2rafa
20d ago
The last place I rented had an expensive-ish Smeg induction hob. Italian so inevitably it had reliability issues, but when it worked it worked very well, and in fact much better than gas (normally my preference) at certain things.
What do I mean by that? Heating up water especially. It had a ‘power’ mode that could, in less than 2 minutes, bring a large pot of water to the boil. I presume this took a great amount of electricity (although I don’t remember a measurable impact on bills) but it was extremely convenient when making pasta or boiling potatoes or whatever.
The downside is, as @sarker suggests, that it constantly beeps at you when water or utensils are on the stovetop. The upside is, I imagine especially if you have kids, that you can touch it even when it’s ‘hot’ and it’s fine.
2rafa
21d ago
Right. Even pearls typically look bad on the really pale (especially blondes) unless they’re tanned to the ‘Swede after 4 weeks in Australia’ level. Dark hair gives you some more options for standout silver or diamond earrings but anything large is still usually a poor decision. As regards a simple necklace, whether it should hang high or low depends on your facial and neck structure, skinniness, clavicles and cleavage so varies. Still, less is more.
2rafa
21d ago
I’m not hugely familiar with him but my recollection is that you’re both kind of right. In the early-mid 90s when he was associated with Jim Goad and the Answer Me! counterculture zine circle he was essentially a ‘classic’ holocaust denier, probably mainly out of edginess.
By the time he was writing for Taki he believed (and as far as I know believes) that at least 3-4 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by various methods that were ultimately the fault of the Nazi government. That probably still counts as denial for Deborah Lipstadt types but neither I nor actual Holocaust deniers of the “only 200,000 died of typhus, the rest either didn’t die or never existed” variety would consider it thus.
2rafa
22d ago
It’s not a win now button because they want good relations with the Sunni Arabs, particularly the Gulf Arabs, and there’s only so far you can push them before the domestic situation kills any chance of full rapprochement for another 30 years. The current conflict probably delayed it five years already, which was of course Hamas’ intention.
That good commercial relations with the Arabs would be good for Israel, though, doesn’t mean the whole state would be doomed if things went biblical though, at least not immediately.
ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial
Alas, that was merely a step in the downward trajectory that resulted in Unz releasing a lengthy series of ever more unhinged schizoposts alleging, essentially, that the entirety of modernity itself dating back to the 18th century was a Talmudic conspiracy, finally synthesizing both religious and ethnic antisemitism in a way, dare I say, that only a Jew could. It was sad to see, but it was also inevitable, probably many years ago, given who he surrounded himself with and hired.
{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."
Taki was always the most well connected person on the (or adjacent to) the dissident right. His great (all inherited) wealth and connections to pretty much the entire right wing establishment in the UK and the neocon right in the US (who humored him and loved him as an eccentric even as he frequently slammed them in his pieces) meant he was essentially immune from cancellation; at the height of Takimag (after Richard Spencer’s editorship) he was still regularly published in The Spectator despite having published and written hundreds of columns that would have gotten any other writer or editor fired. He was at every party. He was astoundingly well-connected; whenever he said anything about the Jews (which was semi-often) many of the most powerful Jewish people in Britain - all his friends, of course - would quietly ensure that the usual censure never really happened to him. He was finally cancelled from The Spectator only when handed a 12 month suspended sentence by a Swiss court for attempted rape (and then only after the full and final conviction) in 2023.
That same network was of course also his weakness. He couldn’t and can’t stand his friends being criticized. He is at his heart a lecherous old libertine, a ‘racist liberal’ par excellence, a man who lived a life of unfathomable hedonism and excess with zero real consequences and who has had a tremendous time doing so. Cole was amusing for a time, but he can’t threaten the real relationships Taki has; that’s just not who his employer was.
2rafa
22d ago
What sort of settlement are you thinking of? It's hard to imagine Israel giving up much control over the West Bank, much less a full 2SS at this point.
Depends on how bad the economic crisis is. People forget that Israel was very poor by Western standards until the 1980s and became a rich country relatively recently, with huge growth in living standards over the last 25 years (kind of like Ireland, but without the very harsh years the Irish had after the financial crisis). If things get a lot worse quickly I think there’s potential for significant political disruption.
