this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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The Coco Chanel meme is quite funny, given that the writer seems too young to know much about her other than that she's some sort of fashion lady. (There's a Behind the Bastards series on her upbringing, business attitude, and collaboration with Nazis.)
Points for honesty, I guess? But also demerits for not at least reading the Wikipedia article. Rationalists are so quick to write paragraphs explaining that they didn't read paragraphs.
Re: Coco Chanel, it's an uncomfortable fact that huge swaths of French society (particularly the more conservative parts) were quite OK with German involvement in French governance, at least until the forced labor requirements sending people to work in Germany. The Third Republic was hardly a model social democracy and if the Nazis hadn't been such incompetent overlords we might have seen a coal and steel union decades before it happened, with Vichy France being an integral part of a Nazi-led European union.
Instead the Nazis looted most of France and made it quite clear that the French were going to be second-class citizens forever, and once they started looking less unbeatable everyone was part of the Resistance.
look at the British aristocracy, who are still full of fucking Nazis
For sure, there were many who would have prepared to cut a deal with Hitler - let him have Europe (and to hell with the strategy of not letting any major power dominate there) in return for the inviolability of the empire.
i mean they were huge fans and think Britain joined the wrong side of the war
When I a was a kid, fresh off TV airings of Scarlet Pimpernel & Ivanhoe, I developed an unfortunate pash for Anthony Andrews. This led to my uncritical absorption of him as Edward VII in The Woman He Loved, which led to my being very sad about the poor man had to quit his job because he loved that nice divorced lady.
Anyway, screw that anti-Semitic, racist son of an imperialist nightmare, screw his Nazi-loving wife, and for good measure, yeet the house of windsor directly into the sun.
I recall reading a great twitter thread a while back that covered a lot of the nazi interplay in british high society in the years prior to ww2. really should re-find that and get it archived (and/or find some other primary sources to read about it)
Yeah the thing about Chanel is that it's reifying the person (who's indefensible), not the company, where you can wave hands & pretend.
(Realistically the nature of global capitalism is such that we all have to decide which former Nazi collaborators we don't do business with. I'd avoid Bayer if it were possible to avoid Bayer & still, y'know, eat food. And I wish the world financial system treated Deutsche Bank the way Rick Blaine does https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BztF71vFpnE&t=28s)
I'm a bit uncomfortable with holding judicial persons responsible for something their management did 80+ years ago. Unless you can prove Deutsche Bank is still discriminating against Jews and confiscating their accounts, it's not really useful to boycott them.
Should you avoid riding with DB, seeing that many of the train lines still in use were used to further the German war effort?
(I'm reminded of zealous FLOSS advocates who try to hold today's IBM responsible for the company's actions leading up to and during World War 2, simply because they really really dislike IBM).
Germany hasn't entirely paid for its crimes during WW2, but they've done more to hold themselves to account than Japan, or France, for that matter.
Germany itself is a decent model of redress, though truth & reconciliation was hampered by the split. But private companies profited from slave labor or manufacturing zyklon b, then quietly reorged to avoid consequences. And yes I do think Dehomag should have been sold for reparations, not reabsorbed into IBM, & IG Farben should’ve been purged from the earth — Bayer AG appointing Fritz ter Meer as chairman after he got out of prison is a sign that they learned nothing & made no redress of harm.
In general I have no qualms about holding “judicial persons”, who are not human beings, responsible for the profits they made off genocide collaboration.