The rats would love to have a coherent position on the Palestinian genocide but there’s just no one from the polycule that’s written about it in their nerd blogs so they’re all going to have to continue rejecting all evidence.
After being admonished by Paul Graham for baselessly questioning the veracity of a Palestinian child saying goodbye to their dying father, Yud writes
Why do you believe that any of this is true? Serious question. I haven’t been able to find any blog with two serious nerds fighting it out, each side says the other side’s stuff is all fake, and each side has compelling instances of other-side stuff being fake.
Aella too finds this all very confusing due to the low IQ of everyone with an opinion
I do really wish someone smart and good at critical thinking would sit down and invest a lot of research into which claims by both sides are accurate and which are propaganda. This would be so good for the world
Nathan Young is also Spartacus, and none of your mean taunts to “open a newspaper” will change that
I respect Eliezer’s public confusion here. I too am confused and struggling to find good sources to understand Gaza.
Nor does people yelling at me make me believe them more.
The important thing is that they are actually very open minded and unbiased and will figure this all out someday when the mass graves are exhumed.
I’m reminded of the thing that happens to people learning the history of the American Civil War. First, you learn that it was about slavery and emancipation. Then you dig into the reeds and start finding a lot of contemporary evidence that actually there were bigger issues of state’s rights or regional versus federal power or whatever at play. And then you keep getting deeper into the reeds and realize that all those other issues and factors were either contributing factors to why slavery was such an important and central issue at the time or were fallout from the decades of fighting about slavery in the legal and legislative systems.
Also you learn about how the existence of stage 2 owes a lot to antebellum revisionism as the men who lost tried to convince themselves and the world that their cause had been for something more than racism and exploitation, even as they supported domestic terror organizations that worked to retrench that same system of racism and exploitation without explicitly being allowed to fucking own human beings.
Like, there’s a lot of motivated reasoning required to get to the point of “actually it’s all very complicated” and not think past that into “because they’re trying to make a smokescreen around a genocide”.