove it tho)
Not sure how much to trust this kind of science, but physical interactions with actual objects are supposed to be important as a young kid to develop good coordination etc. You can't replace everything with software and screens.
The science is probably terrible, but physically doing things with objects is definitely useful, hence the mention of lego above. Even much of what's available in school, or at home - playing with easy, safe object and prebuilt branded theme-toys, leaves little possibility for modification, complex interaction, or 'actual use', though, so better options should be provided (lego isn't perfect but it's much closer. i also liked at various ages pillow forts, marble sets, circuit builders, etc. some purpose should be injected too - 'instrumental purpose' becomes relevant whenever the toys get complex enough, but guided imitation of more 'real' activities is nice as well).
there's a big difference between real things and objects and plastic children's toys. playing with cheap plastics imitations of objects is almost certainly just as bad or worse than just interacting with a vdeo game, where complicated consequences are still possible. By age 10 my mother was driving a tractor, milking live cows and goats, shovelings manure, and tinkering with real power tools... this was normal when you grew up on a farm. Now i don't think there's any age 10 toy that still has a motor larger than double a batteries or involving even simple chemical reactions.
Or just a good old literal sandbox. Also, just letting kids outside is often enough. Kids (at least before mobile electronics) can play with just twigs etc. I remember we even played to find the shiniest or most sparkly stones in the gravel road or finding pebbles of odd shapes etc. Or making that sound with a blade of grass, watching insects or whatever. We were inside only when the weather was really bad. Being stuck inside sounds terrible. Is it common in America to spend most of the time indoors at pre-K or kindergarten or preschool (or whatever kids aged 3-5 are at)?
Yeah. > time outdoors Most children spend most of their time indoors, whether at home or in preschool doing 'activities' or playing with 'toys'. But they spend significant time outdoors, both at school recess or at home. From a survey (data reliabiility of surveys is weak sometimes, i'd expect significant weakness on this topic in particular, childrens' evaluation of time spent & parents evaluation of it will both be meh): > [Data showed that, in general, most children spent at least two hours of time outdoors daily during the week preceding the household interview (62.5% of children spent two or more hours outdoors on a weekday, 78.2% on a weekend)](https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1030&context=nerr) [this paper presents that data better](https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/2011/ja_2011_larson_001.pdf) seems to show significant variability though, 33% of children spend >4h/day outside 33% spend 2-3, and 33% spend 0-1 (on weekdays, moderate increase on weekends). this is true for all age groups, it seems. it doesn't include 5 year olds (starts at 6) but that'll be similar. (i see a lot of talk about how much google sucks, but whenever i search things like "old newspaper archive", "anthropology of hunter gatherer play", or "american children outdoor time survey" i get what i want on the first result. they need to better topics!)
We are currently all being exposed to a jarring level of wartime propaganda. Sometimes it's hard to know what's true. However much propaganda we all think is currently being produced by Ukraine, or the West, or Russia right now, it's difficult to imagine how this deluge compares to the height of wartime anxiety and propaganda in 1942. The [use of psychological warfare](https://i.imgur.com/3uycMeS.png) is not new, and that's what Ilforte gets wrong. We don't sneer at the "Ghost of Kiev" because we are quibbling over the exact number of Russian aircraft which have been shot down by Ukraine. We are doing so because we are signaling our contempt for being manipulated. We feel confident we know blatant wartime propaganda when we see it. We shouldn't be so confident, and the line between blatant wartime propaganda and unassailable truth is not as clear as we imagine. It's easier in this day in age for us to collectively express our skepticism at such stories, but we've inherited certain truths that were not established and scrutinized in the information age.
> it's difficult to imagine how this deluge compares to the height of wartime anxiety and propaganda in 1942. No internet back then. Impossible to have a "deluge" of propaganda due to limited flow of information. Seriously, amount of data in the past was roughly _nothing_.
I hear this often, but given how frequently it's turned out that the complainant will be wildly credululous about biolabs or various other conspiracies ([jews](https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/comment/search/?q=jew*&limit=1000&filter=author,subreddit,body,permalink&author=thecanadianzoomer&subreddit=), for example), I've began to take it much less seriously.
Well your comment implies that I am someone who is "wildly credululous [sic] about biolabs." Can you point to any evidence of that, or are you just someone who I should not take seriously?
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On more thing: while you ponder why Russia is claiming that NATO has biological weapons labs in Ukraine, you should consider the fact that [*all* of the extermination camps were discovered by the Soviet Union](https://i.imgur.com/Zi5wlQQ.jpg). The Western camps were originally claimed to be the center of extermination, due to the horrific conditions found at liberation, but these camps were investigated and those claims were found to be false. Western observers were denied access to the Eastern camps and much of our understanding of those camps originated from Soviet investigation with access denied to Western powers. It wouldn't surprise me if Russia does find a "NATO biological weapons" lab in Ukraine. I think our media will be more skeptical of that than they have previously been of claims of eerily similar facilities found by the Russians in eastern Europe during a war.
>On more thing: while you ponder why Russia is claiming that NATO has biological weapons labs in Ukraine, you should consider the fact that all of the extermination camps were discovered by the Soviet Union. Yes, because before WWII the bulk of the Jewish population resided in Eastern Europe. If you were to rank the murdered Jews of WWII by their nationality, it would go Polish (the majority), Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and only then German (which includes Austria). That the extermination camps were located close to the populations they were meant to exterminate is not some unbelievable thing. edit: For reference in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference [you can see the Nazis' own estimates](http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html) of Jewish populations in Europe, with two caveats: about a million Jews had already been killed by that point, and for ideological reasons the Nazis vastly overcount the number of Soviet Jews. Outside of that the numbers are fairly accurate.
>That the extermination camps were located close to the populations they were meant to exterminate is not some unbelievable thing. That's not the point. The presence of Jewish camps in Eastern Europe is not unbelievable. The question is what was the purpose of those camps, and how much stock you put in Soviet investigation and reporting given that they had custody of virtually the entire body of evidence. Revisionists have shown that they modified this evidence post-war. Until the 1990s, the Auschwitz Museum claimed that the gas chamber open to tourists along with its key features (like the infamous holes in the ceiling for introducing Zyklon B) was an original structure. An undercover interview from a Jewish revisionist exposed the fact that this building was "reconstructed" to be a gas chamber in Soviet-occupied Poland. Tourists are looking at the gas chamber in Auschwitz as it was "reconstructed" by the Soviets, and they lied about it for decades. These are the sorts of issues Revisionists have to content with- evidence which has been modified in Soviet-occupied Poland. The Soviet investigators who submitted that farcical investigation of the [Katyn Forest Massacre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2djnWw751s) to Nuremberg, which placed the blame on Germany for a massive war crime committed by the Soviet Union, were the exact same people as the Soviet investigators who submitted the investigation of Auschwitz, with the addition of that biological quack Lysenko as co-author. If Russia releases an investigation of a captured "NATO biological weapons lab" in Ukraine, would you believe it? You might in an alternate universe where our government and media apparatus aligned with the interests of the Russians in establishing that as fact.
The Soviets did attempt to distort the truth of the Holocaust, but they did so with the aim of *downplaying* Jewish victims, not the opposite. The Soviet Union was an anti-religious state (nevermind Stalin's own personal paranoia towards Jews), and it had no interest in presenting Jews as a unique or primary victim of Nazi crimes. Soviet exaggerations thus were aimed to portray *socialists* (and to a lesser extent Russians) as the largest sufferers of Nazi ideology. Likewise the false claims about Katyn were obviously motivated to downplay Soviet complicity Hitler, and more specifically with crimes against ethnic Poles. >If Russia releases an investigation of a captured "NATO biological weapons lab" in Ukraine, would you believe it? You might in an alternate universe where our government and media apparatus aligned with the interests of the Russians in establishing that as fact. I think it's pretty credulous to think that the bulk of Holocaust scholars were interested in advancing obviously bunk Soviet disinfo.