2rafa
23d ago
The South Africa thing isn’t moralist, it’s catering to white racial activists in America who have wanted this for years and who people like the VP follow on Twitter. That’s not a criticism, by the way, and I have no issues with Afrikaner migrants, who are unlikely to have any deleterious impact on America’s social fabric. But it’s not a universal human rights thing, any more than Israel encouraging Jewish immigration is a universalist human rights thing; it’s particular, it’s in-group loyalty, it’s importing more people assumed (regardless of their actual politics) to be in the core white anti-woke ethnos around which the GOP is increasingly built.
2rafa
23d ago
America didn’t bomb every Iraqi dwelling until every member of the Taliban surrendered. That would be sociopathic.
Leaving aside the conflation of Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s a ridiculous comparison, because neither Iraq nor Japan nor Germany were entirely or mostly or even substantially urban.
In reality, footage of postwar Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo looks pretty similar to footage of urban Gaza today. 5% of Germany’s civilian population died in the war by most estimates, more in many major cities. Again the numbers in Gaza are similar (WW2 was longer, but the pitched phase of urban fighting that saw most of those casualties was actually much shorter). Iraq saw far fewer civilian casualties because the Baathist government was deeply unpopular, its military was a traditional uniformed military built on the failed Arab military model of the 1970s and the majority Shia population eagerly dismantled what remained of Hussein’s regime. Go back to America’s last genuinely major conflict in Vietnam (again, predominantly rural at the time of fighting which inherently means a much lower civilian casualty rate) and the civilian casualties spike accordingly, because the enemy had morale.
That is, by the way, what it takes to root out a highly entrenched urban guerilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms, has an extensive tunnel network and embraces hiding among the civilian population. The only alternative Israel’s detractors can offer to the way the war has already been prosecuted amounts to ‘just leave and negotiate from a distance’. That is a valid approach, and a fair argument (and one I agree with), but it is not and can never be a military strategy, only a diplomatic one. Militarily, strategists offer no alternative. If you were in charge of the IDF and were given the order to militarily destroy Hamas with the soldiers Israel has and the equipment it has, you could likely come up with no military strategy that had fewer civilian casualties than the current approach.
2rafa
23d ago
I think the future I fear most is an extinction or near extinction scenario (at least for everyone but the 0.0001% and lackeys which alas, I am not) that is slow and painful, by which I mean a few weeks, months or years of pain, fear, panic, starvation, disease and - worst of all - watching others one knows and love (friends, parents, children) go through the same and die, and then an ignominious death oneself.
If we are here one instant and gone the next, if it is painless, then I am not scared.
2rafa
23d ago
Agreed. The emotional connection after the war is much stronger with the Falklands; Britain hasn’t fought against Spain in a long time and, in exchange for enough freebies (easy residency for British retirees, an exemption from the new non-EU housing taxes, €10bn which is probably viable now that the Spanish economy is doing better) the public would probably acquiesce. The Falklands I think are unlikely.
2rafa
23d ago
Rumours are that Keir Starmer was the basis for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones.
Fielding all but confirmed that he was. Odd though, because while he was certainly handsome in his youth, a big part of Mark Darcy’s handsomeness is his voice, and Keir Starmer has a bad case of Kermit voice.
2rafa
23d ago
The French literally yielded fully to a minor colonial revolt months ago because they attempted to give their own citizens right to vote in the territory in which they lived, diluting the native vote share. They reversed the change and now seem likely never to implement it.
2rafa
23d ago
I know someone who works in niche print magazine publishing who says they do pretty well. It’s all niche fashion, literature, photography, food, travel magazines where each copy is like $20 sold through specialist stores (mostly retail), so the number of copies you need to sell is actually quite modest. Depending on where you live I’m sure there’s some hip print stores that stock them.
2rafa
23d ago
When you pay $5 a month not just for a newspaper but for a specific person’s article you are very likely to develop a milder version of the sort of parasocial relationship people have with their favorite YouTuber or streamer.
2rafa
23d ago
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
That depends what ‘stay out of it’ means. If it’s just ending military aid (but still allowing weapons sales, the same way the US does to many neutral nations, and preserving the trade relationship) then no, Israel is not doomed. It would likely force a settlement with the Arabs much sooner for economic and political reasons, but it is not the threat of US intervention that prevents Israel from being invaded.
Sanctions and a prohibition on weapons sales could doom it, but that isn’t non-intervention (it is very much intervention of the standard State Department kind). Even in that event Israel is probably still safer than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it had less of a technological advantage, less of a population advantage, less of an IQ advantage (it was much more Mizrachi before massive high IQ Russian Ashkenazi immigration) and when the Arab world was much more united against it.
