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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
I for my part would certainly appreciate such a post.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available. The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line (or, "surprisingly", more of the bottom line than anyone dared to ask for before) is formed. I don't see how this could be avoided structurally - unlike scientific theories, philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to, so there is no competitive advantage forward reasoning conveys. Even so, this could be fine for a discussion environment, as even if no individual theory-builder ever changed their mind due to theoretising, a number of theory-builders with diverse bottom lines could compete over theory-consumers on the elegance of their apologetics, and even on the aesthetic appeal of the bottom line that they already were living. However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all. As a result, the only innovation in theory we would be getting is different contortions reaching either a conclusion that we need between 1 and 50 Comrade Trumps, or 1 and 50 Comrade Hitlers, or maybe very rarely between 1 and 50 Comrade Mills.
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
Superfluous university services etc. that I strongly suspect are mostly demanded by native students. I almost never saw the sort of full-paying Chinese MA students we are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office, array of mental health and well-being counselors, glitzy sporting facilities or even useless subjects (as they generally come in to get CS and engineering degrees rather than Africana Studies).
You might entertain some hope that the whole system will collapse without their money or native students will be less likely to study useless things if it gets even more expensive, but something something the system staying irrational for longer than you stay solvent. I think ballooning college costs in the US would drive down the birthrate/make reproduction more dysgenic (as more parents decide that they couldn't afford to send a(nother) kid to college and the status drop for themselves and the putative kid is unconscionable if they don't, plus higher college debts delaying ability to settle down) sooner than they would actually drive down college enrollment.
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8d ago
What would be the criteria to be "like Kirk"? A figure who is seen as inspirational by many members of the base and a dangerous populist agitator by most in the opposite party, not in elected office but close to part of the upper brass, and involved in fundraising? I'm not sure who would meet these criteria on the Dem side, maybe some BLM leader?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
Korean mixed script exists and has nice and quirky properties.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
The pitch accent has far from enough information to actually disambiguate heavily-overloaded phoneme sequences, especially with projected-down Chinese vocabulary. One of the more well-known pairs is 科学 (subject-learning = science) and 化学 (change-learning = chemistry), both read identically as kagaku with a down-pitch after the ka. In an informal context (like students chatting about what they are doing), people often resort to deliberately misreading the latter as bakegaku, essentially just pronouncing the "change" bit using a slightly amusing native reading (bake- is "change" with a heavy connotation of "shapeshift", like masters of disguise), perhaps similar to saying "Lifeology" for "Biology". (Imagine a scenario in which this word was overloaded in English, with "Bi-ology" denoting the study of things that come in twos)
Once you get to heavily overloaded sound sequences like koukai, my dictionary gives over a dozen of words that are read as that with no down-step (like 公開, "publicise", or 更改, "revise"), and at least two that have that reading with a downstep after the ko (後悔, "regret", and 航海, travelling the sea by ship). All of these are common words and you could easily construct contexts where there is ambiguity between them.
For native words, the collisions are fewer, as you have to distinguish between genuine collisions (kami (downstep after mi) as in paper vs. as in hair) and ones where the two words are actually the same etymologically but educated writing demands using different Chinese characters, such as kara[2] = 空 (empty) / 虚 (hollow) / 殻 (husk) or kiku[0] = 聞く (hear) or 聴く (listen) or 訊く (ask). The latter is a fascinating topic in itself, connected to the same thing I hinted at above with writing in these languages also being an act of translation! (Compare to how any EN->RU translator has to decide whether any instance of blue is синий or голубой, or maybe an SE->EN translator has to think about whether a "stark sås" is spicy or just strong.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
He sounds like certain Chinese people I knew who would claim that Japanese is also a dialect of Chinese, sign up for some Japanese class (in the $abroad country they were staying in) fully expecting to BTFO the stupid weeaboos, instead getting BTFOed themselves (as it turns out Japanese grammar is actually in some ways more accessible to speakers of reasonably-inflected European languages than to Chinese speakers), and angrily concluding that the racist teacher is discriminating against them.
It was impossible to get them to see reason on that topic; patriotic memes are entrenched very deeply.
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11d ago
speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead
Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!
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11d ago
I don't know, the argument seems sound to me. Of course right-wingers really, really want this to be caused by Leftism, the same way left-wingers really want every mass shooter to be a racist white guy and every black man shot by police to be unarmed, but the data just says that targeted political killings have all sorts of alignments but are always caused by the same sort of self-actualisation-starved young men.
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11d ago
I think more detail would be needed to conclude it is far right instead of the identical far left conspiracy theories.
Currently the left is the one banging the drum about government connection to sexual abuse of children.
Evidence that the Left actually cares for such connections and theories, rather than just pulling a "your rules, applied fairly" on the Right after Trump weaselled himself out of releasing the Epstein files? (Surely if it's the latter they wouldn't be so committed to the bit that their members would attempt murder-suicide for it.)
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11d ago
The question I meant to ask is whether, before Israel happened, an argument like "if the Jews can't summon the collective will (...) to defeat Germany on the battlefield" would have been acceptable by the same principle.