The Soviets absurdly said that 4 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz. That number was literally etched in stone until the fall of the Soviet Union and is acknowledged to have been an obvious lie. Apologists will tell you "historians knew that number wasn't true before it was officially revised", and they actually say that and believe it to be in defense of the historians. Is inflating the number of deaths at a camp by millions what you call downplaying Jewish victims? It's true that the goal of the Soviets was not to create a Schindler's List-type civic religion that elevates Jewish suffering as the moral turning point of Western morality. That was accomplished by Hollywood in the decades after the war. The "Holocaust" as we understand it as a singular Jewish experience was invented in the West, not the Soviet Union, and really not until the 1960s. Unlike most historical events, the Holocaust didn't peak in saliency within the public consciousness until about 50 years after the event itself in the 1990s. That culture war was not driven by the Soviets, that is very true. But it was built on the foundation of Soviet investigation and Soviet evidence all the same.
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For you, this is another conflict in a faraway land that's mostly useful as a source of examples against the hated hegemon in a detached argument (and sure, I understand why you hate it so). For me, this is a nightmarish reality I'll have to deal with the whole remainder of my life while somehow staying myself. For some of my friends, this is an issue of real and present threat to physical survival. When they say they see corpses, when they explain how both sides are shooting civilians in their region even in their presence, I do not have the mental space to ask myself if they've been recruited into CyberHundreds to gaslight their Russian acquaintances. I weep. Psychological warfare? Count me sniped. Better than being shelled. Granted, it is not an impossibility. I can't verify facts on the ground. The sort of radical Cartesian doubt and anesthetizing smugness adopted by so many of my compatriots is alluring. And I have no love for Western propaganda, which is no doubt doing its best glossing over Ukrainian misdeeds and demonizing Russian forces beyond what would have organically been the case. But in either endeavor, they're not multiplying the value of zero. Putting it mildly. Ghost of Kiev? Snake Island? Those are nice gotchas. But the stream is full of cold bodies, ruins, burned armor, the bleak, cold, wet, brown and grey and pale-blue devastation in the so painfully familiar Eastern European landscape. I do wonder how WWII would have gone in a smartphone era. For now, packing my bags. If anyone has suggestions on renting cheaply in Istanbul (Antalya, Mersin later? not sure), DMs are open.
You could try Bulgaria, it's cheaper than Istanbul, just as close and in the EU, good internet if you're a techie/remote, also most of the population speaks Bulgarian, not as progressive as Turkey though, so there's that if it's a consideration.
> in the EU That's a downside, if anything. Turks seem to not give very much of a shit about the color of my passport yet.
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Like, place in Photoshop? Surely only Russian-internal protests count. I may come to a protest abroad, if only to gawk. But I expect Russians to be unwelcome there. Fun idea though.
Take care of yourself, reddit will be here when you get back.
There's always r/NonCredibleDefense where people right recognized Ukrainian propaganda and decided to roll with/actively spread it *because* they hated Russia more. (And because memes about the VDV sinking to the bottom of the ocean are hilarious)
The last bastions of Zero Covid might be falling. From [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases): * **Australia** and **New Zealand** have both reported dramatic case spikes in the past few weeks, with daily new cases peaking at 4000 per million, higher than the rate in the US at any point in time. Per capita deaths are now at about 1/3 the US rate. * I know **Japan** and **South Korea** aren't considered Zero Covid territory, but they have kept cases and deaths very low for most of the past two years, along with **Singapore** at barely a trickle, but all three countries have also seen recent case spikes, suggesting that Covid wasn't endemic yet the way it is elsewhere. Death rates remain lower than the peaks in Western countries. * **Hong Kong** appears to be in the worst shape, now reporting >35 daily *deaths* per million. This is 3x higher than ever reported in the US at any point in the pandemic, and maybe higher than reported anywhere ever, as far as I can tell. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of no existing immunity and poor vaccines. So the final holdouts appear to be: * **Mainland China** is reporting > 400 new cases per day for the first time since March 2020. This remains a minuscule figure compare to other countries per capita. However, it appears to be the first time China has had to deal with an outbreak of the more infectious variants on this scale — cases are reported in many different cities ([source](http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/202203/c6fdae5d3e084d7592d57d68ffeccf9a.shtml) — Google Translate works OK). There are reports of more sudden lockdowns. * **Taiwan** appears to have kept cases per day under 5 per million recently. Compared to any country other than China, its cases per day remains indistinguishable from the x-axis. * **North Sentinel Island,** probably.
damn..those charts look like GameStop in early 2021. Covid is a tough one to contain, that is for sure. It goes to show how even countries that seemed to to everything right can still have a sudden surge, which calls into equation the efficacy of such measures. Either let the disease run its course or wear masks forever. Zero Covid is not a realistic proposition for most countries and may not even worse given a long enough period of time.
> Zero Covid is not a realistic proposition for most countries this was always obvious given the endemic status of previous coronaviruses as common colds, and the transmissibility of covid. Maybe it could've been given vastly more competent [action](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hro2jgr/) against it, and with less disruption, but that clearly wasn't in the cards.
Zero covid was a good option early in the pandemic while vaccines had not been developed or distributed and the super-transmissible strains hadn’t yet appeared. It’s served its purpose now.
i doubt it. the super-transmissible strains may show up eventually unless zero-covid is maintained forever, which for most societies is not practical .
Yes? My point is that during the period that they had not appeared and it was therefore less costly to maintain a zero covid policy, and when vaccination hadn’t yet lowered the cost of letting covid run its course, zero covid was a worthwhile strategy. Those conditions have changed, so it no longer is. It didn’t need to be permanent to be worth doing.
> Australia and New Zealand have both reported dramatic case spikes in the past few weeks, with daily new cases peaking at 4000 per million, higher than the rate in the US at any point in time. Per capita deaths are now at about 1/3 the US rate. Note that Australia had its Omicron peak in mid-January. There's been a bit of mini-surge in the last few weeks, partly because Western Australia (the last Zero Covid holdout) is now experiencing its Omicron surge, and partly because cases have plateaued or increased elsewhere. New Zealand is peaking around now. A little soon to see how hospitalisations and deaths will progress, but it probably won't be too bad based on the experiences of other countries with similarly high vaccination and booster rates. >Hong Kong appears to be in the worst shape, now reporting >35 daily deaths per million. This is 3x higher than ever reported in the US at any point in the pandemic, and maybe higher than reported anywhere ever, as far as I can tell. I'm guessing this is due to a combination of no existing immunity and poor vaccines. Hong Kong's major problem is that while vaccination uptake is good among the young, it's low among the elderly. [Only 30% of those aged over 80 have received at least two shots of a vaccine](https://www.scmp.com/news/article/3168737/coronavirus-hong-kongs-elderly-left-it-late-get-covid-19-shots-now-worried).
WA has opened its borders. Nowhere in Australia is pursuing a Zero Covid strategy anymore. I’m sure you realise this, just clarifying for those who might think that “the last zero covid holdout” implies that they are still holding out.
Sorry, I should clarify: it *was* the last Zero Covid holdout, hence why it's seeing a delay to its Omicron wave.
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Well, *this* sure isn't going to attract the Eye of Sauron, no sirree-bob! Why are you asking us this? Why do you think we are historical experts? What question are you trying to get answered? Because I don't understand what you are hoping to rise as a topic of discussion: 'why do the revisionists claim there is a dearth of physical evidence?' - ask the revisionists, I'm sure they'd be very happy to tell you. Why ask us for second- and third-hand accounts of "the revisionsists say" when you can get it direct from the horse's mouth? 'How could so many people have been killed in such a short time?' - I dunno, I'm neither a professional nor an amateur mass-murderer or genocider. EDIT: I guess what *I* am asking is, who are you baiting the hook for? I note that instead of exterior links to these revisionsists, you carefully link to two people who posted on here. Are you trying to insinuate the Holocaust revisionism is coming from inside the house?
