It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything.
Psychopath.
I’ll raise the question here instead of in the thread that gave me the idea, simce it feels not quite right to bring the awful to NotAwfulTech:
At this point, I have real reservations recommending anything that Scott Aaronson has written for any purpose. I’m not going to elide his actual contributions to science, but I can’t suggest that a student read any expository writing of his, not without such heavy caveats and contextualizing that my conscience would welcome any alternative. So, then: What do people read him for, and what are the alternatives?
I was not prepared for this level of DARVO. I was already done with him after last time and can’t do better than repeat myself:
It’s somewhat depressing that [he] cannot even imagine a democratic one-state solution, let alone peace across the region; it’s more depressing that [his] empathy is so blatantly one-sided.
Even Peter Woit had no problem recognizing Scott’s bile and posted a good take on this:
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
It’s bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit’s blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.
And he’s really showing the unidirectionality of his empathy as well as his persecution complex. E.g., here’s Woit telling Aaronson to get therapy:
I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.
And in another comment:
Seriously: seek professional help for your paranoid delusions/psychological defense mechanisms for justifying murdering Palestinian children on a large scale as part of a genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.
And another commenter says,
I hope Scott gets help, he is clearly insane.
OK, call it casually ableist, but it’s not wishing death upon the man, or harm to his loved ones. But here’s Aaronson commenting further down the thread:
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not addressing any of my comments here to Peter, or to any of the cowards of his comment section. They’re unworthy of civilized conversation, as they don’t fulfill the basic prerequisites for it, like caring whether their interlocutors and their loved ones live or die.
Jeshua H. ben Joseph, dude. Get help.
Here’s the update Scott posted, with my comments interspersed:
This post was born of two years of frustration. It was born of trying, fifty or a hundred times since October 7
Ah yes, October 7thism, the belief that the universe began on October 7th of 2023. There was nothing before this time, certainly no such thing as “palestine” or “gaza”, and Israel just materialised, only to be set upon by some real stinkers and meanies who attacked for no reason whatsoever. And then Israel definitely didn’t invoke something they named the “Hannibal Directive” to kill their own people.
to find common ground with the anti-Zionists who emailed me
Dear everyone who emailed Scott: please don’t try debate fascists. They will only try and normalise their fascism to you.
messaged me, etc.—“hey, obviously neither of us wants any children killed or starved, we both have many bones to pick with the current Israeli government, but surely we at least agree on the necessity of defeating Hamas, right? right??“
Yes, Hamas needs to be defeated so that the Israelis can finally leave Palestine alone, a thing they will definitely do and not just continue with their genocide.
—only to discover, again and again, that the anti-Zionists had no interest in such common ground.
This is approaching self-awareness, in that Scott is discovering that as a fascist, he doesn’t have common ground to share with non or antifascists.
With the runaway success of the global PR campaign against Israel—
Helped in part by the Israeli media that gleefully report the results of their genocide and their ongoing plans to continue said genocide—
i.e., of Sinwar’s strategy—and with the rise of figures like Mamdani (and his right-wing counterparts) all over the Western world, anti-Zionists smell blood in the water today.
Damn those anti-Zionist sharks and their opposition of genocide! And damn those people that have only recently found it politically convenient to denounce genocide, and damn those that still aren’t willing to call it a genocide but are willing to compromise on famine. Damn them all!
And so, no matter how reasonable they presented themselves at first, eventually they’d come out with “why can’t the Jews just go back to Germany and Poland?” or “the Holocaust was just one more genocide among many; it doesn’t deserve any special response, or “why can’t we dismantle Israel and have a secular state, with a Jewish minority and a majority that’s sworn to kill all Jews as soon as possible?”
This is hearsay; I reject this outright. I do think that Israel needs to be dismantled, but not for the bullshit strawman reason he’s given.
And then I realize, with a gasp, that we Jews really are mostly on our own in a cruel and terrifying world—just like we’ve been throughout history.
This does not justify genocide.