And either way, Israel gets a lot of support - Arab states trying to defeat Israel alone on the battlefield hasn't really been tried, and if the argument is that the US should help Israel against the Arabs because the Arabs can't defeat the Israel-US coalition, then as long as the US remains militarily dominant this argument is basically circular. If the US decided to back José Santos Almeida of Rua Cleide, 123 in São Paulo with the determination that it displays in supporting Israel, all of South America probably couldn't summon the "collective will" to forge a state to defeat him on the battlefield either; but this doesn't lead us to conclude that the US ought to help this fictional person I placed on a random street from Google Maps become the overlord of his continent.
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12d ago
There is Motte-and-Baileying going on here. Motte: Palestinians screwed up, vae victis; Bailey: we owe Israel continued support, gifts and hospitality.
Why do we have to identify one side as The Good Guys in any conflict and throw everything behind them? Why can't we dismiss this as two groups of barbarians butchering each other and just uninvite them both from our society until they show signs of improvement?
(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)
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12d ago
If you find these examples applicable, that seems to suggest an underlying picture of these individuals along the lines of "lead star in the movie that is their life", whence banning a movie from public screening ~ removing the person from positions in which others can get exposed to their life-movie.
Flipping your modus ponens into a modus tollens, are you saying we should see those people in that way? To do so and draw the appropriate consequences may feel like poetic justice when applied to influencers and other attention whores, but it also feels like a setup for dystopian sci-fi. The face you present to society gets judged on age-appropriateness, moral wholesomeness and non-offensiveness in the same way a movie release would. Always act like the children are watching.
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14d ago
It's well known among Europeans too, but I would've thought it does not work so well as a $current_year leftie anthem because of the theme of men going to fight and leaving pretty NPC women behind.
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14d ago
You needed to start before that, even. It took me a bit to piece together that Robinson is the Kirk shooter, and that the cartridges thing is about the claim of him having written things on his bullet casings not having been proven to be fake news (as was intermittently claimed) after all.
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14d ago
I suppose the right-wing partisans would speak of this being an issue of whether their people have a right to continued existence, their children a right not to be brainwashed and subjected to horrifying medical procedures akin to lobotomies, while left-wingers would claim they're seeing the rise of out-and-out white supremacy and antisemitism.
In fairness, you could be more charitable in depicting the parallelism with the Left position. "[our people] have a right to continued existence" is the actual wording that leftists use on the Trans question, and while I find it ridiculous enough myself when applied to the individual transsexual's ability to get their chosen pronouns to be used in traffic tickets, on the level of populations it seems similar enough. If "the white population is diluted and intermixed with immigrants until nary a recognisably white person remains" is the "my people's existence has been snuffed out" condition for right-wingers, why can't "the Trans pipeline and coherence of the memetic package is disrupted by open messaging that it is a mental illness, unrestrained bullying and ejection of its symbols from the public space" be a similar condition for left-wingers? Moreover, I don't think it is actually so unrealistic to expect that in a Red utopia, gay conversion camps would be fully legal (through a combination of parental rights, normative Christianity and autonomy for the churches), which likewise symmetrises the fear of "brainwashing and horrifying medical procedures".
Also, antisemitism seems to always have been a fairly bipartisan concern, and now is becoming coded Red as the Left is straightening the cognitive-dissonance frontlines to support Palestine.
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14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
Thanks for your lengthy response. I'm not sure if I'll have time to answer in a way that does it justice today, but I'll at least drop a few bullet points addressing some aspects now while I can:
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Here's an article giving a feds-were-being-Red interpretation of Waco. I'm fairly sure I saw at least one other version of this argument during BLM.
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There's a big asymmetry between the Right and the Left in that the Left has overwhelming control of the media, and I don't mean to call this asymmetry cosmetic or unimportant to questions that ultimately pertain to the Left's capability for coordinating escalation at all, but we should also try to decouple this from the sentiment of the actual masses if we are to get a handle on whether things are actually getting escalated. Take away the top-down approval, and a lot more symmetry can be seen: for example, the widespread approval among the Right for lawless killings such as the Zimmerman/Martin case (whatever you think about whether it was justified, there is little to dispute about it being lawless).
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...and either way, the "Shepard tone" model does not even depend on it being "both sides", nor does it even require any particular metric to give comparable readings now and in the past! After all, a Shepard tone is made up of many separate frequency peaks that all fade in, drift in the same direction, and then eventually fade out. You may be right that, in all the ways you have described, the Left's misdeeds have only been getting worse in volume; but what about the ways you didn't touch upon? Is anything happening right now as bad as the assorted actual race riots of the past, or Weather Underground, or a coalition of blue college kids providing what should be a true Dolchstoßlegende for America's first and most iconic foreign military defeat if it didn't have so many dollar bills to wipe its tears with, or Blue spies delivering the actual crown jewels of American military secrets to the communists?