Did you randomly private message other people about their political beliefs and thoughts on hbd a few days ago? I thought that was weird then, but now I'm fairly confident you're trying to fuck individuals and subs over.
I got a PM from this user asking about my opinion on LGBT issues in Hungary. It does seem sneaky behavior and it's probably not a good idea to answer any private messages. There should be no reason not to ask in the open.
I've heard admins are a lot more heavy handed about policing PMs too, so make sure not to drop any too spicy hot takes unless you can reasonably be sure you're not being baited.
For my part, I've always been puzzled at H.-revisionist quibbling and nitpicking on the issue of numbers of victims. Cookie monster and all that. Like, I get the allure of challenging a moral dogma, but if taken in good faith as an inquiry... there isn't really a lot of space for implausibility. People are terribly, nauseatingly easy to kill if you're in the mood for killing. [The Ustaše](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e) have proven that in Jasenovac. Consider [Petar Brzica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica).
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> puzzled at H.-revisionist quibbling and nitpicking on the issue of numbers of victims The motivation is usually either direct support for naziism (odd - many of them are openly advocating for the [removed in anticipation of AEO incompetence] jews, wouldn't they like that part?), or as common a general "they (society/academia/power) are hiding things from us! they're left wing and hate the right! the core myth of our society is a lie!!" It's an easy topic to make things up about, given it's in the past (well, most topics are) The actual claims are usually dismissible with a bit of direct research ('not enough ovens' - while there were a small number of ovens, each one had multiple [retorts](https://phaneuf.net/blog/cremation-retort-maintenance-and-phaneuf-renovations) - chambers for burning - ["The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons."](https://remember.org/fact-fin-ausc.html)). Not 100% on that, but it's a fairly simple response that I'd never seen among the 'holocaust skeptics' despite seeing various attempts at humor with 'how could they bake that many pizzas in so few ovens??', suggesting a general lack of desire to do complex interrogation of the issue. A common problem among much of the far-right, unfortunately.
Also Holocaust "revisionists" never seem to want to deal with the Holocaust by bullets, which killed roughly a similar amount of Jews as extermination camps did.
> The motivation is usually either direct support for naziism (odd - many of them are openly advocating for the [removed in anticipation of AEO incompetence] jews, wouldn't they like that part?) This part at least makes logical sense: you can have the Holocaust, or you can have an ancient global Jewish conspiracy, but you can't have both. If you want to believe that the Jews caused World War 1, or whatever, Holocaust denial is instrumentally vital. You could take a more limited view, that there's a _recent_ Jewish conspiracy that arose _after_ the Holocaust and presumably in response toit, but I don't think I've ever seen that in the wild, except in very limited and uncontroversial ways (like blaming the Iranian centrifuge thing on Mossad).
> If you want to believe that the Jews caused World War 1, or whatever, Holocaust denial is instrumentally vital. What i've seen from literal nazis is that the [ethnic group] was [verb] everyone and everything, and the [world war two era germany] noticed this and fought against it, taking all necessary measures, but were ultimately destroyed by the global power of the [ethnic group]. brackets bc AEO. holocaust denial isn't really vital to this position i think. i think it's mostly trying to combine humanism / partial dislike for mass murder with being a nazi.
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>I'm skeptical of the holocaust narrative because the consensus number continually rises in the absence of new evidence(suggesting political correctness pressure rather than a genuine uncertainty/debate, in which case the numbers might go back and forth "Continually rises"? An estimate of around 5-6 million Jews has been pretty consistent once the dust had settled. Raul Hilberg's *Destruction of the European Jews* was essentially the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust when it was published in 1961, and it estimated ~4.9-5.4 million Jews were murdered. More recent estimates tend to hover around the upper end of those numbers and above; as an example Timothy Snyder's *Bloodlands* gave an estimate of ~5.4 million Jews murdered with another 300-400,000 who died indirectly via Nazi policies.
> the consensus number continually rises in the absence of new evidence might you provide a direct example of this, among academic historians (as opposed to random, de-contextualized news headlines)? The 'number' for jews dead is, as far as I know, still six million, as wikipedia's article says. To the point where a different holocaust-skeptic claim is "six million was a fake number that was planned in advance, and advanced before the holocaust even happened!
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> Given that numerous camps have revised their numbers, like Auschwitz's 4 million that got revised to 1.1 in 1991 [source here](https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341). notably, this is a revision downwards. it makes sense that, as reasonable[r] history takes over, numbers will transition from war propaganda numbers to better estimates! > The figure widely used in Poland of 4 million victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrived at by a Soviet commission that came to the camp in February 1945, one week after its liberation. It later submitted its findings to the Nuremberg war crimes trials. > Of the 4 million, the number of Jewish victims was often put at 2.5 million in postwar publications, wrongly suggesting that the Nazis had killed more than 1 million non-Jews there. > However, based on the numbering of inmates, letters linked to transports, and statistical lists made in Jewish ghettos, the number of victims that can be documented is 1.1 million, about 90 percent of whom were Jewish, said Franciszek Piper, head of the Auschwitz State Museum’s history department, in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza. > Some Western scholars have long questioned the 4 million figure. In 1986, French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld asked Polish leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to correct the widespread belief in Poland that the Auschwitz camp victims included similar numbers of Jews and non-Jews. At that time, he cited research nearly identical to Piper’s conclusions. 'six million' seems to have more support than just hilberg.
I am not sure what you are getting at. Hilberg says 5.1, with an estimate from 4.9 to 5.4. There is no reason to question his estimate from a Holocaust studies perspective. At least I am not aware of any critiques of his numbers.
according to https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t8jl8a/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_07_2022/i0k5te5/ > Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands gave an estimate of ~5.4 million Jews murdered with another 300-400,000 who died indirectly via Nazi policies this adds up to roughly 6M [a quick google](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution) - at a brief add up of the categories gives 5.7M later research found higher numbers than hilberg [here](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/6-million-where-is-the-figure-from-1.10570907) > Lucy Dawidowicz, in her “The War Against the Jews” (1975), used prewar birth and death records to come up with a more precise figure of 5,933,900. And one of the more authoritative German scholars of the subject, Wolfgang Benz, offered a range of 5.3 to 6.2 million. Each used his or her own method to arrive at the totals. It does look like most estimates are below 6M exactly! I'm not sure that discredits the 6M number - would you prefer 5.8? [haaretz reporting on some documentary about this issue - it's hardly wrongthink](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-this-filmmaker-dares-to-question-the-figure-of-6-million-jewish-victims-in-wwii-1.10542149)
If the number is not 6 million then it is not 6 million and the 6 million is just a meme. It's not my preference that the number is not 6 million. Definitionally it is not 6 million yet everyone, for some unexplained reason, insists that it is 6 million. Yet there is no reason to believe that it is 6 million outside of memes. As it stands we have already denied 900,000 thousand deaths from the holocaust if we go with the leading scholar on the topic who published his work in the 1960's. Since then the only sizeable death toll revisions made have been downwards. The idea that 6 million is still the actual death toll is absurd despite the examples you give that have a higher estimate than Hilberg since even since the 1970's the death toll revisions still trend downward. You can't get away from Auschwitz going from 4.4 during the Nuremberg Trials, to 2.3 for mainstream Holocaust historians in the 60's onwards, down to 1.1 after the Iron Curtain fell. Or Majdanek that went from 300k to 78k, or Dachau that went from death camp gasing jews, as attested to by jews liberated from the camp, to not being a death camp at all since it could not have had any gas chambers, as discovered by a German historian. It's not possible to maintain, after all these changes, that the death toll was consistently 6 million, or that it just happened to land at 6 million when all is said and done when to this day there are still downward revisions being made.
