Not an apostate but a heretic

The beauty of it is that you could place that exact same dialogue into any time and place in human history and it would make just as much sense, you could have it as a conversation between sailors in a 1600s ship, a group of bronze-age warriors cleaning their weapons, stone age hunters walking home from a hunt, or a bunch of 21st century redditors on the internet, and it would hit just as splendidly.

There was this conversation about if you could have sex with any specific person from any time through human history, which one would you choose? Famous legendary lovers were brought up, queens, emperors and such were popular, might as well fuck Rasputin just to see what the hype was all about, the kind of answers one would expect.

Then some guy said he would choose his own late wife. He went on to talk about how brutal it is, that you might find the love of your life, but there's no promise that this life couldn't be suddenly cut short. That his body aches for hers and how there isn't much he wouldn't do for one more opportunity to make love to her one last time.

Now, I'd like you to imagine a pause in the conversation. A solemn, contemplative moment of silence, with several of the people present nodding in agreement that this is indeed the finest answer - it wasn't a competition, but there's no doing better than that.

And then someone breaks this solemn silence and says:

You wouldn't think that the archaeology of prehistoric Britain would impinge on MAGA, but it somehow does, multiple times.

The most obvious example is Cheddar Man, a man from the Mesolithic period (the period between the end of the Ice Age and the beginning of farming), who genetic analysis showed to have dark brown skin, black hair and blue eyes. Naturally, there were a bunch of bigots in the Daily Mail comment section insisting it was an anti-white hoax, albeit not helped by newspaper coverage calling him the "first Briton" when (A) he was far from the first person in the British Isles and (B) there's no meaningful cultural continuity between him and modern British people.

Or for another example, one of the key assumptions of MAGA types is that, when immigration happens, it's always one people replacing each other, when what's more common is cultural blending. For example, when the Beaker People arrived in Britain and started the Bronze Age, they retained a lot from the preceding Neolithic people - they had the same agricultural economy (growing barley and primitive strains of wheat, gathering hazelnuts, keeping cows as their main animal, some sheep and a few pigs, and doing very little hunting), seem to have built similar houses (albeit evidence of housing from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age is minimal), and continued to build stone circles and burial mounds.

Speaking of Neolithic burial mounds, within them we have cremated bones of people of all ages and sexes mixed together, without any grave goods or regard to individual status. Combined with the lack of gender-role differentiation and abundance of androgynous figures in Neolithic European artwork, and the standard view (since the 1960s, no less) is that Neolithic Britain was a highly collectivist, highly egalitarian society with few or no gender roles. I don't think this means it was a left-wing utopia (I tend to imagine the Neolithic British social order as a kind of prehistoric Jantelaw), but it does show that the kind of hierarchical, gender-role-heavy society these guys imagine to simply be human nature is not a universal principle.

epistemic status: processing future-shock

Just had an AI-centric software development job pitched to me as:

it's not about how many hours the human works in the seat. it's about how many hours are spent working on each project. if you had spent two hours tending to a batch job, that's two billable hours. If you spent two hours tending to two simultaneous batch jobs, that's still two billable hours of work per batch job, which means you did four hours of work in two hours. Your goal is 40 hours of work in a week, not 40 hours of butt-in-chair.

Suddenly, the parable of the AI Bro who's talking to Claude while in the coffeeshop makes sense to me now. That AI Bro is being a productive worker while also having a bit of a life at the same time as his work.

If you're working simultaneously on 2 tickets for the whole week, then you might only spend 20 hours "at work" while still doing 40 hours' worth of work. If you do 3 tickets simultaneously, that's 13h20m "at work" with 40 hours' productivity. In some environments, this might be called time-and-attendance fraud. But instead, for this job, it's using AI to further decouple productivity from work-hours — this time, in a way that benefits the developer.

There have been proposals to cut the de facto 40h work-week to 30h or 20h, which have been pushed back on because of lost productivity. Instead, this job would index productivity to a 2026 baseline, and then as long as you're that productive, you've done the work and earned the salary. Imagine how this would apply to a factory: if a car factory produces a 2026 number of cars, but in 2027 does so in half the clock time thanks to automation, then the workers get the same amount of pay for the same amount of production and can go home early.

epistemic status: processing future-shock

Just had an AI-centric software development job pitched to me as:

it's not about how many hours the human works in the seat. it's about how many hours are spent working on each project. if you had spent two hours tending to a batch job, that's two billable hours. If you spent two hours tending to two simultaneous batch jobs, that's still two billable hours of work per batch job, which means you did four hours of work in two hours. Your goal is 40 hours of work in a week, not 40 hours of butt-in-chair.

