gattsuru
1hr ago
There's... a lot of messiness, and a lot of different motivations. Someone like Dean could probably give the better Rules For Rulers analysis, but from what I've been told:
There's a complex relationship between cartels and local police. The cartels obviously don't want any interference with their people or operations, but they do at least like if their corrupt police stay bought and collaborative, and it's not worth losing the latter just because of a parking ticket. Small enforcements happen without too much (condoned by leadership) fuss; big enforcement starts street warfare. A decade ago in northern Mexico I'd had it summarized in the Juarez/El Paso area as 'you screw around with a pot shipment it's just a game, you screw with cocaine shipments you'll get a show of retribution that could hurt someone, you screw someone that matters over on a lot of money you die, you screw with the leadership or take a bribe and double-cross then they'll kill you and your family'. Dunno how accurate that is on the exacts, and I'm sure it's drifted since, but that's the rough theory. The cartels had a threat raised if anything targeted their higher-ups, their higher-ups were successfully targeted, the cartels don't want to let those threats seem empty. See Culican as a well-known prototype, but it's supposedly common knowledge among Mexican government officials.
The economics of cartel mid-level employees are a mess. Like most tournament economics, the average member gets crap pay, but is motivated because the winners get massive prizes. Even 'better', there's always dead men's shoes available above you. Killing any member of leadership means there's now a lot of empty slots on the ladder, either because they've been directly emptied, because the guy got a promotion, or because they were emptied as a result of conflict between the tournament contestants. Some seemingly-random violence is negotiating who and what gets to win, some of it's to prove capability, some of it's to distract military and police presence so that those attacks aren't readily achieved, and some of it's psychopaths thinking they can prove themselves or just wanting to have fun while management is distracted or a little more bloodthirsty than normal.
All (or at least almost all?) cartels get funds through 'protection' money. My impression is that most of it by count is more a nice bennie for the mid-level people running the 'protection' schemes rather than any serious effort the cartel leadership likes, but it's a thing, and some industry-sized protection schemes are big enough the leadership does care. Sometimes unrest means higher 'protection' fees someone might not be able to pay, sometimes the new boss needs to be paid in addition to the old boss, sometimes this rando might be a good example of why 'protection' fees are important even if he wouldn't normally be asked to pay them.
The interfaces between cartels (and other gangs) are, unsurprisingly, worse.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yes, and there's also been issues where left-leaning administrations have partnered with overseas European (and Australian) governments and regulatory organizations that have coincidentally threatened or targeted political speech by Americans. I'm trying to keep to the most obvious and least complicated examples, but it does both show that it's a serious concern in terms of possibility, and in terms of clearly being within the interest and goals of left-leaning organizations.
gattsuru
1d ago
Some cis woman 'bimboization' is about not wanting to be responsible for her own desires (or missteps) or cognizant of her own fears or shame, especially in written formats. Not a common kink, but neither is it anywhere near as rare as you'd think. For cis guys who like the kink, it seems more about ease of access and forwardness of desire.
gattsuru
1d ago
Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
Uh... sorry, trying not to get too prurient.
There's a lot of scripts and modes of discussion that occur between potential or new romantic partners. They vary a lot between the sexes and sexual orientations. At least in my experience, the ones for a man going after women, or propositioning sex within an existing but new relationship, are kinda a mess, filled with minefields and potential miscommunications and active hostility. It's not that the gay versions are always easier to read, or always work, or avoid costly side effects, or are even that different -- I've got my horror stories, it's definitely easy to swing and miss, and that's on top of the alcoholism problems.
The straight scripts seem just fucked.
I might want to invite someone over for tea and some good cardio regardless of gender, so it's not seeing the women as Madonnas and the men as whores. But I can probably come up with a plan, even a likely-doomed plan, for the latter. Even inside established relationships, there's a lot of expectations that men initiate sex or perform desire, but only in the ways that the women want done to them, and that's a list that is neither well-documented nor consistent.
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
Can't find it, but it's certainly a believable result. The median chaser-trans interaction is probably pretty rough, but ultimately, they are just guys with a lot of focus on a kink. That doesn't necessarily make them bad people, just a potential trouble that has to be negotiated. Part of why the discourse gets so toxic in reddit environments is that it's something that should be solvable.
gattsuru
1d ago
Sometimes, but more... with some warning about more explicit detail than you'd probably want to know:
Pregnancy concerns specifically get complicated. There's a lot of ways to avoid them pretty effectively, and some gay guys are under the (not entirely correct) impression that just being on testosterone is itself effective birth control. But you do see some who are really into the idea in fictional contexts and get grossed out because an IUD isn't perfect.
((And they tend to be polarizing for trans guys, where either it's something out of Alien as a fate-worse-than-death, or they get out of high school with an exact number of kids that they want. But I have met a few exceptions who like the idea but aren't sure they're ready for it, a la Daxhush, and there's a lot of cis woman who have similar divisions, so not sure how much of that's downstream of trans stuff as how much is downstream of the whole progressive culture.))
gattsuru
1d ago
I'll second the Guards series as Pratchett's strongest work: it has the broadest and most serious engagement with the philosophy, and the Thud! and especially Night Watch have some masterful writing. Only real downsides is that Jingo is a pretty dated, and The Last Continent is merely good and sets up later stories, rather than being great. If Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms don't do it for you you're not going to like any of Pratchett's writing, but they're really good stories.