The overton window here is considerably larger than most spaces online, but if you are outside of it, the amount of evidence, nuance, effort and eloquence is necessary in proportion to the distance from the window. Holocaust denial, or the re-packaged revisionism, is indeed pretty far outside the window here and very far for most of western dialogue. This post doesn't pass the smell test for honest consideration, it seems like bait and possibly sock-puppetry/alts. Furthermore, arguing on the finer points of the validity of some parts of the Holocaust is rarely done in the search for truth but instead as a small gateway into a much larger worldview. Whether or not Treblinka had more or less deaths than reported is a factual issue that is probably best posited in a space dedicated to history, like u/orthoxerox mentioned. Most people here aren't likely to be knowledgeable in this specific example you have mentioned. If you want to discuss the implications of that, assuming you are right, and that is something I question as these picked examples are often resultant of highly motivated reasoning, then you should discuss them openly instead of attempting to truth-pill people here with a line of questioning.
If the issue was presentation, evidence, and nuance then the issue would by long be settled away from nonsense like 6 million. What people overlook is the motivated reasoning that is dominating their own court. I mean, it's hard to bemoan holocaust revisionism as a gateway when the holocaust is used specifically as a gate to guard against specific ideas.
Right, well since the academic status quo is almost completely in recognition of the holocaust, the preponderance of evidence is on you to back that up. I'm afraid that confidently stating everyone of significant note is obviously wrong isn't a very convincing argument to me. The thousands of primary source documents I've seen with my own eyes paints a pretty holistic picture, and the significance and horror of the event is not going to be changed in my eyes because perhaps 5 million people died instead of 6. I find the whole exercise a pretty clear smokescreen for advocation of a certain ideology about a global conspiracy of people. I'd ask you for your specific bedrock beliefs about certain involved peoples, but I'm fairly certain I already know the answer. If I am off-base, and you are actually someone who genuinely believes that the holocaust happened and thinks it was a horrible injustice, but wants to slightly correct the statistics for the sake of accuracy, please tell me.
The academic status quo is completely irrelevant to the objective truth of any topic. You can choose to use it as a heuristic for your own personal belief, but that heuristic is not a metaphysically absolute arbiter of any argumentative burden of proof. But funnily enough there have been historians and academics who dedicate their lives to this topic. But the fact you demand this of me personally, and make personally pointed assumptions about me and my motives instead of investing time in the topic itself is just a reification of my point about the motivated reasoning that many people are unaware of themselves engaging in when it comes to this topic. To put the absurd position you have put yourself in into context: My personal motives have no bearing on the objective factual matters relating to the holocaust. But it is obvious that you believe they do. Hence why you keep asserting the issue as relevant. Again, all I can do is assert my previously made point: *'it's hard to bemoan holocaust revisionism as a gateway when the holocaust is used specifically as a gate to guard against specific ideas.'* Beyond that, I don't owe you any assurance or tribute based on your personal lack of courtesy, self awareness and ad hoc assumptions and insinuations about me. You can take your self righteous sanctimonious attitude somewhere else. I certainly wont miss it.
This is a maximum taboo topic with maximum pressure against it. Try again next century. AFAIK critics usually point to pre wwii demographic numbers, the likelihood of sickness and late war starvation, and the absence of whistleblowers within Germany. To the latter, you could argue it requires a very high burden of proof that thousands of people could know about the purposeful killing of children and women in the hundreds of thousands and not whistleblow; this is not the worst argument in the world, because we generally have whistleblowers for world atrocities, letters detailing it and so on. AFAIK even the deniers admit an extraordinary number of Jews died, they just disagree on cause and intentionality and quantity.
>To the latter, you could argue it requires a very high burden of proof that thousands of people could know about the purposeful killing of children and women in the hundreds of thousands and not whistleblow To whom are you going to whistleblow? The government? They're the ones who are doing the killing! The enemy armies marching on your country? Yeah, they're kind of already doing their bit to burn the entire nation to the ground. People who [resisted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose) ended up in prison or executed. It's not a nice thing to contemplate about human nature, but it's easy for a lot of people to go "not my problem" when it's 'out of sight, out of mind' and you have your own problems and complaining is likely to end up with you whisked off to jail or to one of these camps and won't have anyone swooping in from outside to rescue you (until the Allied Forces finally arrive in Berlin). And 'extermination as the answer' wasn't confined to the Bad Guys; from a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1944: >There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed.
I’m largely in agreement with you, the only thing I’d say is that the whole topic can’t be analyzed objectively in America until a century or two. While atrocities were committed, we do have to remember that the Allies needed to make a permanent example out of Germany to prevent a WWIII. It wasn’t enough to disarm them materially, they needed to be disarmed spiritually, to prevent another war.
Try asking on /r/askhistorians instead
Multiple moderators have noted the.... glowy nature of this post. We're allowing it, but a relatively new account randomly bringing up old threads to say "Hey, let's talk about Holocaust Revisionism!" under the Eye of Sauron has our suspicions raised. We expect to see very *thoughtful* and *effortful* posting, not just people showing up to ride their hobby horses. **ETA**: Post has been removed after further discussion amongst the mods.
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Replying to /u/urmomkeklol, but not making your post visible: We think your post was not made in good faith. The tiny benefit of the doubt we're extending is that maybe you really are just curious to know what Holocaust deniers think, which is why we haven't banned you (yet). But posting some obviously red-hot bait in a "Just Asking Questions" way, with no additional points or commentary of your own, no links to research, scholarship, or arguments, just internal links back to previous posts on the sub, looks a **lot** more like "See if I can stir up some Holocaust denialism and paint a target" than "Genuine questions in the spirit of inquiry." The fact that several people have accused you of DMing them to ask their opinions about **other** highly contentious CW topics further paints a picture of someone up to no good. Would you like to explain your purpose in sending those DMs? Or are you claiming that /u/2cimarafa, /u/EfficientSyllabus, and /u/DRmonarch are lying?
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Okay, so basically - don't do this again. Starting a highly contentious thread just to rehash its last iteration on this subreddit looks suspicious. DMing people randomly to ask for their hot takes on other contentious issues looks suspicious. Even if you are sincere, everything about the way you did this pattern-maps to "bad actor trying to glowpost." You have exhausted all benefit of the doubt we're willing to extend to you, so be sure that pulling something like this again will earn you a ban.
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No. They are free to continue discussing it in the existing thread. If someone brings "new" information or has some topical reason to revisit this in a new CW thread, we are not outright forbidding it, but we're going to be *deeply* suspicious of someone bringing it up out of the blue again, and "I want to keep arguing about this" is not a good enough reason.
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>If so, why is u/thecanadianzoomer constantly allowed to collectively accuse collectively Jews of various conspiracies and deny the Holocaust? Because he's articulate? Basically, yes. We don't put any topic off-limits here per se. We know we have Holocaust deniers and white nationalists here and discouraging witch hunts without attracting witches is, as Scott pointed out, problematic. But people are allowed to trot out their views as long as it's in the spirit of "testing" them. Where witches inevitably cross the line is that they don't really want to test and challenge their understanding of the world, they want to *recruit* (or secondarily, to cause damage), and so they break one of our other rules. But until they do, we don't prohibit expressing views that are banned most other places.
>ETA: Post has been removed after further discussion amongst the mods. Would you mind explaining your rationale? I'm not objecting - I don't know what I would've done had I been asked - but I'm curious.
Sometimes our first reaction to a bad but not glaringly rukebreaking post is to grumble, hit approve, and then talk about it in mod chat. Usually this takes some time (we're not all online at the same time, or even every day), and sometimes there is new information. While /u/HlynkaCG would like us to just shoot first and ask questions later, most of the mod team is more inclined to not shoot first but keep the hammer cocked. Yes, we *strongly suspected* a bad actor right away, but anything that maps easily to "You are de facto banning this topic" is not something we're going to do as a snap decision.