Suddenly, the parable of the AI Bro who's talking to Claude while in the coffeeshop makes sense to me now. That AI Bro is being a productive worker while also having a bit of a life at the same time as his work.

If you're working simultaneously on 2 tickets for the whole week, then you might only spend 20 hours "at work" while still doing 40 hours' worth of work. If you do 3 tickets simultaneously, that's 13h20m "at work" with 40 hours' productivity. In some environments, this might be called time-and-attendance fraud. But instead, for this job, it's using AI to further decouple productivity from work-hours — this time, in a way that benefits the developer.

There have been proposals to cut the de facto 40h work-week to 30h or 20h, which have been pushed back on because of lost productivity. Instead, this job would index productivity to a 2026 baseline, and then as long as you're that productive, you've done the work and earned the salary. Imagine how this would apply to a factory: if a car factory produces a 2026 number of cars, but in 2027 does so in half the clock time thanks to automation, then the workers get the same amount of pay for the same amount of production and can go home early.

Depending on who you look at, Real Clear Politics had El-Sayed ahead of Stevens by 10.2% with 50.5% of the vote, Pollsmax had him up by 11.8% with 48.7% of the vote, 270 to Win had him up 7.4% with 46.8% of the vote, and Prediction Edge had him up 12.4% with 51.6% of the vote. With 99% of the vote counted, El-Sayed beat Stevens by only 1% with 48.5% of the vote.

That's a huge under-performance in the polls and, if that continues to be the case in the general election, he's going to be in big trouble! Depending on which polling aggregator you use, the GOP candidate Rogers has a 1% to 4% lead on El-Sayed. He'll probably make up some ground now that a particularly bruising primary is over and he can try to make peace with Steven's supporters, but if he's underperforming by 5% to 10% again, that's a lot more ground he has to make up!

Now, I'm not sure whether he's a good candidate or not, we'll have to wait and see in November whether he performs above or below the baseline of this cycle and whether that's good enough to win the seat, but I will say this:

technically none of that is partisan or threatening to power in the sense that it's just judging people by their own public statements and goals: Trump saying he will discipline Iran quickly then failing to do so is a target of mockery regardless of what you may think about the relationship between the US and Iran!

but would a late night host be willing to claim that the enthusiasm of the entire US establishment to attack Iran goes way beyond Trump and that even a successful war would have been criminal, that planning such an attack is the ultimate crime against humanity for which men were hanged at Nuremberg, and that "of course Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon" is how people justify atrocities?

and tonight Jimmy Fallon (forgive me) does an aside during a joke about the US military dreaming up unusual ways to punish (!) Iran where he says:

I guess I feel like we should pair economic and military pressure with a clear diplomatic off-ramp, because escalation doesn't serve American interests; the goal should be preventing a nuclear weapon, and any sanctions relief should come in exchange for specific verifiable steps to that end.

the joke here is that he's the comedian playing the role of the sensible man giving the serious take that everybody knows to be true in response to the insanity of Pete Hegseth's War Department and Trump's Baby's First Diplomacy Effort, but as is typical it absolutely fails to challenge the prevailing Washington orthodoxy in any way at all; the next marginally less foolishly kleptocratic president who chooses to bomb Iran would have nothing to fear from this kind of comedy.

it's no different to the kind of moralising about how it's a shame all those Palestinians died but "obviously we must deter Hamas", like that isn't an entirely meaningless claim used to excuse bloodshed and cover repeated failure.

it's easy and satisfying to laugh at failure, whether it's small scale (the reflecting pool has algae) or huge scale (the Iran war is dragging on), just as it makes sense to lampoon hypocrisy (he said one thing but did another) or simple grubby dirt (crypto scams, the Epstein files).

technically none of that is partisan or threatening to power in the sense that it's just judging people by their own public statements and goals: Trump saying he will discipline Iran quickly then failing to do so is a target of mockery regardless of what you may think about the relationship between the US and Iran!