To say that this experience radicalized me would be an understatement.
Actually, it would be an overstatement. Scott was already Zionist before Oct 7th, so he was fully radicalised as Zionist/fascist before “this experience.”
Indeed, my experience has been that even most Israelis, who generally have far fewer illusions than we diaspora Jews, don’t understand the vastness of the chasm that’s formed. They imagine that they can have a debate with outsiders similar to the debates playing out within Israel—one that presupposes basic factual knowledge and the parameters of the problem (e.g., clearly we can’t put 7 million Jews under the mercy of Hamas). The rationale for Zionism itself feels so obvious to them as to be cringe. Except that, to the rest of the world, it isn’t.
Yes, to a lot of the world, colonialism is objectionable. And to the rest of the world, genocide is objectionable.
We’re not completely on our own though. There remain decent people of every background, who understand the stakes and feel the weight of history—and I regularly hear from them.
The Nazis had sympathisers too!
And whatever your criticisms of Israel’s current tactics,
Not putting it lightly at all.
so long as you accept the almost comically overwhelming historical case for the necessity of Jewish self-defense, this post wasn’t aimed at you, and you and I probably could discuss these matters.
Once again, this does not justify genocide. This does not justify zionism or fascism.
It’s just that the anti-Zionists scream so loudly, suck up so much oxygen, that we definitely can’t discuss them in public. Maybe in person sometime, face to face.
More like fascist to fascist.
That is certainly a way you can use to describe a course of action that you would consider morally good. I don’t know if you should, but I suppose it is not a physical impossibility.
I felt dirty reading that. Glad I didn’t persist till the end.
Oh no, you must have missed the surprise incelism, let me fix that:
And as the world learned a decade ago, I was able to date, get married, and have a family, only because I finally rejected what I took to be the socially obligatory attitude for male STEM nerds like me—namely, that my heterosexuality was inherently gross, creepy, and problematic, and that I had a moral obligation never to express romantic interest to women.
I … just … what?
He made up a whole society to be mad at.
@blakestacey @Architeuthis I can’t remember where I read this, but I saw someone describe his position as “how dare women discuss their real problems when I have imaginary problems”
And he concedes he was wrong - he has enough self-awareness to realize that his problems were, to some extent, imaginary - but still insists on blaming evil feminists for… I’m not even sure what. Hurting his feelings so badly that he was ashamed to be hetero?
I never achieved what I saw for years as my only hope in life, to seek out those who believed my heterosexuality was evil and argue them out of their belief.
Fucking why would you believe this.
Fucking why.
It’s like he fixated on a handful of feminist trolls and convinced himself the only rational thing to do was feed them.
Even by incel standards, this is so profoundly irrational I can’t wrap my head around it.
You know who Scott Aaronson reminded me of, back when he first had his incel-ish blogospasm? Tatsuya Ishida. Scott Aa’s blogging echoed, to an extent, the “Sisterhood” phase transition of Sinfest. Both of them stemmed from a man being his own worst enemy. In both cases, my reaction was, “Good grief, bro, take a breath. There is not a mass movement to declare that your penis makes you bad. Whatever you’re reading, you’re seeking it out to hurt yourself because some part of you feels you deserve to be punished.”
For those who don’t rubberneck at online car crashes, Sinfest was a popular webcomic in the early 2000’s known for raunchy, bawdy, deliberately “edgy” humor delivered with rather technically adept art. It was anti-establishment during the Bush years, with a bit of a “spiritual but not religious” streak. Tatsuya seemed to mellow when Obama rose to prominence; the strip bought hard into the “yes we can” message. And then… whoo wee, things got off the chain. He swerved into “feminism”, of a self-flagellating kind. Then from anti-porn, anti-sex-work-ism, he went TERF, then MAGA, and eventually esoteric pagan neo-Nazi. The art quality decayed apace, first discarding the personality of the brushwork, the settings, the character design… eventually losing its grasp of basic frame-to-frame continuity. A significant fraction of it by now is probably AI slop. Tats’ politics have degenerated into a few hateful ideas in orbit around each other. One Reddit user said, IIRC, “Tats believes that genocide is bad because the Jews are doing it.”