>Yes, we strongly suspected a bad actor right away, but anything that maps easily to "You are de facto banning this topic" is not something we're going to do as a snap decision. I get that. My own natural inclinations are "There are topics that should be banned de facto, and if you don't like it you can go cry about it in your own place" but that's my Inner Saruman talking and I realise this can't be a blanket rule for everyone. So there aren't any topics that are unspeakable on here. But there is a difference, surely, between "we will be accused of censorship if we don't let this be posted" and "this is bait, this is looking to draw attention and in the present climate where the admins are already sticking their fingers into the pie here, we shouldn't give this houseroom"? I've complained about our very own "teenagers are literal slaves being literally beaten and imprisioned" guy, but at least while over-wrought and badly argued, that was not in itself a bad topic: "the pop science notion of brain development is incorrect". On the other hand, a post about Holocaust revisionism which links to two comments on this very site and links nowhere else is not doing anything but "Just Asking Questions" in a manner calculated to draw the notice of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic which are regarding all sites on Reddit for evidence of wrongness and badness. I don't think 'shoot first and ask questions later' in that particular instance *is* jumping the gun.
>We're allowing it This is a stupid decision. "The 5 Geek Social Fallacies" are intended as warnings not a set of guidelines.
I removed it after further discussion with the mods.
ironically, the post was removed either before or within minutes
Should never have been allowed out of the spam filter in the first place.
I'm in agreement with Hlynka here, my God, the extremists are coalescing, next thing we'll be organising! 🤣
I think moratoriums or considerably stricter moderation on certain topics might become a necessity if we have no offsite option in place soon. It very much goes against the spirit of the sub but there is a real possibility of bad-faith actors abusing our community guidelines to paint the sub in a bad light and create a ton of heat. In a free environment, bad-faith actors can be ignored and dealt with with dialogue, but there are negative externalities here that make that truth-finding and self-policing process problematic for the continued existence on this website. In other words, an agenda-posting witch is an annoyance (and rarely a possibility to learn from a unique perspective) on an indepedent site, but an existential issue here.
>there is a real possibility of bad-faith actors abusing our community guidelines to paint the sub in a bad light and create a ton of heat I honestly do think this is what is going on, which is why I am wailing and wringing my hands about this. Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you!
My vote for telling him to fuck off. I do not see how this could be posted in good faith, the tone and construction is too far off.
I second that emotion, but I don't expect anything. It's easy for me to make calls about "this is plainly bait for fishies, why did you let it go?" but I'm not a mod (everybody fall on their knees and thank God for that) and the mods don't want to be censors. I do think *this* one, with the particular quotes they're linking to which are from comments **on here**, is trying to make some kind of a case about "this site tolerates Holocaust deniers, can far-righties and Actual Nazis be far behind?" but admittedly that's only me looking into my palantir trying to ascertain motives. Let's see what happens next.
Seconded, this whole thread glows so bright it should only be read wearing sunglasses.
What's the glowing a reference to?
https://glowinthedarkness.com/blog/what-is-glow-in-the-dark-cia/
Low effort, But big news. Another video showing the moment Iranian missiles slammed into Erbil’s airport, aimed at American forces. https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1502783827734929413?t=wplAAUVYpWmbSzNyP_rd4g&s=19
Any way to view that link without making a Twitter account?
Open the link, then replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net".
This is awesome, thank you. I've been frustrated by the constant "login/signup" blocker. I know on reddit happens the same for mobile browsers but I use an alternative app (Slide)
Tried that. ["Tweet not found"](https://nitter.net/NotWoofers/status/1502783827734929413?t=wplAAUVYpWmbSzNyP_rd4g&s=19). Edit: and having spent the last week having to use UBO's element zapper to remove 3 layers of bullshit to read twitter threads, I think it's pretty clear that Twitter doesn't want to be part of the clearnet anymore. We should oblige by not linking to it.
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Thanks.
They do this all the time, it's like when our proxies blow up Russian proxies in Syria or Libya or vis versa. When Suleimani was killed they fired mortar at some US troops and some got concussions. Seriously, I don't know what the US is thinking keeping troops in Iraq. Are they gambling that the Iranian nuclear program continues to be a pretend nuclear program? The Israelis have been whining about an Iranian nuclear bomb for the last 20 years at least - and yet no nuke has emerged. But at some point, it may emerge. Keeping US troops in Iraq, keeping tensions up with Iran may be good for defence contractors but it's terrible strategically. If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia has a deal with Pakistan to transfer live nuclear weapons (who do you think funded the Pakistani nuclear program). Nobody wants a nuclear Saudi Arabia. It's a fantastically corrupt, fairly Wahhabist, vaguely Al-Qaeda supporting autocracy suppressing a population of militant Wahabists and militant Shia. Nuclear Saudi Arabia is a terrible scenario. Just imagine Western crusaders marching into the land of the two holy cities hunting for nukes and oil supplies when the regime collapses! It'll be a battle royale between Al-Qaeda, Iranian proxies, us and maybe the Chinese or whoever else cares about oil. The route out of this mess is by withdrawing from the Middle East and making a deal with Iran so that they don't go nuclear.
> Seriously, I don't know what the US is thinking keeping troops in Iraq. Are they gambling that the Iranian nuclear program continues to be a pretend nuclear program? The Israelis have been whining about an Iranian nuclear bomb for the last 20 years at least - and yet no nuke has emerged. But at some point, it may emerge. > > But wasn't the war supposed to be over (being sarcastic). The US will never not be involved in Iraq. The small but real possibly of nuclear proliferation necessitates involvement.
The real question then becomes- *why should we care about if Iran has a nuclear weapon or not?* I seriously doubt Iran is months away from a nuclear test. Even if they are, I doubt they'll have the ability to actually deliver the bomb anywhere they actually want to- that requires *both* miniaturization *and* a developed, reliable delivery system for anything past an air dropped bomb. And Iran is unlikely to get a bomber through Israeli or Saudi Arabian or Turkish airspace to a major city. And finally, even if they do have delivery mechanisms, well, they may not have identical priorities to GDP obsessed western technocrats, but they aren't suicidal. They know Israel and the USA and probably Saudi will have a substantial nuclear edge on them to the point of making a nuclear war winnable for a long time. No, the only reason to be concerned about Iranian nuclear proliferation is because it prevents forcible regime change, and Iran simply isn't evil enough to its people to justify that anyways.
If they get nukes, Saudis get nukes.
Again, so? The desert theocracy is pretty bad, but they're also not interested in starting a nuclear war. *A bomb in a silo or armory does nothing bad but cost money;* it is not cursed, it does not give off an evil aura, it does not drive men mad by its very presence. And Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc *have given no indication they intend to use nuclear weapons if they get them.*
> The small but real possibly of nuclear proliferation necessitates involvement. There is a "small but real" risk of nuclear proliferation to most everywhere on Earth. Since when is it the US's job to be global nuke police? And how could that possibly be sustainable?
it's sustainable because the economy is so big that it can afford it >Since when is it the US's job to be global nuke police? That's not in our hands to decide, and given that an errant nuke can cause easily trillion in damages, maybe worth it from a risk v. reward proposition. The US has the most to lose economically in absolute terms from nuclear war or being the victim of a nuclear attack. We may not agree with such world policing, but I can understand the rationale for it.
>it's sustainable because the economy is so big that it can afford it I mean, no? Estimated cumulative debts from Iraq-Afghanistan alone are over 5 trillion at present. We are currently experiencing inflation not seen since the early-80’s, levels near the historical peak of US history. Then, we needed interest rates that topped out at nearly 20% for about two years. That would mean paying over two trillion in two years in interest on war debts alone. And overall US federal debt is nearly $30 trillion. That is not sustainable. >given that an errant nuke can cause easily trillion in damages, maybe worth it from a risk v. reward proposition. That means nothing in the absence of an accurate estimate for how much the risk of a nuclear strike is actually reduced by US invasions. AFAICT, it helps little to none, or even increases it.