but would a late night host be willing to claim that the enthusiasm of the entire US establishment to attack Iran goes way beyond Trump and that even a successful war would have been criminal, that planning such an attack is the ultimate crime against humanity for which men were hanged at Nuremberg, and that "of course Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon" is how people justify atrocities?

it's not all empty laughter, like Jon Stewart (or one of his identical clones, I forget) rightly pointed out that the White House Correspondents' Dinner is an appalling idea, not because Trump bombed at it but because it reinforces a cozy dynamic in which the journalists get overly friendly with the bastards they are supposedly there to keep honest, the carrot and stick of precious access to power mattering more than truth or justice.

i think i found my new favorite artist on twitter

bunch of ice

Aesthetic Non-Cognitivism - Non-cognitivists think aesthetic judgments like "Bwa mask dancing is energetic and powerful" and "This shade of green is vibrant and beautiful" do not express statements that can be true or false. You can be, for example, an expressivist or an emotivist, so you think aesthetic judgments are somehow expressions of feelings or other non-propositional representations.

Aesthetic Cognitivism - Not to be confused with a view about the relationship between art and knowledge that also gets labelled "aesthetic cognitivism," this is just the view that aesthetic evaluations like "Blok's verse is lyrical" or "These curtains are tacky" are truth-apt. They can be true or false. Typically it's thought that in order to be a realist or a relativist of either stripe you have to be a cognitivist. But there have been suggestions that you can be a realist without being a cognitivist in ethics, and I see no reason why we shouldn't think the same of the aesthetic domain.

Indexical Relativism - A view about the semantics of aesthetic evaluation. Aesthetic disagreement is sometimes merely apparent because the truth of the sentence "x is beautiful (graceful, elegant, sublime, tawdry, shabby, etc.)" actually means something different depending on who speaks it. "Shabby" means something different in Bohemian interior design than high modernist interior design or "graceful" means something different when I say it than when you say it. There is some sense in which disagreements don't share a topic or content. You can be an indexical relativist and an aesthetic realist.

Genuine Relativism - Also a view about the semantics of aesthetic evaluation. This is different from indexical relativism because it does suppose that there's topic agreement between speakers who are voicing aesthetic disagreement. But the truth conditions are relativized to the speaker. So when Marty and Sally disagree on some aesthetic matter, they are both taking about the same property when they say "X is beautiful" and "X is ~beautiful" and they are both right: "X is beautiful" is true for Marty and "X is ~beautiful" is true for Sally. This usually pairs with a response-dependence view and so is incompatible with realism.

Vulgar Relativism - As you can imagine this term is supposed to be a little derisive. But it should be clear that you can be a relativist without saying something silly. A vulgar relativist is someone who just doesn't see the point of aesthetic disputes because they don't see any capacity to switch over to another community or viewpoint. All disputes are notional rather than real.

Aesthetic Realism - The view that there are some mind- or subject-independent aesthetic value facts or that there is something the world is like aesthetically that is independent of our attitudes. Importantly these facts can be anchored in social practices and attitudes without being grounded in them.

Aesthetic Nihilism - Good news: aesthetic judgments are truth-apt. Bad news: all of them are false! (But good news again: no one has ever defended this view in print.)

Aesthetic Anti-Realism - Just a rejection of the above: aesthetic facts are grounded in our attitudes, dispositions, desires, reactions, etc.

Aesthetic Naturalism - The view that aesthetic value facts are natural facts. In other words, facts about aesthetic value are grounded in facts about the natural world. Two objects cannot be the same physically (biologically, chemically, institutionally) and differ aesthetically if you believe this.

Aesthetic Non-Naturalism - Again, just a rejection of the above. There are aesthetic facts over and above natural facts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wait, so if I'm a realist then I think aesthetic value has nothing to do with pleasure?

Not quite. Take Auburn realism, a family of views being developed by the high powered aesthetics department at Auburn, for example. James Shelley has a view on which aesthetically valuable objects please because they're good; they're not good because they please. Keren Gorodeisky develops a neo-Kantian view in the Auburn realist vein that says aesthetic value merits pleasure but it isn't pleasure. Of course, you can think emotional, hedonic, etc. responses are only contingently related to aesthetic goodness. Nothing about aesthetic realism forces you to answer one way or another.