Rincewind's saga is rough and early enough that it barely fits into the rest of the setting, and even the standalone Death works like Thief of Time require a lot of buy-in. The Witches series can be a good second set, starting with Wyrd Sisters, but they have kinda the opposite problem, where they're very much send-ups of mainstream stories that can be a little trite if you've seen other Shakespeare or Disney pastiches.
gattsuru
1d ago
lol jk, there's basically zero chance of a cert grant on these facts
What it looks like to me (but not to you) is that two things can both be true: we can live in a country where opposition politics still exists and neither side has achieved the total victory you claim/fear, and we can live in a country where a lot of people would really like to achieved total victory and are completely unprincipled about it. E.g., cases from California which offend every classical liberal sensibility but which do not, in my mind (but apparently do in yours) round to "We live in an authoritarian dystopia where you are not allowed to disagree with leftists."
Either this is a meaningless statement -- obviously I'm allowed to disagree with leftists, otherwise I wouldn't be able to make this complaint to start with -- or a clearly false one -- I can get fired (even when working directly for the government), doxed, punched in the face, and there's a nonzero chance of ruinous lawsuit or serious physical harm, all while local authorities will cheerfully shrug or condone or actively mandate it. Neither is the claim I made, nor, supposedly, the line you want everyone to wait for before they're allowed to notice what's happening.
There's some longer point to be made here where your secondary thesis is that leftists wailing about fascism don't really believe it because they don't really act like it, while rightists wailing that they have no right to protest loudly protest in public.
It'd be funnier if we were making it on Reddit, and if I couldn't provide a long list of people who got fired for not-very-loud protests made in not-very-public spaces. As is, it's a nonsequitor.
I'm not saying that I have absolutely no right to protest loudly in public. I'm saying that this right means little, if anything, of value; it receives nowhere near the practical protections that even far-more-marginal penumbras of the left do; the paper makes poor armor against a club.
Okay, let's suppose I take everything you are implying (but which is unstated in that article) at face value: a leftist totally got away with killing righties because the DA and judge were in the tank for the left and think killing conservatives is Just Fine.
Specifically, as I described outside of the link, he shot and killed one (1) conservative, and was not prosecuted, tried, nor plead guilty. I make no assessment of whether the DA and judge think killing conservatives is Just Fine, whether they just coincidentally couldn't bring enforcement in the exact circumstances that several people here argued demanded a trial (when Rittenhouse was the subject), or just ate bad clams and spat out this vomit of legal decision-making as a result. I'm saying he murdered a conservative with impunity, end stop.
So I stipulate this was a heinous injustice. Does this mean it's now legal for leftists to shoot conservatives, or a heinous injustice occurred?
There's an Unsong -- and I presume religious -- story about sparrows and the correct level of injustice to set yourself at odds with the power meting out judgement in the universe. I'm not going to make that argument.
I'm noticing when the prosecutors ignored the wrongful killing of an absolute putz once, a bunch of people started fires and riots, it happened to get results and even the 'peaceful moderates' noticed that it worked, and then someone pointed out the logic of how that goes in a talk about charcoal briquettes, and for some reason it was only the last one of those steps that got your dander up. Here, a heinous injustice occurred, no one cares, nothing's going to change, and you’re telling me to start counting and that you can’t answer how high.
I don't know how many such cases it would take to prove to me that the law has legalized murdering conservatives, but that number is >1.
Given that it's not the argument you presented originally or the one I was trying to give, that's not a huge surprise. Do you actually care about the question of, and I quote, "The left will not be murdering political enemies with impunity".
I don't think demanding examples with a number will be productive. (apropos of nothing), but I'm sure as hell not going to do it without you giving an actual definition and count of what you're demanding.
Do you not think someone as motivated as you in the opposite direction (say an Impassionata or a Darwin with research skills) would not be able to provide ample links of conservatives doing awful things, awful court cases to support their narrative, and thus argue we functionally live in a fascist police state?
To borrow from FCFromSSC five years ago: "I am pointing to facts, you are dismissing them with an appeal to fictions. And yes, the other side doesn't believe they're fictions. But that's why we have actual evidence, to settle disputes of fact."
I've actually gone into the weeds on these things, both here, and in other online fora, and in meatspace.
MadMonzer says anyone calling Trump a Nazi is an idiot. MadMonzer also says he thinks there is a 10% chance Trump suspends the Constitution.
.... he doesn't specifically give numbers on suspending the constitution, and the mention from an older argument anyway. Here, MadMonzer dances between talking about running for a third term while specifically disclaiming that he believed it was likely due to Trump's age -- what Arjin was trying to bet on, and why the 'you'll never be able to collect' doesn't real -- and:
So when you ask :
I do not think those two statements contradict each other. You do. Why?
Because I don't think you can discuss whether people are behaving rationally, and whether they're morons, and have the answer to both questions come up yes, in any way that is useful to discuss. And I'm going to engage with that question, not some alternative universe one that would make sense but no one would make.
I say leftists cannot shoot conservatives with impunity. I also say your example of a leftist who was not prosecuted for shooting a conservative was (taking your version at face value) an injustice. I do not see these statements as contradictory. You do. Why?
Because a leftist shooting a conservative with impunity is an existence proof! It's a situation in which a sample size of one is too many. I will recognize that it remains rare, and the other examples I could offer are complicated or marginal (mostly of the 'they didn't catch anybody, and I could even believe it this time'), especially compared to the extent that 'mere' Middlebury Riot-style violence has become normalized.
But that seems like it's another variant of "won't be able to collect". Just as "wailing that they have no right to protest loudly protest in public" seems like it's turning into a demand that conservatives can't notice that they've being ejected from the public square until they're so fully ejected no one can hear them, this seems like a demand to wait until nothing can be done.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'll caveat that my tastes are ... unusual, and a lot of the part I can relay aren't necessarily representative, and those that are representative are going to reflect more 'masked' environments (eg, tumblr, blahaj programmer world) than unmasked ones (eg, furry fandom stuff).
There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization.
To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.