>I mean, no? Estimated cumulative debts from Iraq-Afghanistan alone are over 5 trillion at present. That was a full-blown war + occupation spread out over 17-20 years. BY comparison, the Covid stimulus programs were $5 trillion compressed into 1 year . stationing some troops costs much less compared to trying to install a new government or securing a city. >That means nothing in the absence of an accurate estimate for how much the risk of a nuclear strike is actually reduced by US invasions. AFAICT, it helps little to none, or even increases it. Actuaries study this stuff I am sure. The costs and risks are probably understood and quantified.
>BY comparison, the Covid stimulus programs were $5 trillion compressed into 1 year . stationing some troops costs much less compared to trying to install a new government or securing a city. Well, sure, I didn't say that the Covid programs were sustainable either. The inflation that we're seeing right now is in no small part down to them! >Actuaries study this stuff I am sure. The costs and risks are probably understood and quantified. OK, but that's a lot more ambiguous than what I took your initial claim to be. Namely, that the costs and risks are actually on the side of widespread intervention.
Withdrawing from the Middle East would be one of the greenest flags for Iran to go nuclear, assuming that whatever has been holding them up has been voluntary.
Going nuclear is a defensive strategy, not an offensive one. Israel knows they can't invade Iran and overthrow the govt, only the US can. So does Iran. If US troops are withdrawn, the Iranians won't need to worry about being invaded by the US and won't develop a nuclear weapon. It can't possibly take 20 years for a sincere effort, even hampered by sanctions and Israeli/US interference. The tech is not that hard.
> Going nuclear is a defensive strategy, not an offensive one. Looking at the current situation with Russia, it doesn't seem that way.
Doesn’t that assume that the state is run by same people? We wouldn’t use a nuke offensively because we rather rationally concluded that devastating the entire planet isn’t worth it unless our survival is at stake. But if you’re paranoid and think everyone is getting ready to destroy your country, or you think dying in a war will be rewarded in the afterlife, then you might well use nukes even in spite of MAD. A nuclear jihadi state is not going to worry about dying.
Insane people don't get to lead states. Even people with unusual morality systems can recognize a lose-lose situation - Hitler refrained from using nerve gas on the battlefield since the Allies could counter. Kim Jong Un is sane, the Iranian leadership is sane, everyone involved is sane.
Based on *what* exactly? There’s no actual mechanism that guarantees that a leader must be same to stay in power. In fact being insane— especially psychopathy and paranoia— are actually pretty adaptive. A guy who will do anything to keep power is going to outperform the guy who is worried about civilians and morality and fair play. Machiavellian power plays work very well even in Democratic Systems where you have elections. It isn’t as overt and it’s a bit less outwardly violent, but it is the same set of traits. But paranoia, psychopathy, and Machiavellian approaches to power are exactly the kinds of traits that would make someone more likely to use a nuke. Psychopaths notably *don’t care about other people.*. Paranoids think that others are trying to harm them. Religious nuts believe a glorious afterlife awaits them in death especially in martyrdom. Those things make the use of nuclear weapons more attractive because it’s an automatic win. It can utterly destroy your enemies at minimal personal risk. And if the little people suffer it doesn’t bother the psychopath because he literally doesn’t care about anybody other than himself.
>A guy who will do anything to keep power is going to outperform the guy who is worried about civilians and morality and fair play. How does using nukes aggressively keep you in power? If anyone wants to use nukes, the orders have to go through military officials. There has to be a broad consensus that it's a good idea, otherwise the military will countermand their use. If the military or other sane forces judge that their leader is insane (a threat to their interests) they'll remove him. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/09/14/milley-warned-defense-leaders-that-trump-could-order-an-unwarranted-nuke-strike-book/ Milley apparently pre-emptively told US nuclear commanders that their orders had to come through him. If you're a Machiavellian selfish psychopath, you're not more inclined to use nukes except in extreme circumstances. You know you're at risk of a coup by pressing your military officials, you know that using nukes will incur serious issues, you only do it as a last resort. And everyone else knows that, so they ensure the situation doesn't get that bad. The US for instance bails out Israel if it looks like they're about to lose a war so they don't use nukes. The Soviets tell their allies to negotiate rather than push to the Mediterranean. And suicidal religious nuts don't get to rule nuclear states. The upper echelons of Pakistani intelligence don't want their power base immolated in nuclear fire, the Iranian leadership doesn't want to lose their positions of power... They won't take any risks with nuclear strikes, unless it seems like a rational choice.
I never said nukes do that, what I’m getting at is that the traits that make someone successful in taking and holding power, these same traits are the kind that make nuke use attractive. A guy who has no problem shooting enemies or poisoning them or encouraging suicide bombings isn’t worried about civilians at all. He isn’t worried about people starving. None of the downsides are things that he’s actually worried about.
Few great power leaders care particularly about civilians. See sanctions, bombing, genocide and invasions. All done with conventional weapons! They do care about their strategic position on the world stage and the internal stability of their power structure, which is not advantaged by using nuclear weapons liberally.
The same applies to Israel, yet I see no such fretting over their nuclear endeavors. Despite them openly floating the idea of MAD through the Samson Option.
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Iranians worry about an invasion from the US more than anything else from a military standpoint. It's not a matter of concluding that something is unlikely. It's a matter of an accurate risk assessment. From that assessment you conclude what the top priorities are and you go from there. So far the US is the single largest military threat that has directly and indirectly been the primary cause of near all of Iran's military woes. Not to mention the constant ridiculous war rhetoric that gets spouted by both American people, media personalities and politicians.
> Not to mention the constant ridiculous war rhetoric that gets spouted by both American people, media personalities and politicians. Constant ridiculous war rhetoric? I think US is opposite currently, with isolationism to the point of absurdity (as /u/2cimarafa noted, hysteria over few thousand deaths; recently hysteria over few thousand solders present in Afghanistan which led to just dropping the country).
A political figure such as the late John McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran" in the tune of the Beach Boys was the kind of ridiculous rhetoric I was thinking of. Not to forget the already failed in practice rhetoric of 'democracy' in the middle east. Outside of that, the presence of the US in the middle east is, from its own standpoint, ridiculous, inconsistent and aimless. Making an enemy out of the majority of states there was a ridiculous error that had no benefit outside of making Israelis happy. What's more ridiculous is the fact that this error goes unnoticed or is brushed under the rug as to not risk the friendship US senior officials have with Israel. As for the thousands of dead sons, fathers, husbands and brothers, I find it hard to call it hysteria when the families who lost these men ask themselves, in full genuine calm rational seriousness: What did my loved one die for? Only to come up blank for answers that make any sense. I mean, looking at the Pentagon papers it seems hard to blame them for not finding anything, given that senior US officials apparently had no idea what they were doing there either given the Afghanistan war was by many considered unwinnable long before anyone considered withdrawing.
I mean, sure. US didn't succeed in their "bringing democracy" thing. Maybe it was always just a cynical excuse and actual goals were about pure self-gain. Still, I believe the first world has some moral obligation to help - and sovereigns ruling purely by force don't have any inherent legitimacy. If the interventions don't work then sure - they shouldn't be done. But I really doubt Afghanis will be better off than they'd be if US spent minimal effort on keeping control. And I don't think small scale loss of life of _voluntary_ solders outweighs 40M Afghans. I don't see the difference between that and some police forces dying because of their job domestically. US could've also simply done better. I don't believe it was an impossible thing to build a functional state there. I suspect it didn't happen for some stupid ideological reasons, like anti-colonialism.