Do I have to think aesthetic realism is true in order to think that aesthetic value is normative?

Probably not! You could think that aesthetic norms are grounded in community expectations, rules, attitudes, etc. (so this is a stronger view than the network theory, which says they're anchored in community attitudes, etc.) and still think this makes room for aesthetic disputes that can be resolved by appeal to community norms. Similarly: it's not clear if Kant is an aesthetic realist. But he does think that aesthetic judgments command universal assent and they are in some sense procedurally objective.

Is there a route from normativity to realism?

Man, y'all, I didn't even bring up whether or not it "counts" as genocide. I didn't refuse to call it a genocide or agree with calling it a genocide. It is truly incredible that expressing almost zero opinion on this has caused so many people to decide confidently what it means my opinion is.

This is not all on you, anon; I notice that you're not directly critiquing me but saying what seems to be your personal opinion. Apparently I need to settle this too, though, so:

My first opinion: it is bonkers that I need to express an opinion in order to stop everyone from deciding my opinion for me.

My second opinion: What Israel is doing is unequivocally wildly disproportionately harmful and the figures I have seen about bombings are shocking and appalling and horrific. There is zero doubt in my mind that Israel is violating international law (if international law can even be called "law" when it barely exists in the first place, but that's a rant for another day). There is zero doubt in my mind that Israel is ensuring there will be people who feel justified in violent retaliation for decades based on these events. I believe there's no justification for bombing civilians.

My third opinion: Looking up "genocide" in Black's Law Dictionary, I think Israel's actions actually fall closer to the related definition of "ethnic cleansing" than "genocide" itself. Ask a lawyer, get a pedantic answer.

My fourth opinion: The United States hasn't just actively funded genocide and ethnic cleansing, it's done it, extraordinarily often. In fact, when your brother says "everyone's done it" he's kind of more right than he realizes. One of the theories of democratic development that's less discussed, for obvious reasons, is that some form of genocide is actually somehow beneficial for, or some kind of pre-condition to, a nation-state developing democratic norms or ideals. This is a theory I learned about in school, particularly from the book The Dark Side of Democracy. Isn't that some fucked-up shit?

My fifth opinion: I appreciate that you are actually mentioning that America is not only funding but doing genocides. This is true, and it's something I happen to know a lot more about and therefore have more opinions about than Israel and Palestine. I'm happy to expound at length about federal court tyranny over Indian reservations. Missing and murdered indigenous women. Actual current right now American concentration camps. Places where my opinion might be actually valuable and educational!

The frustrating part about these stupid language-purity tests is that they are about excluding people who literally agree with you. Does what I said above make me the enemy? Y'all make me want to refuse to answer just because the question is so far beside the point and it pisses me off.

Genocide has a precise legal definition. In the law, there are two primary sources for the crime of genocide: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and Article 6 of the Rome Statute. In both, the requisite elements are:

(1) actus reus—any of the following acts: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

(2) dolus specialis—the specific intent to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group . . . ."

Ethnic cleansing, by contrast, is not a recognized crime. Its legal origins are in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ("ICTY"). The ICTY defined ethnic cleansing as "rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area." See here at 33. Importantly, the ICTY's report noted that "[t]hose practices constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." Id. (emphasis added). The necessary distinction is that ethnic cleansing, at least under the ICTY's definition, "can be assimilated to specific war crimes", whereas the prohibition of genocide is a jus cogens norm.

Jus cogens norms "reflect and protect fundamental values of the international community, are hierarchically superior to other rules of international law and are universally applicable." See here at 105. This matters because it means that the prohibition of genocide is absolute and applies whether a state is at peace or in war. War crimes, on the other hand, can only occur during war. Is it incorrect to say that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing in Gaza? No. The problem, though, is that when assessing culpability for war crimes, the calculus is different than genocide. The inquiry is not into whether the crime was done with the specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. To evaluate ethnic cleansing (which, notably, has no evaluative criteria because it is not an independently recognized crime) absent this element fails to account for the practices that result in ethnic cleansing. Is it really possible to "render[] an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups" without genocidal intent? I am not sure. What I am sure of is that the International Court of Justice noted that ethnic cleansing may demonstrate genocidal intent in reference to the ICTY's findings. See here at para. 190.