I like to use the metaphor of the dishwasher here. Most people who've loaded a dishwasher end up with The One True Way to do it. Getting into a long-term relationship, you're going to find out that some people do things in crazy ways: forks facing up in the silverware holders, putting bowls on the top rack and cups on the bottom, running it on a daily basis even if it's almost empty, so on.
Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.
That's definitely part of it, but there's also a lot of ugly physical ramifications about Guys Who Think Transwomen Are Always Up For X. The central argument that trans activists bring up is the guy who's post-nut-clarity devolves into horror or even violence, but you can usually get the admission that, in the modern era, that's at least unusual (especially outside of sex work), or where the chaser is only interested in trans women as seen on porn. There's still a lot of room for disagreement, and when a sexual partner's change of presentation or mutability of presentation is part of the attraction to start with, even honest and well-intended trans chasers that are genuinely interested in a longer-term relationship can be Trouble.
At the most overt and crude level, someone that's explicitly interested in trans women qua "chicks-with-dicks" is going to have a really complex negotiation if their sexual partner wants or has had bottom surgery. Someone that's really focused on the idea of being pegged by a real penis is going to have problem with a large number of trans women who, even if they're planning on keeping their dick, don't particularly want to penetrate anything with it and definitely don't like having someone focusing on it. There's a lot of stuff that's built around the fetish and isn't actually built for the person. There's a lot of sissy and sissification stuff that's really common in gay porn and you might think would be catnip for the actual-AGPs, but a sizable number of trans women (even some actually-AGP ones!) find so overtly mocking that it puts them entirely out of their rhythm.
(tbf, because most of it is mocking the sub, just in a way a cis sub gay guy's going to like; for those not too squicked out by the content, contrast tyroo as a trans sub take and vonepitaph as a cis sub take.).
And that goes far beyond sex stuff itself. Like people who chase Asian women, you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women.
There's also the gay culture problem and 'quality' problem, where a lot of 'discrete masc tops' are... just not very good people or physically appealing in the market-for-lemons manner that plagues a lot of dating spheres. I still think they layer on top of that first one, though.
((This can go the other direction, although for obvious reasons FTM complain about it less since guys don't bitch like that. For all the 'bonus hole' porn out there, there's a lot of trans guys who either don't want to or physically can't take a dick there. There's a lot of gay tops that really like the idea of breeding someone, but actual ramifications of a working reproductive system squick them the fuck out. And the ramifications of a near-inevitable hysterectomy put massive pressures on romantic development. The 'bisexual' guys who treat FTMs like dyke-breaking do get a lot of complaints, and with pretty fair reason imo.))
In that five-year-old post, how many of the things I have said wouldn't happen have happened?
Hm...
My wager is that in, oh, 20 years (change the number if you like) the comfortable existence of conservatives like you will be mostly unchanged in the absolute terms you are speaking of.
It has not. Trivially, we've had discussions about how I've found out the hard way that people -- meatspace people -- find it hilarious when a political activist got assassinated and needed to wave it in my face. I won't call that unimaginable in 2020, but I wouldn't have let them live in my house had I considered it a plausible thing. Now?
I'm not going to self-dox and I wouldn't demand you believe me even were I to do so, but the examples exist regardless. The Biden ATF's expansion of FFL regs in direct contradiction to the text of the statute -- and the inability of any court but the Fifth Circuit to issue an injunction or stay on the rule, and for even the Fifth Circuit's injunction to be meaningfully applied -- is no small part of why the Administrative Warrant No Real people are driving me up the walls, and doing so for a reason.
You will still be able to proclaim your right wing views in public.
California just started a lawsuit against some randos for the awful crime of running a website demonstrating how ineffective their gun control program is going to be, and while it's 'only' 20k per 'violation', it's also alleging thousands of 'violations'. ((This is the Code Is Not Free Speech reference from here.)) It's a matter of federal law what public radio stations a shipping company may allow its employees to turn on. The EEOC has held that wearing a coworker wearing a Gadsden Flag hat was sufficient evidence to that someone could be subject "to discrimination on the basis of race". The final punchline to the Damore fiasco is that the NLRB held that "anti-discrimination or anti-harassment policies must be afforded particular deference in light of the employer’s duty to comply with state and federal EEO laws", aka the law required Damore's punishment. The only reason Governor "Can't Remember if It Was Blackface or KKK Costume" Northam stopped declaring emergencies every VDCL day was that he termed out from office.
Out of my parade of horribles from five years back, the only one that's no longer true is Demkovich, and that only for the specific case of a religious employer talking to a ministerial employee (... in the Seventh Circuit). Everybody else? Fuck 'em.
And that's just a small selection of the explicit law stuff. If you're willing to admit social power or non-state force, I've got a long long array of examples, no few of which hit me personally. As FCFromSSC said back then "I can't do this now, not without an unacceptable level of risk to my career and livelihood. I am exceedingly careful about proclaiming my right-wing views with my own family members in private."
But in case that's unacceptable as a hypothetical, and I'll spell out now: I tried to be exceedingly careful, and I wasn't careful enough, and it's cost me badly. The Saga Of Forge isn't a specific one to hit me, personally, but it rhymes with one of the online cases. There have been offline ones.
You will not be living in a leftist authoritarian state with "struggle sessions" forcing you to say you love Big Brother.
Five years ago, I specifically spelled out : "There was a news story last week about the Trump administration trying to end them for specific jobs. Do you think that the next Democratic administration will decide that he declared "no takebacks"?"
The Biden administration did, in fact, decide to go full takebacks, both specifically for that executive order on Day One, and in terms of expanding those rules far more expansively than ever before. By 2023, according to a Pew survey: "52% say they have trainings or meetings on DEI at work. Smaller shares say their workplace has a staff member who promotes DEI (33%)".
I do, in fact, have struggle sessions where I'm told to reflect on my privilege, and that's after having worked hard and made significant sacrifices to avoid the Blue Tribe stranglehold.