Israel’s main problems are that Ben Gvir and a number of other intellectually unimpressive mizrachim have actually managed to seize a degree of political power (something the country’s ashkenazi founders fought a long, valiant, losing battle to prevent happening) and - even more importantly - that the ultra orthodox situation now threatens to spiral fully out of control as their population continues to expand.
The gap in this thinking is where Americans are obligated to support Israel as the modern, moral, side of the conflict.
That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway. Growing anti-Israel sentiment is the consequence of rising antisemitism among whites and blacks (whose growth predates October 7 and has little to do with Israel), large scale immigration from the third world, particularly from Muslim countries in Europe and on the left third-worldist sentiment that always sides with the browner, weaker party.
To the question "Do you support the claim that the IDF, when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, that is, kill all its inhabitants?" 47% of all respondents responded in the affirmative.
If the population of Gaza were polled on October the 8th, 2023 on the same question (with regards to a conquering Arab army entering Israel), I wonder what they would have said? I suspect that the percentage would have been higher than 47%, and indeed on the previous day, almost every Israel Jewish civilian they encountered who did not successfully flee was either killed or captured to ransom for their own prisoners.
There is wisdom to the most famous adage about revenge. I am on record here as saying that I suspect Israel’s founding in its current location, fated as it was, is the most likely cause of its eventual undoing, which is likely to be far more brutal, more horrific and more violent than the conflict since 1947 so far.
But if an Israeli says “well, the Arabs would do the same or worse to us if they had the whip hand” he speaks the truth, and he does so without persuasive counter-argument. This is what people in this part of the world do. When you move to Arabia, when you become indigenous, when you believe it…well, thats why it’s called going native.
You need the malevolent AIs to also commit suicide for dubious reasons for this to be a Great Filter, unless alignment is so hilariously easy that there aren't any.
Only if the all powerful malevolent AI specifically wants to conquer the universe and therefore expands forever (or until it encounters resistance). What if it has other goals (programmed or organic), like some kind of anti-pollution or even conservation-type instincts where it doesn’t want to fill up the universe with mechanical metal garbage for no real reason other than maximizing energy production to make more energy? If you’re smart enough to relatively accurately simulate reality, you no longer need to explore and expand in the same way. A smart enough paperclip maximizer might simulate the paperclips and consider that sufficient.
2rafa
23d ago
the AI itself still counts as being an alien civilisation for Fermi Paradox purposes.
Only if we assume that AI not only shares the broad goals of human civilization (expansion, growth, conquest of space) but executes them effectively. Smart humans still makes mistakes. Smart ASI is still likely to make mistakes, and even if it does so much less frequently those mistakes are likely to be far greater in consequence.
Imagine a global benevolent ASI designed to achieve human flourishing that accidentally exterminates the human race. This sounds ridiculous but is perfectly possible and perhaps even likely on a long enough timeframe because of the extreme power such an ASI might possess. This is a closed loop solution to the Fermi paradox. An ASI might even develop a moribund or nihilistic tendency that leads to the above with no desire for recovery (by eg. cloning or remaking human civilization).
2rafa
23d ago
Superhuman AI is probably an inevitable consequence of the evolution of intelligence. There is a good chance the solution to the FERMI thing is staring us in the face / we’re about to find out.
2rafa
23d ago
I’m more sanguine about this stuff now, and not because it’s wrong. It’s because there are essentially an infinity of ways for super intelligent ASI to wipe out the human race - these are just the ways we can think of, and it’s going to be much smarter than us. If it happens, it’ll happen anyway, any safeguards will be redundant. It’s like trusting a bear with the possibility space for killing a fox or something - it can come up with a method (and a feasible one), but it’s one of a thousand ways a smart human could come up with.
2rafa
24d ago
I’m very flawed, in that I’m often arrogant, prone to making things up, dismissive. But I like to think that when the evidence is there, I can adapt, change my view. The evidence is here - even a simpleton can extrapolate. It’s easy to be scared but, when I am, I think of all the scientists and philosophers and inventors who one day imagined a moment like this, but who never got to see it. That is also a privilege, even if the outcome is a poor one.
2rafa
24d ago
I like my job, but I think it’s all about not living through it. I take solace in the things that I hope will still matter to me no matter what.
2rafa
24d ago
I'd either go for a run or play some vidya.
Running I can understand, but games? Even the best can put me to sleep if I’m actually tired.
Yes, I guess you’re right. I imagined there might be some kind of additional inefficiency, but probably not.
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