ThePrussian

• ThePrussianAug 1, 2015, 4:45 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  Thanks, that is good advice. Honestly hadn’t thought of that—oh well. Errare humanum est and all that...

• ThePrussianJul 29, 2015, 12:13 PM

  9 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

  Hi everyone.

  I’ve already posted a couple of pieces—probably should have visited this page first, especially before posting my last piece. Well, such is life.

  I headed over to LessWrong because I was/​am a bit burned out by the high-octane conversations that go on online. I’ve disagreed with some things I’ve read here, but never wanted to beat my head—or someone else’s—against a wall. So, I’m here to learn. I like the sequences have picked up some good points already—especially about replacing the symbol with the substance.

  Question—what’s the ettiquette about linking stuff from one’s own blog? I’m not trying to do self-promotion here, but there’s one or two ideas I’ve developed elsewhere & would find it useful to refer to them.

• ThePrussianJul 29, 2015, 12:02 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  I was wondering why it got downvoted so much. Did you mean the post over at my blog, or this post here? I’m really not sure what’s so inflammatory about this post—I was just trying to explain an idea.

• ThePrussianJul 29, 2015, 11:59 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  Yes, as a matter of fact. He often travelled in Kurdistan, had Kurdish “comrades” as he called them, and championed Jalal Talabani.

• ThePrussianJul 29, 2015, 11:58 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  I should have made it clear—when I was referring to the articles on the Hitch, they were usually from respectable news organizations such as The Guardian or Salon—and so on.

  In case it wasn’t clear (reviewing the article) I was quoting Conservapedia as an example of this kind of bad arguing, bad reasoning.

• ThePrussianJul 22, 2015, 1:42 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  Could be two different uses of the word rationality. There are certainly those who call themselves “reality based” or whatever and therefore assume that everything they assert is rational and scientific. But if you invest yourself in “doing rationality” rather than “being rational” you might do better.

• ThePrussianJul 22, 2015, 1:38 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: David_Bolin’s comment on: Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

  Could you expand on that? I’m not sure I follow...

Base your self-es­teem on your rationality

• ThePrussianMar 4, 2015, 5:12 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: satt’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  Thanks—you’re quite right. That is the study I was thinking of, and 79% is still horrifyingly high—sorry for getting that wrong, and thanks for the correction!

• ThePrussianMar 1, 2015, 7:42 AM

  3 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  Just to take your last point, my response is that this is both a strawman and an argument from intimidation. Take this:

  “you make the claim Hitler’s sole motivation was killing Jews”

  Did I? Where? I said that Hitler’s motivation was his fanatical racism and that the desire to murder the Jews was a large part of that—was, in fact, an inextricable part of that. His racism wasn’t the result of the war, it was the cause of the war. As you admit towards the end.

  “You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.”

  Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary “The Führer recognizes the enormous opportunity that the war provides”. Hitler needed the night and fog of war, not to mention the hysteria that war brings, to carry out his plans.

  “What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? ”

  Well, quote something from the book rather than just drop its title.

  “he slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. ”

  The mass murder of those considered racially inferior was purely tangential? Well, if that’s the way you think, then that’s the way you think. There is a simple answer to this: the Wahnsee decision was to exterminate the Jewish people, and then the Slavs (there is some evidence that Hitler wanted to depopulate Africa after Europe was conquered), and there were camps that were purely devoted to the business of mass murder, no slave labour involved—Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka. The Nazi camps were not like the labour camps of the Soviet Union, they were murder facilities. To argue that the mass murder in the east is tangential is completely ahistoric.

  Since the civilized tone of debate has become strained here, I think I will leave it there.

• ThePrussianFeb 28, 2015, 6:05 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: knb’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  You don’t… but others do. Dinesh D’Souza has written a book detailing the “root causes” argument, but with a twist—the quotations and other evidence he amasses are from a socially conservative perspective. That is, he makes exactly the same, fully backed up “root causes” argument, but differs on the root causes in question.

  Again, I am trying to make the point that what you find obvious isn’t at all what others find obvious. People change radically across time and space.

• ThePrussianFeb 28, 2015, 7:09 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: knb’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  “No doubt they disapprove of many aspects of the American lifestyle, but mostly they are interested in signalling to their fellow Muslims the purity of their opposition to US power in the middle east.”

  But why do they object to US power? They object, in their own words, to US power because it dilutes the purity of Islam. They are not struggling for national liberation, but for theocracy. Their explicit goal is the establishment of a vast theocractic empire—the attack on America was a part of that, to rally the faithful to their cause. Take Palestine, for example—Al Qaeda doesn’t even think Palestine should exist, except as a province of the Caliphate.

  What is “meddling in local affairs” in this context? According to what they say, it is as much American pop culture and the spread of “decadence” (liberalism) as it is the support of certain tin-pot tyrants.

  That isn’t to say there aren’t objectionable US policies. But please don’t confuse why you might object to a US policy with why an Islamic fanatic might object to it.