((This gets even funnier given my orientation and demographic background, and I'd rather take a butane torch to my junk than try to actually get my interlocutors to confront that paradox.))
The Trump administration tried to claw them back. Ebb and flow, right? Eh, sometimes after enough fuckery from the courts (although note that it took over a year for the supposedly-unlawful nation-wide preliminary injunction to get slapped down), sometimes not. Doesn't really matter, though. A lot of lower offices are just ignoring it.
Right wing media and right wing politicians will still have power and influence. Trump will not be the last Republican president.
In the sense that TheNybbler's not right, and occasionally people with Rs after their names will be elected? Sure, sometimes even in Blue States. If you just said 'the Blue Tribe is not going to be 110% effective at blocking every single Republican candidate ever' I'd have agree with you, and if you just said every single conservative candidate ever I'd only have been able to quibble.
I think you have already updated on both the 'a bullet nearly Gallagar'd a Presidential candidate' and 'judges ordered already-cast (primary) ballots not be counted', so I don't want to hammer this bits too hard, but it's still one of those 'not for lack of trying' bits, though.
There will still be religion and people who say homosexuality is a sin and trans people bad (and teach it to their children, who are not taken away from them).
There's a mess of court cases percolating right now about when and how this breaks down in divorce, and whether foster licenses can be pulled for speech against homosexuality or be made conditional on requiring prospective foster parents to condone specific LGBT things. Even where the religious orgs get a victory, it's only to find that their religious beliefs can't be the sole determining characteristic. It was considered a major compromise (aka 'sign he's running') when Newsom vetoed a bill requiring child custody hearings to consider parental acceptance of trans stuff, California still encourages judges to consider it.
So fair, yes, this is one of the spaces with the most clearly mixed results.
There will probably still be problems with race and crime.
Yes, the Democratic Party is sure doing their best to make sure they're a relevant concern for everyone.
The left will not be murdering political enemies with impunity
Matthew Dolloff shot and killed Lee Keltner in October 2020. Do you think he was convicted of homicide or manslaughter? Went to a grueling trial where his self-defense theory was broken down into every component? ... plea bargain for his well-documented other simultaneous unlawful behavior, such as acting as an unlicensed security guard?
there will be occasional demonstrations and violence from both sides, as now, and people will still argue over who's more guilty and who's more violent.
Yes, people will argue. I'm more interested in whether people will argue using the facts.
Has a single person been brought to a criminal court for attacking Andy Ngo? When San Jose police steered pro-Trump activists into a riot, where the activists were beaten by unmasked protesters, was anyone throwing punches given a custodial sentence, or anyone forcing political activists into a pile of their enemies fired?
Hell, are we even at the point it makes news, anymore? I can give more recent examples. There's a fun meme going around tumblr literally this weekend praising a high school student who punched a pro-ICE counterprotester, and they might not even be wrong to call the punchee a troll; Portlandites beating the shit out of conservatives and the police solemnly informing everyone that Nothing Can Be Done is a regular ritual. But it's not like it's going to end up on CNN, and it's not like there's anything interesting to discuss here.
There will still be daily arguments in whatever the next generation's version of Reddit is between liberals and conservatives.
We're not on Reddit, now.
There will be some tiny fraction of political discussion allowed on whatever the actual successor site ends up being, between some small selection of approved politics. Anything else will either need to happen on a site with an explicitly free speech (aka 'right-wing') stance, or it's going the exact same direction, and Elon Musk isn't a reddit addict.
I could have bought an alternative back in 2010; there was a short golden hour where RPGnet could slice a thick line between UKIP and BNP and hold to it, where Nazi didn't just mean Something You Don't Like. You know, exactly as well as I do, where that's gone.
The exact talking points may be unrecognizable to us today, but I assert, essentially, that your Doomer "We have lost and Red Tribe will no longer have rights" is absolutely, 100% wrong and will continue to be proven wrong.
Dick Heller still can't register, lol, his gun from Heller I. SFFA happened, and then the next year Harvard decided that it would just discriminate less against Asians and more against non-minorities. NRA v. Vullo said of course you obviously can't bring iffy non-profit governance claims while clearly motivated solely by the politics of that non-profit, and then lower courts decided that it wasn't obvious enough so qualified immunity for everybody (and a similarly-motivated prosecution in a different jurisdiction just got a settlement from the NRA). SCOTUS has punted on the question of But It's Mean on Free Speech. Hell, guns aren't even the only thing in the guns cases. The court has similarly punted on the question of whether But It's Guns on Due Process, or But It's Guns on Free Speech [see also], or But It's Guns on Court Settlements, or even But It's Guns on the very caselaw that SCOTUS thought so beyond the pale that they'd managed to scrounge up a 9-0 before.
Separate from the relitigating:
We're farther than I thought we'd be five years ago- but right now, we're on a slippery slope that Red tribe is pushing us down. (Yes, I know the response is "They started it, tit for tat is the proper game theory response," and that is how we keep going down the slope. No, I don't know what the exit looks like.)
No! The response is 'the only alternative is rolling over, lying down, and taking it without lube or a reacharound'! It's been clear for over a decade, now, that the only way to delegitimize a supposedly bad tactic is for someone on the Right to use it, and the only revelation in the meantime is that much of the Left will nitpick why they should be able to continue to do it while objecting to the exact same thing being done by the Red Tribe.
That's why I keep highlighting the complete and abject failures of any group, even groups originated from here, claiming to oppose escalation and political violence to actually oppose it when it comes from the Left. That's why I keep highlighting that these weapons worked, sometimes even in ways I'm a beneficiary from their success, and that any shocked and appalled monocle-dropping is going to ring false when deescalation needs be done by their opponents first and foremost and their side Soon (TM).