Now, on the question of whether Israel is committing genocide. Regarding the actus reus, Israel has (a) engaged in killings of Palestinians and (b) inflicted serious bodily and mental harm on Palestinians. Israel's blockades of aid as well as its deliberate targeting of hospitals, educational facilities, and cultural heritage sites can be argued to have (c) subjected Palestinians to conditions calculated to bring about their destruction. Israel's attacks on birthing centers may also amount to (d) imposing measures to prevent Palestinian births. This element is generally not contested; it is the second element, dolus specialis, that some argue is not satisfied.

By Black's Law Dictionary, ethnic cleansing is:

The elimination of a particular people from an area or country because of their racial or national identity; specif., the officially sanctioned forcible and systematic diminution or elimination of targeted ethnic minorities from a geographic area, usu. by confiscating real and personal property, ordering or condoning mass murders and mass rapes, and expelling the survivors.

Your argument that this is not ethnic cleansing boils down to:

Ethnic cleansing isn't a bad enough crime and would be on shaky legal ground (literally couldn't give less of a shit)

Other people call it genocide (I'm sure I can find plenty of scholars who vigorously disagree)

You'd have to have genocidal intent if you were doing ethnic cleansing (arguable, especially from someone who doesn't have an education in mental state vs. intent)

And you used so, so many words to say this.

My point was that there are actions here that seem more intended to drive people out than kill all of them. Okay? Okay.

I'm not trying to be mean here, but this remains not my shit, I remain concerned about American atrocities that I can actually do something about, and I'm not sure why you spent so much fucking time on this. It's not like I said "oh, it's just ethnic cleansing! Totally understandable! Israel is forgiven!" Do you think I think ethnic cleansing is good? Like, why spend all these words trying to convince me of this? What is the goal here? Did you even touch on reading the rest of the post with the "language purity" bullshit?

“My point was that there are actions here that seem more intended to drive people out than kill all of them.” This argument is exactly why I made my post. Genocide is not “killing all of a group.” It is one of the five aforementioned acts—killing, inflicting serious bodily or mental harm, creating destructive conditions, preventing births, transferring children—done with the specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. In fact, genocide can theoretically occur without a single killing! Whether ethnic cleansing can occur without genocidal intent is debated by scholars, which helps further explain why it does not exist as a standalone crime. This is also why I am not engaging with your comments about “language purity”. Genocide is a specific crime with a precise definition, it is not “language purity” to critique its incorrect use. It was you who invoked your profession to give a “pedantic answer” in the first place! I’m also not sure why you’re opposed to leaning on the legal analysis of experts as, in your words, this “remains not [your] shit”.

Yeah I can tell you’re not a legal scholar. Because what you have done here is, in a place where I referenced a specific source of a specific definition, you have instead substituted your own set of definitions and therefore decided you have disproven my argument.

A person can’t use the words “ethnic cleansing” to cover up mass murders and mass rapes if those are specifically part of the definition that person has specifically used. Which it was. Historical reference for word meaning is only relevant if a definition has not been agreed upon in advance.

Still don’t care that it’s not a specific enough crime for you.

And I’m not “opposed to leaning on the analysis of experts;” I’m just aware that your appeal to authority is a fallacy.

I understand that you are talking like this is an academic paper because you want your point of view to seem like an inevitability instead of an opinion. It’s certainly not working on me because your actual argument just isn’t strong. It’s also nigh unreadable. Reconsider your tactics and your purpose.

I’m not interested in this anymore. This is boring. You are starting a fight not because I took the side of “the enemy” but because my language wasn’t good enough for you. This is the action of someone who has no way to do any moral good except by language policing. Someone who has no direction in their life. Does this rage make you feel less empty? Kind of short-lived, isn’t it? Addictive? Always makes you need to bully someone new to get the same feeling? Ever wonder if you’re actually doing any good at all?

Instead you came in full guns blazing telling me I needed to call it this word or I was actively perpetuating an evil, all while hiding your own intent in “see id” type official academic language, which is flat absurd in this context. You tried to bully me into submission as an enemy instead of having a conversation. How’d it work out for you?