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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17hr ago
I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18hr ago
Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.
You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I think that at some point in the early 2000s, the EDM genre might have bifurcated into a much more mainstream subgenre ("Anthem Trance"?) and a myriad of niche ones that you couldn't really play at a club or beach party without scaring the hoes or whatever they call it these days.
Is your issue with the remix the specific choice of orchestration, or just that it seems all around more busy? I wouldn't call either version of the song you linked "not repetitive", insofar as there always has been trance/EDM with a more pronounced dramatic arc. There are a number of newer songs that I would consider to have similar vibes to yours: Christian Fischer - Watch the Dog (original mix), So Inagawa - Selfless State, or on the busy end of the spectrum, NAYUTA - Weisse Messer.
Some other trance songs I enjoy: busy with mainstreamish orchestration: Plutian - Sonagi, lawy - forget me not, marginal to the genre: Hooverphonic - Battersea. There is in fact a wealth of great trance songs with vocals, but I figured you might not be looking for those.
I think it's rather more common with younger generations, in all countries, though I do actually have a Japanese woman friend in her 40s who is a fairly dedicated competitive Splatoon player. I don't think I would have found out without several coincidences aligning, either, even though I had known her for a long time, given the Japanese thing where compartmentalising your life and following a default don't-ask-don't-tell policy about other compartments comes very easily.
(One of the coincidences resulted in meeting some of her Splatoon buddies in real life, and their commitment to not prying behind the online masks of their compartment was notable. I figure this might actually help with the gender ratio, considering the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls.)
You seem to be accepting the predominantly American framing of Hitler ("he was bad because he genocided the Jews, and then I guess there was also that whole WWII thing") as default truth, whereas in much of Europe it has been closer to "he was bad because he wanted German supremacy and started WWII, and then I guess there was also the whole Holocaust thing" all along. (The difference makes sense, since Europe bore the brunt of the WWII part of Hitler's record, while the Americans are under the heel of all various kinds of Zionists.) Where does the UK land between those poles?
Being anti-Hitler and pro-Hamas looks a lot more coherent in the latter frame. In fact, I think that, for example, in Germany, an interpretation like "Hitler would be pro-Israel in 2025" would catch on easily were it not for constant effort exerted by Transatlanticists and other establishment types to keep the blood debt alive and salient.
(See also the question whether Ukraine could be run by "Nazis" - reactions ranging from Americans seeing a Jewish-heritage president and concluding obviously no, to Russians seeing swastikas, German steel and people who want to violently move the Western European cultural sphere closer to Russia and concluding obviously yes)
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
So, does this somewhat surprising choice of an American pope count as another instance of successful meme magic?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
6d ago
We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts - even granting that the person in fact existed and the general story of Jesus-the-religious-leader is broadly accurate, the Gospels are the product of several iterations of sanewashing (by followers who did not need to believe anything more outlandish than the common sense of the era) and selection (as we now know of Christian writings that were nixed such as the fanfic-tier Infancy gospels).
In my own estimation, the likelihood that a historical Jesus actually existed seems pretty low, and the apparent scientific consensus for it fake - looking at the main arguments commonly cited (..."we don't have more evidence about other historical figures considered uncontroversial"? "Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact"?), they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
At the risk of contributing to a subthread that could have come straight from Reddit save for the edge, there's also Make Eastern Europe Soviet Again...
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs
Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
I suspect part of the issue here is that Trump actually has a pretty good carrot for Putin to end the war – sanctions, and frozen assets.
Weren't the vast majority of the frozen assets held by the Europeans, who didn't seem to be keen on playing along with any Trump-brokered deal?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
11d ago
Thanks for this post - it's an interesting collection of observations/opinions, though having experienced almost all the places on your list I do not agree with some of them. Regarding your Dresden guy, it seems very natural to me how he would end up with that preference. If you live in Dresden, you spend approximately your whole life having European baroque built at any possible budget, preserved in any state of (dis)repair, and restored anywhere on the spectrum from convincing to cheap China/Las Vegas themeparkery shoved down your throat.
To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context - if he wanted to score those points, by his background he would in fact more likely have been dissecting the details of whatever Rococo creamcake topping stucco you were marvelling at. Are you sure you weren't inadvertently rating him according to an American scorecard? I recall noticing that at my grad school (NE US), there was a clique of locals who were frequent renaissance faire/medieval reenactment festival goers and this slotted into a wider strategy of signalling sophistication to each other, while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15d ago
I'm with @RandomRanger's objection below - it's not quite clear to me what sort of offer he could make to the guards to incentivise all of this, and why they wouldn't have been caught. I think the better explanation would be somewhat more satisfying - Epstein did kill himself, but this was facilitated by "friends in high places" whose interest in his death aligned with his own. The friends would have coordinated a time with him some way or another, either bribed or pressured the guards to remove all eyes, and taken any necessary steps to ensure that this isn't investigated too thoroughly afterwards.