It's not just that you don't know what the exit looks like. It's that even if one dropped out of the sky, ringed in halo'd cherubs, no one would or could take it.
If you want to cite some specific thing for me to respond to or agree with or rebut, I will do my best, but I do not think it is reasonable for you to demand I revisit a five-year-old post and answer all the questions you don't think I answered satisfactorily five years ago.
Your literal only answer, ever, was to say "gattsuru's list does not impress, but if I was wrong, he should be able to point this out in a few years."
Either tell me to stop and I'll stop, actually engage with the problems, or I'm going to keep noticing that you're playing this game and spell it out.
I was just being pedantic about poker, ffs.
... sure.
And also expressing my general dislike of the "Put money on it or you don't really believe this" form of argumentation.
And here's the crux. You don't like that? Fine! Actually say it, and then actually support it with factual claims, and then when people point out those factual claims are wrong, engage with them! Which, coincidentally, I'll note that you haven't done:
- MadMonzer did not, in fact, object to other proverbial wagers -- I say this not to suggest you must bet, but that the objection based on non-iterated games falls flat for MadMonzer.
- Arjin did not, in fact, demand some massive bet.
- MadMonzer clearly does not define 'fascism' to such a point that he'd be unable to collect on a wager.
I said "literally Hitler is absurd." That is my opinion. I did not say "no one's saying literally Hitler." Obviously there are people saying literally Hitler. I think they are wrong.
Fine, mea culpa. Do you have a recommended pattern for how we challenge people when making obviously absurd beliefs? I don't play poker, is there some term about calling a bluff relevant here?
my reasons for believing MadMonzer believes that number is that I know that many, many leftists believe that number or a higher number, and they clearly sincerely believe it whether or not they are willing to put money on it. That their belief is often driven by hysteria and/or detached from actual facts does not mean they don't seriously believe it.
My reason for not believing MadMonzer when MadMonzer says that number is that four months ago he called anyone making it an idiot. Insert the Frieren meme here.
A ton of leftists say it; we've all seen Darwin and its alts. But a scarce sub-Lizardman Constant handful act in accordance with those beliefs in any way, and I don't mean that in the 'do something to get an FBI visit' sense or even a 'act under perfect knowledge regarding enemy capabilities' sense.
A hundred thousand leftists say that they think Brandon Sanderson wants gay kids to undergo electroshock therapy, or that the Sad Puppies were going to march around WorldCon in ghost costumes with nooses. Kelsey "The Good One" TUOC cried herself to sleep for years over an Obama-era picture for a Trump-era policy that had already ended before she first heard about it, wrote long paeans about how Reporters Like Herself needed to do better about bringing this to the forefront early, and then spent the next four years informing anyone who asked that oops immigration isn't her schtick... only to get instantly promoted back to that January 21st, 2025.
They do not sincerely believe this just because they've worked themselves into neurotic hissy fits repeating the words like parrots. They say the words because:
The problem with this view is it leaves you subject to the whims of anyone who will demand concessions in exchange for not "raising the temperature", such as the antifa rioters, or those claiming looting as their right. It leads to paying the danegeld, to appeasement, and that just isn't likely to work out; the demands are not going to end.
It's just a word, and it just means 'something you don't like'. You don't have to bet on it to prove otherwise, but you can't just point to people saying the word for 'something you don't like', while they collect countless accolades and prizes and rewards for their false panic, and have anyone else take it seriously.
Are you trying to debate me, now, about whether MadMonzer (or liberals with TDS in general) really believe the things they are saying?
Nope. I don't care about MadMonzer, and you've not tried to present any information showing actual belief, and it's not worth either of our time, and the best-case scenario would turn into a discussion about dissolving definitions that I also don't care about.
I care about the actual facts on the ground.
How this applies to our five-year-old argument I think is pretty obvious, but that argument was never about whether I believed that you or FCfromSSC really believed the things you were saying.
I care whether the facts on the ground point to one thing or the other. Same then, same now, and the same problem where we keep getting pulled away from it.
gattsuru
3d ago
And, for an even more overt examples, I'll point to Snope. He previously even written -- in Heller II over a decade before! -- calling for more serious scrutiny of that very class of law. But they were busy that day.
We'll see if he can't punt any further on Monday.
gattsuru
4d ago
Hm. Do you think there would be any benefit pointing at the recent California Code Is Free Speech bans?
gattsuru
4d ago
Then around 2018, possibly connected with the porn ban on tumblr, the identity sort of died off.
Therianthropy tends to be pretty cyclical in terms of visibility; there was a relative boom in the 1996-2004 era (the Burned Furs lumped them in with animal abusers, plushophiles, and vegans), and another in 2012-2018.
A lot of that is specifically visibility, though. I can't say for sure on 2018, but the 2004 die-off was pretty overtly downstream of widespread raids by trolls who'd learned just enough about the community to make themselves annoying. A lot of groups moved to private IRCs (and, later, Discord and then VRChat) because anything on the public net was inviting disaster. That skepticism about outsiders definitely remains today. Trace was trying to 'keep an eye' on a group in 2023, and they kicked him out as a troll.
All the high-profiles are necessarily going to be very weird, even when some of the weirdness is at least instrumentally helpful. Maia crimew from the No Fly List 'hack' is a therian, as an example. It's the same with furries; the very thing that means my only public meatspace furry trait is a very-boring sticker that keeps my ThinkPad from getting mixed in with everyone else's is a good part of why I'll never show up on The Daily Show short of being taken hostage. At minimum, anyone bringing this stuff up in the real world is going to be autistic and/or chuunibyou as hell; more often, they're going to have thirty thousand other things that they've Got To Share (and worse, share without explaining or making understandable)
Someone that's normal about their weird stuff, even a pretty wide mix of pretty-hard-to-hide weird stuff, is just going to come across as a bit neurotic.
and the only surviving neopronoun is "they".