Mirror images, man. Mirror images.
That’s an interesting parallel. Tats endorsed the view though, and now went full anti-semitic. But both are battling their imaginary demons
(Random comment, but I love how the sinfest subreddit basically became a sneerclub for it)
Never heard of Ishida, but he sounds like he’s yet another one of those people for whom politics and belief are just “vibes”. There’s no principle, no rational basis, just vibes. I feel like more and more of the world is becoming this way. Or perhaps it always was this way, but the Internet has just made it more evident.
incel
Some guys had to learn that most sex and dating advice on the Internet should be ignored, but many women have to learn that magazines like Cosmo are not written to help them. I wish we did not live in a world where so much culture tries to hurt so many people in an important area of life, but introverted men are not the only victims.
Bringing up his individual struggles when two million people are being starved to death, shot, and forced into the desert is gross.
Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed – in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it’s really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.
There’s a shocking level of scope insensitivity on display. Like, on one hand I think there’s something healthy in recognizing that some people are going to be assholes to you for their own reasons and that you can’t “fix” them. Like, I’m perfectly happy to live and let live with some of the people in my family or former friends for a variety of personal reasons, and like Scott here I found that my mental health and life outcomes improved significantly when I decided to accept this.
But I don’t even know how to explain that there’s a difference between saying “I don’t talk to people from high school anymore” and “we should depopulate and resettle an urban area the size of Detroit.” Like, this is fundamentally not something that should need to be explained.
Apparently I’m a fighting-type because I was not prepared for all this psychic damage.
Also, I’m not sure what the fucking takeaway here is supposed to be. Like… Getting over your own unhealthy fixations about relationships and sexuality is important for actually improving your relationships with people who might want to have sex with you.
I wonder if in an earlier draft he accused sneerclub of causing his support of the genocide.
You can pull a lever to divert the train and save your daughter. But there’s a catch, as there always is in these moral dilemmas: namely, the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks, in such a way that, if you divert the train, then it will kill his children.
Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob.
I deal with emails and social media posts day after day calling me a genocidal baby-killing monster.
I mean this is all just textbook zionism. Zionists are openly genocidal and proud of it, and are aghast that anyone might oppose zionism.
E: to be clear, zionist propaganda gets regurgitated by western media outlets to try and hide the genocide; this is a tactical measure as israel relies on international support to continue its genocide. Internally, israeli news outlets openly celebrate genocide.
Scott here is provoking me to inchoate “fuck your trolley problems” rage.
You know, if I were ever actually confronted with a situation where I had to choose one child’s life over another, the trauma would fuck me up for years. Anyone who says they could feel self-righteous in that circumstance is emotionally and morally diseased.
This works just as well to defend mass punishments of villages suspected of harboring partisans. Which makes sense, since that is pretty much what the Gaza war is about.
There is also the whole ‘nits make lice’ sort of stuff which was used to justify killing Native Americans (ow look, a group who also has not homeland to return to, which Scott, an American, forgot about). And basically any sort of genocide ever runs on this sort of ‘I have to kill their babies because they might kill mine’ shit logic.
Even Robocop got that you should not shoot through hostages when the bad guy takes a hostage. (Cw: attempted sexual abuse: https://youtu.be/taWMwB1mLhc)
First paragraph there is literally Hitler. o_O
Yes, I overestimated the number of people who ever believed that, but the fact that it was clearly a nonzero number had been deterrent enough for me
Consider he was wrong about the creepy nerd stuff and perhaps he is wrong now. Bit it doesn’t matter because one person hating him is already enough. This says a lot about him, just insane part of this article is him going: “they were mean to me so all Palestinians now should die”. Unhinged shit. High amount of abuser logic here as well.
Also, doesnt he live in the US?
Really hope he doesnt teach students anymore because that will not end well.