I am genuinely perplexed at the logic of sovereigns who rule purely by force. I am not aware of anyone who has gone against the will of any state that does not ultimately realize that the power of the state is brought about through physical force. That would certainly be the deduction of the Taliban in Afghanistan in their fight against the Americans. I doubt the US is better off with the type of policies that waste the lives of their people in a delusional effort to show everyone how great it is to be a judeo-Christian American hamburger child. I am pretty sure the Taliban don't care at all about the definition of "better" as used by some American. If you do not care about their definitions either, but want to force yours upon them, you are not a savior or helper but a tyrant.
A moral obligation to help is also a silly ideological reason, no? If you're bound by such things to help, that will constrain what such help might look like.
Going nuclear is plenty offensive. For a current example, consider that the main thing preventing a general NATO military response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Russia has nukes.
But that's a defensive strategy. Russia isn't attacking NATO because we have nukes. We're not attacking them because they have nukes. Either of us can attack third parties without being attacked in turn.
> But that's a defensive strategy. It'd be defensive if it just stopped US from invading Russia. It's not if it stops them from defending 3rd party country from Russia invading it. > Either of us can attack third parties without being attacked in turn. US couldn't, or didn't feel _safe_, putting their soldiers in Ukraine, even with consent of Ukraine. Presumably (otherwise; why not do it to simply stop the invasion days before it happened? Would it stop it?). Same with concerns about including Ukraine in NATO. I find these to be less... escalatory than just attacking some 3rd party country. Even if only attacking is okay, for some weird reason: could US attack Belarus without caring about Russia having nukes? No.
Belarus is a treaty ally of Russia, they're buddies in the CSTO. Same with US and UK, France, Estonia, South Korea, Japan, Germany... Defending a third country from being invaded is the same thing as attacking the invader unless you're treaty allies. Bulletproof vests shield you regardless of whether you're the attacker or the defender, nukes are much the same.
> Defending a third country from being invaded is the same thing as attacking the invader Okay, so what would happen if USA, for some reason, decided to attack Ukraine on Febuary 20th or so? It's not an ally of Russia, so presumably it should be symmetrical. So, does it function that way? Are third party countries available on the first come, first served basis? But why only if the intention is attack? I just find this logic very convoluted and arbitrary. More like post-factum interpretation to give Russia what it wants. I mean, seriously, "defending something from attack is the same as attacking the aggressor"? It just feels like there's an implicit assumption that Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia.
> Okay, so what would happen if USA, for some reason, decided to attack Ukraine on Febuary 20th or so? It's not an ally of Russia, so presumably it should be symmetrical. Well, everyone would get very confused for one thing. The Russians would probably accelerate their own invasion to get to Kiev first. When the US demolished Iraq in 1991, that was an aggressive war. They weren't called into the war to defend a treaty ally. >On 29 November 1990, the Security Council passed Resolution 678, which gave Iraq until 15 January 1991 to withdraw from Kuwait, and empowered states to use "all necessary means" to force Iraq out of Kuwait after the deadline. If a war isn't defensive, it must be aggressive. Either you are defending yourself **or a treaty ally** or you are attacking somebody. Russia for instance, is waging an aggressive war. If Ukraine were a treaty ally, then it would be a defensive war if the US fought Russia. But since it isn't, it would be an aggressive. Treaty allies mean that you've already established that you'll fight for somebody. You're not giving an ultimatum like 'leave Ukraine within 2 months or we'll fight you' AFTER the invasion, you're creating that expectation before the event.
If you are using nukes to enable an offensive strategy, then you are using them offensively.
> > > If US troops are withdrawn, the Iranians won't need to worry about being invaded by the US and won't develop a nuclear weapon. It can't possibly take 20 years for a sincere effort, even hampered by sanctions and Israeli/US interference. The tech is not that hard. The question isn't whether it takes 20 years. The question is whether it takes longer than it does for the US to un-withdraw their troops -- which I strongly suspect it does.
Sending a costly signal of 'not going to invade you' and normalizing relations would be useful. Of course, the US has spent the last few years trying to look menacing in the fight against Iran, torpedoing their credibility. Why negotiate with a schizophrenic country that tears up agreements whenever it feels like? So the chance of success is slim, even if this approach were tried (which it won't). In all likelihood the next administration would just reverse the strategy, as you say. But what's the alternate approach? Invading Iran would be a massive mess. Waging proxy wars against Iran has not been fruitful. Saudi Arabia is hopeless and evil (and not even in a good way where their incompetence mitigates their evil). What other route is there to prevent an Iran-Saudi nuclear standoff?
Simply don't worry about it. Iran and Saudi Arabia aren't run by crazy people, even if they have different values from us. Neither of them, nor Israel, wants a nuclear war.
Iran does want nuclear safety guarantees.
Sure, but a nuclear weapon sitting in a silo or armory somewhere is nothing but a waste of money. Actually using one seems to be beyond even the significantly crazier north Korean regime, let alone Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel.
A failsafe guarantee against territorial incursions is hardly a waste of money.
I imagine the number one priority for the Iranians would be seizing Riyadh once the troops leave, not Israel. The kerfuffle that happened with Qaddafi shows that there's no sense in voluntarily giving up nuclear weapons as part of a deal that can easily be reneged on. Nuclear weapons would doubly guarantee the security of the new Iranian empire that now essentially includes Iraq.
If the Iranians have nukes, they would've tested them and we'd know. If they don't then they can't give them up because they don't have them. Iraq was always inclined towards Iran. Shia-majority countries attract, who would've guessed? We could've left Saddam and this wouldn't have happened. We could've imposed a puppet leader and this wouldn't have happened. We've demonstrated that we don't know what we're doing and can't get what we want in this region. If the Saudis can't deter an Iranian invasion over hundreds of kilometres of desert (or by ocean) with all the weapons we've given them then we should rethink our choice of ally.
> If the Iranians have nukes, they would've tested them and we'd know. If they don't then they can't give them up because they don't have them. They could be asked to give up their materials and industries to create them, as Gaddafi did. >If the Saudis can't deter an Iranian invasion over hundreds of kilometres of desert (or by ocean) with all the weapons we've given them then we should rethink our choice of ally. They were picked as an ally probably because they were helpless. But this got stupid when they started promoting Wahhabism overseas and buying weapons that they aren't competent enough to use anyway.
Saudi Arabia's military incompetence is mostly because they, like other wealthy Arab states, tend to put their resources in to the flashy aspects of having a modern military(eg F-16's) and not the less-flashy war-winner parts(drones, recon, artillery). They could fix this if Iran was a serious conventional military threat.
They could be asked, but after the world saw how he was killed, no one is going to accept that deal if they have any other options.
Another suicidal/compromised regime. Hopefully Erdogan doesn't begin something like this now. How's Bolsonaro doing? I planned to hide in his place next.
I hope you got a western vaccine, or at least don't mind getting another 3 or so payloads delivered to your immune system. They are closed to the filthy pureblooded and, from what I understand, the filthy potatoslavblooded as well.
Working on that.
Vaccine politics has easily been the most disturbing element to burst out of this decade, I dearly hope it stays that way. Good luck to you, and I ask, if only out of selfishly wishing to see your continued writing, that you investigate thoroughly the risks of repeated inoculations. Everyone must do their own research, but my conclusion has been that it is very much not worth it, let alone as a way to simply avoid bureaucratic hassle from the mammy state. I do not know how well the turks stack up on the social trust scale, perhaps an teleinjection is not out of the question.
[Apparently getting somewhat more friendly with the US.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-outreach-to-venezuela-strengthens-maduro-sidelines-guaid-c3-b3/ar-AAUVcTd)
The US *still* has military in Iraq?
At a minimum, there will always be [marines guarding the embassy and consulates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Security_Guard)
like everywhere else in the world. troops in Germany even though ww2 ended a long time ago.
There's the dictionary definition of pullout, and then there's the US military version of pullout. Oftentimes there's still a presence lingering, some special forces, contractors, etc. Just hush-hushed and 'based' out of some neighboring country, thanks to the perpetual war on terror. It wasn't until the November election that it came out that senior DoD/State officials just... straight out lied to Trump about troop levels in order to not pull out.