Oh, I wish.
gattsuru
4d ago
I mean, I already told you I literally have trouble figuring out exactly what you are accusing me of, and here you are returning almost two weeks later to go at it again! (I'm not saying you have a time limit on responding, but come on, I thought we'd both walked away from this one, and now I have to reread the whole thread to remember where we even were.)
Apologies. Work and STEM outreach have been busy, and I've been limiting politics-writing when in those environments even where I have idle time for the obvious reasons that are kinda my point. And then I'll realize half-way through a response that I'm relitigating stuff you clearly didn't want to litigate the first time, and have to start again.
I think I already apologized for accusing you of being a Kulak fan
I don't think a neutral observer would have read that as an apology, but I'll take it under the intent you meant if that's what you meant.
... and I honestly don't remember calling you a Soros conspiracy theorist. I suppose you have a link where I implied it or something.
And I'll spell out specifically that my claim was "I get lumped in with Soros conspiracy theorists".
You're not a Soros conspiracy theorist. Are you happy?
Happy would be overstating things, since that wasn't the claim I made, but I'll take it in the spirit it was intended.
I have said repeatedly that I regret that exchange and have reconsidered how I expressed myself, even if don't repudiate the core thesis.
My problem has never been your tone, as I've said at length. I care about your core thesis. I think it's wrong, I think it's been wrong for years, and I've shouted in every way short of going full-caps at you about it. Literally, to quote my PM to you, "I would like to know which of us is right, and which is wrong. From you, I'd take a serious argument why you believe I'm wrong."
((Yes, I'm going to keep referencing the five-year-old post that, in its closest to a followup, specifically spelled out "gattsuru's list does not impress, but if I was wrong, he should be able to point this out in a few years", when I still think you're wrong and you've done less than nothing to even attempt to actually confront that list, or the specific claims you made then.))
I'd love to think otherwise! Whether it's that the lists of things I offer aren't actually happening or are gish gallops or are purely hypothetical, or that they don't seriously impact my freedom of speech or civil rights, or that if they do it's just social conformity not partly the state actions I've already linked, or that it's really going to just ebb and flow in way that actually leaves me whole or my enemies feeling genuine mirrors of my problems. But we don't do that discussion. I can't even get agreement on what level your thesis actually holds on long enough to debate the facts, and when I've attempted to draw out a literal branching graph of options, the closest we got was a thesis of "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are".
What evidence? What point on the slippery slope? What could possibly change your mind, before it was too late?
But if we can't have that discussion, hell, I'd just take a serious engagement with the thing that brought you into this thread. You popped in to insist that it's a bad idea to make single bets, even at steeply favorable odds, and that no one's saying literally Hitler. Well, MadMonzer's willing to bet often, claimed the odds are wildly favorable, Arjin didn't demand anyone go all-in or even beat pizza money. Oh, and MadMonzer said specifically "10% chance that Trump is Hitler". Does this say anything? Do you have some other reason to believe that MadMonzer actually believes that number, when you yourself are saying that it's clearly absurd?
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah, I practiced back in the usenet wereweb and werewolfdotcom days; while the modern version has drifted a bit just as the late-90s early-00s one itself was drifting from some of the goofier forms of crystal witch neopaganism, it's still pretty recognizable. It's weird and I wouldn't recommend it, but it's been around for a long time.
Dunno enough about the current or historic South/Central American therian stuff to comment there, but there's a decent number of South American furries, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise.
gattsuru
4d ago
But I go through your laundry lists of accusations and feel like sincerity requires me to try to answer them point by point, and I get bogged down in a mixture of "That's completely not what I meant," "That is not what I said and I think you're straw manning me," and "What does he even mean?"
You don't have to respond to every single point. You don't have to respond to a majority of my points.
But if you genuinely believe that I've gish galloped you or straw-manned you, you should be able to pick two or three meaningfully false claims or clear misquotes or obviously unfair rephrasings, using actual quotes of words I've actually used, and then provide grounds for disagreement based on facts that exist in the world that can be discussed. And then, if I'm able to support my claims in response, either engage with my counterexamples, or justify how your position survives those counterexamples.
I'm not demanding that you admit you're wrong. I'd like you to be right! But it's hard to come away from conversations like this thinking we're debating what the actual state of reality is, rather than trying to discuss what we're even talking about.
((I'm sorry that I'm being both circumspect and prone to digressions, but from my perspective it feels like I can't have a conversation with you unless I nail down every possible aside. Best case, we end up spending ten posts relitigating the bare existence of a topic that we already discussed at length; worst case, I get lumped in with Soros conspiracy theorists and KulakCatgirl fanboys.))
gattsuru
7d ago
I think that's part of it, but there was some serious pistol training for some roles in WWII and even WWI. My impression -- and I'll admit I missed the whole 'got assigned a bit of military history as a special interest' thing, so I may well be running on pop history here -- is that doctrine just favored minimizing vulnerability and prioritizing speed of fire, instead. That's a weird decision as an offensive weapon given the limited magazine capacities of the time, but given the realities of trench and urban warfare of the time, may have been reasonable.
It's just strange in retrospect.
gattsuru
7d ago
I've never tried that on a range, and I don't think I've seen it on one. With some snap caps it was doable but not comfortable, and maintaining a sight picture even while standing still felt rougher than strong-hand-only, and while moving it was actively frustrating. Didn't feel either terrible or strong from a recoil management perspective, though without live fire that can be misleading.
That said, I'm not particularly strong as a pistol shooter (and mostly stick to .22 and .380) myself and definitely far from an ISPDA pro, so big grain of salt. There may be advantages that aren't obvious, or I might just not be good enough to use it properly (or even position it properly). That said, if you're having fun with it for VR shooting, that's all that really matters when fighting with H3vr.