E: he wrote an update, where he claims anti-zionists(*) are saying all kinds of things (which I thankfully have not seen any of them do, because wtf, those are some fucked up things to say). It really makes me wonder what kind of people he surrounds himself with, I mean we know he is allergic to sneerclub style people (and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate (see how he considers people who agree with him decent people and the other side not, and he doesn’t just consider everybody decent people with the wrong opinions (and there is the event where he send a former sneerclubber back at us, according to the sneerclubber, but there is no reason to believe the former SCer on his word there))) but he is less allergic to debate neo-nazis in his surroundings wonder if that is a cause of it. I get why he says Jewish people are scared (I do consider saying ‘Jewish people’ when you mean Israelis a form of anti-Semitism but lets not go there), but just nuts he doesn’t extend this to Palestinian people or Arab/Persian people in the region. (And don’t take this for me being a fan of Hamas here(**), which I also would rather see gone than stay, but killing everybody will not solve that, it will only make things worse, see as an example the Taliban)
*: This should not come as a big surprise to people, as I tend to be weird about the usage of a lot of words, but I generally try to avoid the word zionist because it is inflammatory, and badly defined and usage generally muddies things and not makes things clearer (for example Albert Einstein was a zionist, but he supported the Palestinian people so it is a bit more complicated, sorry I’m odd like that, see also how I almost always say neo-nazi not just nazi (because at least the nazis didn’t know where they would end up they just didn’t care, neo-nazis know and they still choose it). Just quoting him. And yes, I’m doing the Rationalist word taboo thing here, I know.
A rant about how I learned of the existence of Hamas and Dutch culture.
**: While I’m already doing a lot of sidenotes here, I do recall where I first learn of the existence of Hamas (I was more aware of the PLO, as their scarf was popular among alternative people), from Dutch Soccer, the Amsterdam team is seen as Jewish (there is no reason for that at all, it is just a weird claim, while yes most of the Dutch Jews now live in Amsterdam there is very little connection between them and the team, and general we have been pretty bad to Dutch Jews historically, a bit of philosemitism (which is a form of anti-Semitism)) and of course they have a sort of feud with the Rotterdam team. Who started to shout ‘Hamas Hamas, alle joden aan het gas’ (hamas, gas the jews) during matches (and it isn’t just their team a lot of others do it). This is so important to the these soccer fans that now despite finally realizing this is not a good look (see Dutch people bad re Jewish people) they still want to keep the ‘hamas hamas’ part because it is tradition. They just wanted a different rhyme. I think about this a lot, and how normalized it was/is, esp as we are doing the ‘immigrants are anti-Semites’ bit during election times again.
and I have always suggested we keep away as he seems to need therapy not a debate
Zionists are fascists and do not deserve peace.
Had me in the first few paragraphs…not gonna lie. Then it flipped to a pro-Zionist theme, and I was all like, “Wut?”. Buddy, how do you not see the utter hypocrisy in your take.
Fuckin’ satire is truly dead. It’s bleeding all over reality and nothing is real anymore.
Had me in the first few paragraphs…not gonna lie.
Yeah, the first few paragraphs actually felt like they would serve as a defense of Hamas: Israel engineered a situation were any form of resistance against them would need to be violent and brutal so Hamas is justified even if it killed 5 people to save 1.
The more I think about his metaphor the more frustrated I get. Israel holds disproportionate power in this entire situation, if anyone is contriving no-win situations to win temporary PR victories it is Israel (Netanyahu’s trial is literally getting stalled out by the conflict).
What the actual fuck?
I guess we know at least part of where the “nobody can say” ambiguity came from in Eliezer’s reality tunnel.
Like, even if you somehow accept that his wildly offensive framing is somehow actually analogous to the Palestinian genocide, it is at best “not intuitive” that throwing even more corpses on the fucking pile is going to somehow be the right thing to do. I thought these people were hard “shut up and multiply” utilitarians
Gotta admit I was not expecting the A in ScottA to stand for annihilation rather than just apartheid