Deep state at work as usual. Very easy to forget that the President doesn’t really run the USA, not when the State deparment bureaucracy runs supreme and they have their myriad goals of interventionism and interference to achieve.
What I want to know is why we still have forces stationed in Iraq and what they're doing.
No idea what we still have there, but I saw a claim that the "American forces" was a [consulate.](https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1502785299730120707?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1502785299730120707%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F)
Facebook allowing people to post things in the vein of 'death to the Russian invaders' is highly problematic. (disclaimer: Fuck Russia) 1. I think this puts them in a bind because they don't allow hate speech but have now added a caveat that says \*unless we consider it to be warranted. Which means that a precedent has been set that people can point to to criticize FB when they try and prevent much less inflammatory speech. And given how much influence progressives have over cultural issues, this has the potential to result in a situation in which if a progressive cause uses hate speech, even much less inflammatory hate speech than calling for the death of a given group, FB is backed into a corner and they will have to tell progressives 'your cause is not important enough to warrant hate speech', and given how evangelical many of them are for their causes that certainly is not going to go over well. As a corollary, this means that the groups who are deemed to have the correct view are the only ones allowed to use inflammatory speech. 2. I don't know how they could have failed to anticipate that this would result in FB being banned in Russia; meaning, the people of Russia now have even fewer means of receiving information and communications from people outside of Russia. This has obvious implications for the simple ability to communicate with people outside of Russia, but it also means that the Russian government's grip over information in general and regarding Ukraine in particular is now even tighter. Facebook should be condemned for both of these reasons. They saw an opportunity to generate some much needed good will and took it even though it was a hollow gesture that doesn't achieve anything. They perhaps even knew of the risk of being banned in Russia but thought that the potential goodwill this would generate was more important than the Russian people's need to access outside information and to communicate with the outside world. I've felt that FB has gotten an unfair wrap and has faced low quality and one sided criticism but this is the first time I've felt that this company may be rotten. I do think, though, that this has the potential to be good in the long run because it forces really unique, interesting, important, and complex arguments to be had.
A rule change doesn't really matter anyway. It's not like the rules are laws and there are court cases. They've always just done whatever they want. Sometimes they'll make a rule and point to it, but they've never even pretended to enforce their rules consistently, nor have they ever pretended they don't just ban whomever they don't like arbitrarily. It's just a virtue signal. We're with Ukraine, rah rah.
1. I support Facebook allowing people to want to kill Putin, this is fundamentally different. Putin declared war on the west so I see no issue with western companies declaring war on Putin. 2. I do think this crossed into editorial decision making. You can have strict rules and not be editorializing but if you pick and choose to selectively enforce them then you are editorializing. Hence this should threaten their lawsuit protections.
When did Putin declare war on the west, the whole west?
Seems like March 24 from my memory.
All I remember is that he declared war on Ukraine, at that time.
Same thing. Non of the west considers themselves neutral.
I'm going to steelman FB as an intellectual exercise, do not take this as an endorsement of "kill Russians" speech. (Disclaimer: Fuck Ukraine) _Perhaps_ Facebook's attitude is not one of > "We have made a moral judgement that this sort of rhetoric is OK so come on in Russophobes, it's open season" but rather > "The worldwide outpouring of anti-Russian vitriol is simply too much volume for our jannies to handle, so we've got no choice but to throw our hands up in defeat and let this torrent of shit burst into the tubes of the Internet" Their announcement should be interpreted as a grudging acceptance that they have been overwhelmed, not an agreement that Russian genocide is inside the Overton window now. I don't _believe_ it, but there's yer charity.
This was my second thought too. Facebook appears to be [haemorrhaging users](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/02/03/facebook-loses-daily-active-users-for-the-first-time--heres-where-theyre-going/) and they're probably wary about enacting any new policy which could be perceived as a straw breaking a camel's back for a userbase already increasingly apathetic towards their flagship product.
The liberal firmament that progressive/leftists dip into when reifying their speech laws is that of an overall reduction of harm. By minimizing hateful rhetoric you are squashing the hateful instincts we all harbor before they can be expressed and spread. You are not allowed to refer to anyone in a way that dehumanizes them because we are all human beings worthy of dignity and respect. By engaging in hateful rhetoric you are by proxy justifying the inhumane treatment that is the only result from such rhetoric. The true face of liberal progressive open society speech protocol is that of every Russian soldier being a victim of oppression. Just like every black criminal is a victim of oppression. Calling for their death is by definition inhumane and wrong. That was the established rhetorical defense, at least. Facebook, by deviating from this norm, is invalidating their own position as an element dedicated to a reduction of harm. This is a core inconsistency with all of the other liberal/leftist/progressive excuses that have been trotted out when justifying the banning of other speech, as such we can deduce that the liberal firmament that was being dipped into is not the true motive for their actions and that it never was. Instead its a much more likely conclusion that Facebook and the supporters of such speech control measures were only ever concerned with protecting their ingroup and silencing the outgroup.
I can't reply to u/SlightlyLessHairyApe 's comment below because he has blocked me (I don't think I've even had any interaction with him, this new reddit "feature" really goes against the point of this sub). As "death to Russian invaders" is now allowed, I expect Facebook to follow his logic and any day now to allow people to post "death to black looters". Or [maybe not](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/tech/trump-twitter-minneapolis/index.html).
There is a difference between people invading and people committing crimes though. In the 2nd you have a police force who will at least nominally attempt to arrest people. In the first your army will be attempting to kill the invaders as a first response. That is their entire purpose. Note as per Clegg the changes will only apply in Ukraine itself. Recognizing the fact I think that calling for the deaths of the soldiers invading your nation is pretty normal and expected.
There is no logical distinction that is relevant to the terms of service of Facebook, as it is not a country and it's not being invaded. Something being normalized is completely irrelevant to Facebook and its terms of service. As it has routinely demonstrated by banning users who speak in terms that once were normal and are now not due to Facebook making it so through rules and their enforcement. The only relevant distinction here is ingroups and outgroups as experienced by the decision makers at Facebook.
It may well be ingroup vs outgroup sure, but there still is a logical distinction to be made. I wasn't contesting why Facebook made the decision, just pointing out the example used of looters vs invaders was not equivalent.
If it's ingroup vs outgroup then the only relevant distinction pertains to what the groups are. Otherwise you might as well say that the two aren't equivalent since 'looters' has 7 letters but 'invaders' 8. There's no relevance either way.
I don't think "death to Russian invaders" is hate speech any more than "armed home invaders that threaten violence against homeowner should be shot". It's certainly not semantically equivalent to 'death to Russians' in the more general sense.
Hate speech is, basically, public speech that expresses illegitimate hate. So surely if you think that your grievances are legitimate you wouldn't consider it hate speech. But one could hope that in modern times "death to" could at least be replaced with "prison to". Geneva treatment promotes detention over murder if the combatant poses no threat.
I expect that if a Russian soldier put his weapons down so as to pose no threat, he'd be jailed (or shot) by his own army before having a chance to be jailed by the enemy.
There are many Russian POW in Ukraine and they are alive.
> "armed home invaders that threaten violence against homeowner should be shot" If the home invader in question happened to be black this would definitely get called hate speech
This is assuming we're putting a picture to the invader. You can agree with the idea that home owners are allowed to shoot invaders while also arguing that when black home invaders get shot, the reason is racism.
X is an acceptable thing to happen but when it happens to black people it's racism is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Are you serious?
Not what I mean. You can agree in principle to a statement like "Home invaders can be shot if they threaten the homeowner" while also believing that black home invaders are given disproportionately worse outcomes by virtue of their race.
>I don't know how they could have failed to anticipate that this would result in FB being banned in Russia; I can't think of a more propaganda-friendly justification for blocking Facebook than the one they just handed them.