(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".
This is pretty funny in a modhat comment, considering we have an OP saying "Don't paraphrase unflatteringly."
It occurs to me to ask, when talking to a moderator, is it less antagonistic to say "you are an asshole" than to say "your users are assholes, and it is your fault"?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
In the hypothetical scenario you talk about, it sounds like you only ever considered voting or lawing your way into banning the fucking machine from acting according to their design, and you did not consider to vote or law your way out of letting the fucking machines into schools at all. Why? Alternatively, do schools have some mystical property that gradually converts their staff into fucking machines?
If what you are perceiving is anything close to consensus reality, then surely it should be possible to persuade other people to vote with you, either to kick the fucking machines out, or to shut down schools altogether, or to dedicate significant effort into figuring out if there is a way to change the mystical property mentioned earlier. Do other voters in your country agree about what is going on, but just strongly feel that on the balance it is imperative to continue forcing your kids into the care of fucking machines for 8 hours a day? Then you probably shouldn't want to coexist with them in a democracy, and the obvious solution for you is to legally exercise your still rather generous right to exit to go somewhere where you can live among the like-minded. Do they not see the f(ucking machine)nords like you do? Is there no way to legally make them see?
Nothing about your post suggests that you are interested in exploring serious alternatives and exhaustively searching the space of "political or legal solutions" - you sketch the failure of one fanciful "political or legal solution", declare that its expected failure means there are no viable ones at all, and use this to set up an emotional account of your hardships in coping with this conclusion while also trying to retest the boundaries of anti-fedposting enforcement. At that point, your situation really starts looking like you are reasoning backwards from a specific scenario you wish were real - either you live as part of a free, just and democratic USA that finally recognises the evil of fucking machines at schools and unites to gloriously smite them and restore propriety, or you go out in a blaze of violent resistance against the insanity of the world (or, well, spend your time fantasising about it on an internet forum vaguely hoping that somebody else will light the spark so that following it into the blaze will feel natural and effortless).
This is of course certainly a way to live, and sometimes the "my utopia or exit" approach yields surprising results in politics, but it's worth noting that the successful political movements of the last decades if not beyond generally did this in ways that involved plenty of compromise, "selling out" and delaying gratification. The acolytes of the US Left had to put their signatures on hiring many a competent white male CEO during their Long March through the Institutions, even from their point of view that might have well amounted to complicity in putting a Fucking Machine in charge of their kids (PoCs).
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18d ago
So why do you figure are even cities like Kharkiv, which are in glide bomb range, still habitable and only minimally damaged? Why are Ukrainian civilian casualties still many times lower than those in, say, Gaza, despite the much greater scale of the conflict? Why are other dams on the Dnipro still standing, and why do you figure Russia would feel the need to "muddy the waters" if they don't actually care about the perception of the Western public?
I think a US "withdrawal" coupled with an EU "entry" could curiously be the closest to an actual winning strategy for the Western bloc in this war.
From the start, the war has been defined by a curious dynamic where the fence-sitting audience was in a way more important than the combatants actually fighting. Russia does not want to fight against anything resembling the actual full industrial power of the EU and US; Ukraine wants more of it, and can't bear to lose it; meanwhile, the fence-sitters want Ukraine to win, but they don't actually want to suffer deprivations, and it would take a lot of moral outrage to get them to come to terms with having to cut back on the occasional cute latte or family vacation. As a consequence, Russia has to fight with several hands tied behind its back - it can't produce too many Gaza-like pictures of historical city cores reduced to rubble, maimed children and crying mothers, can't just sink every single ship entering or leaving Odessa, has to allow the lights to be on occasionally, and can't give the Germans a meltdown by just taking out the NPPs already. (And then, of course, there is the actual logistical support backbone that is on sovereign NATO territory and they can't risk touching at all.) To an extent, they can afford going on like this because Ukraine, too, has to hold back - its PR allowance is generous but not infinite, and so we have not seen Belgorod reduced to rubble or random high-rises in Moscow 9/11ed. I reckon even some matters of inanimate logistics are dominated by this - Russia has not knocked out the bridges across the Dnipro because the symbolism of destroying such a recognisable piece of civilian infra could also result in a watershed of Western support, and Ukraine has given up its attempts on the Crimean bridge because if it did blow successfully the Russians might figure Westerners would be less shocked and appalled if it blew up major bridges across the Dnipro in return.
If the West goes all in against Russia, this consideration is out. Of course in a few years, if the war stays conventional, the West would still win easily - but I would expect the immediate effect to actually be a swing in the favour of Russia, as they could immediately and trivially knock out all centralised power in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe and firebomb Ukrainian cities with no regard for optics, which would significantly hamper the main workhorse of Ukrainian resistance that is the ability to mass-produce FPV drones in nondescript basements and commercial spaces hidden in residential areas. The end effect would be a scouring of Ukraine and significant damage to everything on all sides, and depending on how the escalation spiral plays out around going nuclear the West might even still chicken out and settle before its industrial might is fully retooled towards war.