• ThePrussianFeb 28, 2015, 7:03 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  May I make an assumption? I’m guessing you’re American—it’s that phrase about “right wing Christianity”. The problem is that America doesn’t have anything like real Christian fanaticism. It has some people who are upset about gay marriage and evolution and that’s it.

  Europeans, on the other hand, have had the real thing in living memory. We’re not talking about “the Moral Majority” here, but the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Falange. This is the real thing, real fanaticism, and what you learn is that true faith, true belief does indeed inspire war.

  This is what I mean when I say you cannot assume that other people think the way you do.

• ThePrussianFeb 28, 2015, 6:25 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  One line disproof: There have been a grand total of zero terrorist attacks on the United States from Vietnam, easily the most destructive and wicked war the US has ever waged—if people whose kids are still being born with birth defects don’t decide to fly planes into buildings, I think it is safe to say that something else is going on.

  Again, this ignores the stated intentions and demands of Al Qaeda, to recreate the lost caliphate and enforce the most fanatical Islamic rule within it, a global Taliban style rule. It also ignores things like Al Qaeda’s stated support for the genocide in East Timor or Darfur.

• ThePrussianFeb 28, 2015, 6:22 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  On the other hand, you get exactly that impression by reading… what the actual Nazis said, all the way to the top, and the experiences of people living through that period. During the height of the second world war, they insisted on using scarce resources like trains and troops to keep up the Jew killing—they were willing to risk their own war aims to complete this task.

  You keep citing these books but you don’t give any evidence from them.

  The entire program was to saturate society with racial hatred and frenzy. Children in school were terrified by long harangues about racial purity and so on.

  There seems to be nothing that I can say that will convince you, no piece of evidence from the entire action and behavior of the Third Reich that could possibly indicate to you that they meant what they said. The very idea of a Nazi empire was to establish lebensraum for “pure” Aryans to repopulate. Racial ideology wasn’t window dressing in that empire, it was the very cause and basis of that empire.

• ThePrussianFeb 27, 2015, 6:11 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  If you start an eastward invasion in June, you end up in Russia in Winter. Which is what happened. Which is why Hitler’s generals were against it. It’s not difficult to work out—Napoleon did the same thing.

• ThePrussianFeb 27, 2015, 5:53 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  See above—Hitler’s armies didn’t invade Russia until winter.

  There’s no problem there whatsoever—Hitler always intended to march against Russia, not least to wipe out or enslave the Slavs. The pact just allowed him some breathing space.

• ThePrussianFeb 27, 2015, 5:51 PM

  −2 points

  in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  That’s a common misunderstanding. Barbarossa begins in June, but the push into Russia proper does not happen until the winter. Which is what was predictable if you start such an invasion in June.

• ThePrussianFeb 27, 2015, 5:03 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  This is all said long before Hitler was even a lunatic fringe candidate, though I repeat myself. Was Hitler always obsessed with race and Jew-hatred? Yep. Did his actions seem in accord with this? Amazingly so.

  Take your comment on the USSR—why did Hitler insist on breaking the pact and invading Russian in winter? The answer is that he regarded Communism as “Judeo-Bolshevism”, a Jewish plot against the Aryan race. Again, why did Nazism never take in the East when people began by welcoming the Wehrmacht’s advance? Because in Nazi racial theory, Slavs were untermenschen. The whole course of the war is completely explicable by thinking that the Nazis actually believed what they said.

  This is what I mean about some people not being able to understand that others have a radically different view of the world. You need to explain away just about everything about the Third Reich to imagine that its animating principle was something other than fanatical racism. You have to explain nothing if you make the contrary assumption.

  What do you think animated Hitler? For that matter, what do you think animates jihadis?

• ThePrussianFeb 27, 2015, 12:41 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Epictetus’s comment on: If you can see the box, you can open the box

  “Bin Laden himself may or may not have theocratic aims” - May or may not?

  “My point was that without the political grievances, he just becomes some fanatic spouting rhetoric. With political grievances, he has supporters and recruits.” Once again, this assumes that his supporters and recruits think in a way that follows yours. I have to just say [citation needed]. Let’s take one example: 99% of Afghans think that the punishment for apostasy should be death. The assumption that there is not a large support for theocracy is unwarranted, at best.

  “I call it superficial because it just so happens to align perfectly with our own interests. ”

  First of all, that’s a non sequitor. It is in my interest to think that the water from the tap is healthy. I still haven’t been sick yet. It’s in my interest to think my employer will pay me at the end of the month. Never failed yet.

  Second, however, - who is this “our” in that sentence? And what interests? From my perspective, if Islamic jihad has a goal that is at least understandable to us, something like the Basque ETA or the IRA, then that’s something we can deal with. On the other hand, if its goals are like those stated by Hassan Nasrallah—“We want nothing from you, we want to eliminate you”—that’s another matter entirely. I would far, far, far rather deal with the first kind of an enemy, rather than the second.

  To the subject of the bin Laden list of grievances, one of them is that the United States helped free East Timor from Indonesian rule, and end the genocide of the Christian nation there. To the Islamic fanatics, this is outrageous, because it is a matter of doctrine that no conquered infidel nation may ever be freed from Islamic rule.