If they're not banned in your jurisdiction (and not 'legal-but-sketchy' a la UK), springer or compressed air pistols can be an inexpensive and indoors-friendly option. Won't get you much a grip on what recoil's like, but the difference between 22 and heavier-duty airsoft is smaller than you'd expect.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, this is one of those funny bits of history that is fascinating to look at in a “reading philosophy backwards” sense. The Weaver stance wasn’t invented until 1959; until then, the overwhelming majority of practical pistol training used dorky-seeming point shooting approaches that largely ignored sight picture when standing. Before even that, the familiar “dueling stance” wasn’t a mere formalism, but an approach believed to help best with standing aim.
There’s military doctrine reasons that the field advanced so slowly, and I’m sure some people predated Weaver, but it’s goofy as hell that it took 40+ years of people using the 1911 before they would seriously try to aim with it.
I'm kinda surprised orientation play gets through any models, both for censorship reasons, because of the relative paucity of relevant training data, for its various politics, and also just because of the logical inconsistencies. I don't expect James T. Kirk levels of making a modern LLM explode with the order 'Write an erotic story where two gay guys screw a woman', but given that real-world people with this specific kink sometimes end up with pronouns getting mixed up, logistically improbable acts, or forgetting about the orientation play, it's a little impressive that the LLMs can do it at all.
Hell, sometimes they're able to notice points where my own writing hasn't been very consistent (cw: 'review' of a smut intro, implied furry M/F/M, no bits but probably not something you want to explain to your boss).
In turn, though, it's a bit impressive in the sense of getting a dog to dance. This (cw: not good, 13k words actually-SFW Jupiter Ascending script-style fanfic, with serial numbers filed off) is an experiment in trying to get long-form consistent writing out of a model. A lot of the problems are the experiment, or me: switching out names means that the model is operating off a game-of-telephone level of characterization, and I didn't queue it very strictly about either rising tension or how I really wanted the story's themes and focuses to go. And it does work, in the sense that it's a story with a beginning, middle, and end that's not got more plot holes than the last Star Wars film.
But holy hell is the dialogue and pacing awful at points, and when we're starting from Jupiter "I Love Dogs!" Ascending you know that's damning with harsh criticism. There's probably something to be done by feeding it back in on itself, since a lot of the worst bits are things even the LLM will recognize as needing improvement, but it's hard to justify the tokens on that even on a monthly rate.
I mostly finished a 16k words "5 Times X Happened + 1 Time It Didn't" meets "Male Swimwear Challenge" lemon M/M + F story, leaving it with some time to settle before I review and publish it. Not AI-written, and the attempts to do so turned out absolutely terrible, but it's something where AI criticisms actually helped out a ton (cw: explicit but mostly not erotic, detailed discussion of an erotic furry story). Yes, it glazes my writing more than the main character got coated and its direct prose 'suggestions' go somewhere between purple prose and outright bad writing, but 'does this character come across like I want him or her to, and when not, why not' are really hard to even notice when you've had an idea bouncing around in your head for a couple weeks, and the LLMs do that surprisingly well.
Trying to brainstorm an anthrostate story as my current 'project'. Soft femdom's pretty fun and the whole assigned partners thing is fanfic heaven for a reason, but the actual universe is a kinda fun thing to explore separate from the kink. LLMs handled this better, probably since it's got a more conventional escalation pace, and I might well see if Opus 4.6 can write something that isn't atrocious, but for now I've mostly found the models helpful for doing 'this is the state of this world, what would cause it to look like this' and 'this person with this background encountered this situation, what are the most plausible reactions?' questions.
I've also experimented a bit with a story line involving video-game-level-gore-and-death for ARK. It's about as far down the rabbit hole as I'm willing to go to test how censored a model gets, and there's a lot of storylines that I'd like to write where adjacent themes are kinda unavoidable (eg, basically any game with in-universe revives, or where trying for a Mortal Kombat-style tone of violence). GLM-4.5-Air-Derestricted can write it without shying away from the gore, but in turn its pacing is atrocious, and most vanilla models are unsurprisingly very uncomfortable with the topic. Doesn't always result in refusal, but even where models give outputs they just avoid it or obvious consequences around it.
Outside of writing:
Been trying to figure out a radial kerf bending cut meets living hinge situation. Every model I've tried has failed it. Can be done -- I've got the Fusion360 layout done -- so dunno how much of it's outside of the training data, how much I'm just asking the question wrong, and how much is just it's a hard question to ask in words.
Codingwise, have some CRUD stuff I've been doing for work that even QwenCode-30B handles fine and fast, some robotics stuff that's been an interesting challenge for students that Grok and Opus have been helpful for explaining but involves a (probably intentionally?) polluted namespace that's left most LLM suggestions not fit for copy-and-paste, and a few enthusiast projects. Haven't had much time to work on the last ones, and results from AI assistance have been more varied than I'd like. Lots of stuff that works but is hilariously brittle, and lots of stuff that's not right at all.
Art generation's strong. I've been trying to dial in a sublimation printer for metal printing and mousepads, so it's been fun building a few dozen outputs and seeing how they look after being pressed onto a metal card or a mousepad. Trying to get something that can take a character and make a full Major Arcana Tarot set out of it, mostly just fighting to get a model that handles text acceptably while still accepting a tarot lora and a character lora (and doesn't melt my machine trying it). Workflows keep getting more and more complicated to keep on the hairy edge of progress, though, and the lack of a local equivalent to NanoBanana / Whisk is annoying.