On the other hand, if the US makes a point of staying out, the dynamic from before more or less continues unchanged, except now Ukraine also has all of Europe's military heft on its side. Russia will be left wondering at every step whether they can really afford to do the militarily necessary, or it will produce pictures that will push the US public and Trump over the edge after all, and it is probably in fact true that even a few civilian casualties in Germany will piss off the US much more than the same casualties are doing in Ukraine. As a result, their fear will force them to continue their current piecemeal strategy of poking at the Ukrainian front, while Europe gradually cranks up its production and gains experience until eventually even the belated decision to firebomb Kiev would not really make a difference anymore.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
20d ago
In your eyes, is there any threshold that Trump could cross with his actions whereupon making a show of being opposed to them would no longer show one's "true colors as a rabid partisan"?
As I see it, the unpersoning thing is a valid, if silly and ill-thought-through, answer to the question of what the judiciary could do if its orders are ignored by someone too powerful to go after with the forces at its direct disposal. If you think it's an "rabid partisan" thing to consider, then, it seems that you think that someone who is not a partisan or not rabid should not be thinking about ways the judiciary could enforce its will in this case at all. Do you believe that Trump has a mandate to power uncircumscribed by the judiciary?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
24d ago
I hope you don't mind that I took this very nearly explicit "try and ID me" challenge as such! I quickly found an individual that seems to match the profile drawn by your opening post exceedingly well, but I can't see the associated photo as depicting the same person as the iPhone ad video you linked before. Is this just coincidence, my borderline faceblindness striking, or did you actually borrow someone else's biography for camouflage/misdirection?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
Right, I'm reasonably familiar with them but wasn't terribly impressed. They only really brought the "anyone can make a board" thing as an innovation, nothing about the posting system itself apart from some QoL improvements that had accumulated on altchans over the years. Compare to how 2ch->Futaba involved the addition of images.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
I wonder if 4chan getting hit by the bus will enable some innovation in the anonymous posting space (like how Futaba Channel/4chan's direct Japanese template first flowered as a replacement when 2ch/its text-only predecessor went down), or the whole concept was just waiting for its overdue demise. Any interesting alternatives to watch?
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28d ago
Well, it is, but how much do we know about the CO part of the equation? There seem to be often-cited figures for calories burned by various activities, but for example it seems quite obvious that whatever people poop out is not actually of zero caloric value, and that moreover the difference between, say, diarrhea and wombat poop cubes must be nontrivial, but this seems to never be addressed in those arguments.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
29d ago
If it turns out that our current approach to AI fizzles out at von-Neumann IQ levels, then all is good as historically, that is not sufficient intelligence to take over the world.
Well, we don't know. We ran this experiment with one von Neumann, or maybe a handful, but not with a datacenter full of von Neumanns running at 100x human speed. While we don't know if the quality of a single reasoner can be scaled far beyond what is humanly possible, with our understanding of the technology it is almost certain that the quantity will (as in, we can produce more copies more cheaply and reliably than we can produce copies of human geniuses), and within certain limits, so will the speed (insofar as we are still quite far from the theoretical limit of the speed at which current AI models could be executed, just using existing technology).
I always got the sense that LW was, and the AI alignment movement continues to be, stuck with the idealistic memeplex that '70s economics and classical AI had about the nature of intelligence and reasoning. The sense is that uncertainty and resource limitations are surely just a temporary hindrance that will disappear in the limit and can therefore simply be abstracted away, so you can get an adequate intuition for the dynamics of the "competing intelligences" game by looking at results like Aumann agreement.
It's not at all clear that this is the case; the load to model the actions of a 0.1% dumber competitor, or even just the consequences of the sort of mistakes a superintelligence could make in its superintelligent musings (to a sufficient degree of confidence to satisfy its superhuman risk aversion), may well outscale the advantages of being 0.1% more intelligent (whatever the linear measure of intelligence there is), to the point where there is nothing like a stable equilibrium that has the intellectually rich getting richer. Instead, as you are ahead, you have more to lose, and your 0.1% advantage does not protect you against serendipity or collusion or the possibility that one of those narrowly behind you gets lucky and pulls ahead, or simply exploits the concavity of your value functions to pull a "suicide bombing" on you, in the end forcing you to actually negotiate an artificial deadlock and uplift competitors that fall behind. Compare other examples of resource possession where in a naive model the resource seems like it would be reinvestable to obtain more of the same resource - why did the US not go FOOM among nations, or Bill Gates go FOOM among humans?
I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.
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