I've been trying to get some of the 2d->3d tools running. TRELLIS2 and Wan3D both have serious tradeoffs (and by all that is holy, Microsoft, what the fuck is your deployment environment for TRELLIS?), but they are powerful... when they work, for their very specific use cases.
This is interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that the common "shitty free models" defense crops up rapidly; commentors will say that this is a bad-faith example of LLM shortfalls because the interlocutors are not using frontier models. At the same time, a comment suggests that Opus 4.6 can be tricked, while another says 4.6 gets it right more than half the time.
I'd expect to the degree any model gets it 'right' without modification, it reflects some weirdness in the model rather than something inherently better about the strengths of the model. A couple local (and thus not-updated-specifically-to-this-question) Thinking-style models I tried the same question on gave the 'wrong' answer, but had Thinking components specifically highlighting that the question was strange and must have involved unstated assumptions (either picking up materials from the car wash to do the work at home, or the car already being there). A dumber old model got it right occasionally, but that's probably as much a result of the high temperature I was running it rather than any actual consideration.
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in? Do they reflexively shy away from cars in the same way that a human baby fears heights? It would track with some of the other ingrained biases that people have found.
Yes. There's a fun question of whether it's just Reddit-brain, or was actively cultivated by the people training it. But since it's present in both heavily decensored or trained-out-of-US models, my bet's that the former is at least part of the problem.
The basic idea is that you are more trusting of sources if you are not particularly familiar with a topic. In this case, it's hard not to notice the flaws - most people have walked. Most have seen a car. Many have probably washed a car. However, when it comes to more technical, obscure topics, most of us are probably not domain experts in them. We might be experts in one of them. Some of us might be experts in two of them, but none of us are experts in all of them. When it comes to topics that are more esoteric than washing a car, we rapidly end up in the territory of Dick Cheney's unknown unknowns. Somebody like self_made_human might be able to cut through the chaff and confidently take advice about ocular migraines, but could you? Could I? Hell if I know.
It's... not exactly a hard trick to learn skepticism. Nor one useful only when considering LLMs. As much as that summary of "you can not actually outsource the requirement to evaluate truth" has aged like milk, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea. The core question of 'what do you know, and how do you know it' can't solve everything, but where a matter matters, you shouldn't be trusting one secondary source without verification no matter what substrate it's running on.
gattsuru
8d ago
[disclaimer: I do not and will not use LLMs to write text I post directly to TheMotte; only in linked content I try to identify as LLM-produced.]
I've not been impressed by any AI-built writing itself, but they can be useful when analyzing a written work, even if only in a way that's helpful to the original writer. They've been able to catch everything from the standard typos and grammar errors, to pacing problems, to (in one case) a theme I overlooked, along with sometimes fairly biting criticism. They're not perfect when it comes to either false positives or false negatives, nor do they handle every use case well, but it's much more useful than info-dumping-and-getting-generic-responses back.
((Most of the time. I have had one or two times where the only criticisms I could pull out of the LLM were just 'try to make your characters feel more grounded in the setting' schlock, and that's not because the work was stellar. And for writing adult or erotic fiction, the LLMs can be hit-or-miss about pacing, unsurprisingly.))
Some of that might reflect the quality of other beta readers available, especially in fandom or extremely-genre spaces. I can't compare the LLMs to professional editors, which might well blow the machines out of the water. But I can't make that comparison because professional editors are and have long been unavailable for randos like myself.
gattsuru
10d ago
The practical failure of these laws to actually block bad people from getting guns is a little overdetermined. There's even been pretty major advances on those lines: benchtop CNC machines are obviously more available, but electrochemical machining has also made manufacturing accurate rifle barrels susprisingly accessible. There's no real serious way to claw back the files themselves, universally.
But I think the purpose of these laws is more social. It's given carte blanch to push this stuff off the open internet, and make it such that even in fairly pro-gun communities there's a ton of bad or old information going around. Cody Wilson's original bet was not just that he'd make gun control obsolete, but that he'd demonstrate that it was doomed, or that it would require massive and invasive censorship to still end up doomed. For all he won the former bet, the latter is what actually drives public policy and what he expected to drive public policy, and it's been a very unpleasant wakeup call.
I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.
Yes, there's a bunch of downstream epicycles around depositions, so on. It may be navigable; it may be navigable until a sufficiently malicious plaintiff/prosecutor and mendacious judge work together.
Uh... I dunno that you need a cutting-edge model for that. I used a similar approach for this (cw: bad Jupiter Ascending fan-script). It's not good -- I'd say not even good as fanfiction -- and it's not even what I'd want written for the setting, and it's admittedly only into 13k words. But while it took three layers of "let's take these characters and flesh them out", "let's add this setting flesh out into a story outline", and then finally prompting the actual story, it did do it with minimal human intervention and none of it actually drawing the story plot. Putting even trivial effort into feedback, guidance, and pacing during the final prompting sequence would probably have helped a ton.
My problems are more than the character voices are really samey, the setting doesn't get enough interesting exploration, the twist doesn't get enough emphasis (and frankly isn't that interesting even in outline form: "why would anyone be willing to risk eternity for an unproven chance? Well, we happen to have a big pile of people that risked their lives and were trying to kill for a tiny improvement. Having eternal life only available to the elite kinda makes that a day-to-day thing."), and it keeps throwing extra characters in with too much detail rather than using the ones I was trying to emphasize. It's not necessarily incoherent, just bad.
((The LLMs do eventually notice that it's a Jupiter Ascending-with-names-filed-off-story if you try your review. Not sure whether that hurts or helps it as analysis, but given that the character tones sound nothing like their film counterparts I don't think it pollutes too much. And while my original fic efforts have been on content that you... probably will find even less appealing to read, original fic does work.))
I've got a busy week, but I might see what I can get out of a local LLM aiming for the longer form 30k words target, just to do a compare and contrast.
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