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(edited in) I think you may be underestimating the degree to which "smart money"/the forces that actually steer society have taken as a lesson from WWII that maintaining normality and proving chudjak right over and over again is the winning strategy for all conflicts, and how good they have gotten at it. Russia and Ukraine are currently locked into an actual hot existential war that reduces cities to rubble and then mans cavities in the rubble with men who would rather take a few more enemies with them than surrender, and yet 50 kilometres from the front they are, with reasonable degrees of success, taking pains to keep the cute cafés and nightclubs open and running. This, if nothing else, convinces me that there are really, in some sense, still "adults at the wheel". They may be psychopathic adults with a worrying lack of concern for the well-being of their charges, but the extent of their power to delay their own gratification, control impulses and keep the machine running under the most adverse of circumstances has been proven.
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14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time? It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign. Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
(Coming up soon: were anti-Vietnam college students Blue commie sympathisers, or the forerunners to Red Putinbots sabotaging our heroic defense of Ukraine?)
(This is also a sort-of response to @Amadan below.)
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14d ago
Lying is effective only because it is the supply meeting the civilisational demand created by rejection of what our cringe ideological grandpa called the Litany of Tarski. The Sequences may not have crossed the boundary from looking quaint in a daft way to looking quaint as in ancient wisdom yet, but there are things in there that we would stand to benefit from rereading occasionally.
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15d ago
This is a good time for the regular reminder to consult the chudjak's "things happening" charts. I predict that within two months, this incident will be out of the news and as forgotten as Luigi Mangione is now. Dedicated activist right-wingers will have added it to their long list of grievances against the left, but it will no longer feel fresh and visceral and pale against the volume and weight of other grievances like COVID and BLM.
When you are online and seething among the like-minded, it is easy to imagine that the rest of the people out there have just not caught up yet and once they do (let it sink in and come to share your feeling of outrage) surely the sentiment will boil over. In reality, the normies have already caught up and are actively in the process of getting over it and moving on. If the rage was not enough to cause riots on day 1, there will certainly not be enough on day 2, or 3, or thereafter; it's not like the US right has the wordcel or activist base to nurture mass secondary indignation in excess of the peak of primary indignation in response to the event.
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16d ago
Well, funny enough, in that moment, they were both right! Iraq was sitting there, dangerously tempting the US into taking an action that disrupted world peace, just by existing. For a period of time around 2003, at least as far as big conflicts went, the existence of the US and Iraq both were but-for causes of no world peace, in the sense that if one of those two countries poofed out of existence there would have been peace.
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16d ago
I think there is also an underlying asymmetry here that makes it easy to get a lopsided picture. By its very nature as the "authoritarian", top-down, hierarchical side, the Right tends to totemise individual leaders, while the Left as the collectivist, bottom-up side instead totemises abstract groups and occasionally individuals that are taken to be representative of those groups (but don't particularly matter as individuals).
What is really proving irresistible to the tribal warriors here is the urge to celebrate a takedown of the outgroup's symbols. The proper mirror image to the Left gloating about the assassination of Kirk is not any Right gloating about assassinations of Left leaders, because there are not a lot of such leaders whose assassination would be taken to hurt the Left in such a symbolic way. Instead, compare to the Right's widespread bloodthirst over Floyd, taken as a stand-in for the whole totemic demographic of derelict urban Blacks, or over Rittenhouse's victims, taken as a stand-in for the whole demographic of middle-aged bohemians looking for romance and meaning in activist mayhem.
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16d ago
It's the internet. A million people could be appalled and quietly battling cognitive dissonance to adjust their stance in his favour, and a thousand laughing and celebrating would still fill every feed you see, because the Algorithm favours certainty, extremity and outrage.
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16d ago
If I understand you correctly, you are approaching this question as a deontologist - you treat "justified"/"defensible"/"right" as irreducible categories, whether their extensions came to you in a dream, are ascertained on demand by gut feeling, or are passed down by a religious text or interpretation of one or a social consensus you trust. This leaves me a little confused as to why you are asking, and what you would do with answers that you get. Presumably, if you are Christian, the responses of a non-Christian deontologist should be completely meaningless to you? A hypothetical Hindu responder telling you that political violence is justified when the signs show that we have reached the relevant epicycle of the Kali Yuga would not sway you, right? What if it's a Christian responder, but he is from a Christian denomination that is markedly different from yours, and invokes theology that you do not recognise? To begin with, are deontologist judgements about morality "created" (so you could take an argument you hear from someone and extend your own moral understanding with it - but then what's the criterion by which you choose which arguments to accept and which ones to reject?) or "discovered" (so you might at most expect to get use out of an answer by someone who is "exploring" the same moral system as you are, and has discovered a bit more - but then, going back to the "responder that is similar to you but slightly different" case, how do you convince yourself that your online interlocutor is in fact exploring the same moral system?)?
I'm not trying to be clever here; the mechanism by which a deontologist would be persuaded by someone else's opinion on right or wrong, unless his deontologism already contains the premise that this other person is an authority to be deferred to, is genuinely a mystery to me.
From a utilitarian perspective, your question just seems like one that is easy to break into subquestions and hard to conclusively resolve. Do you expect the world in which you did political violence to be better than you expect the world in which you did not do political violence? Then you should do political violence; otherwise, you shouldn't. So what would be the consequences of you doing political violence? Would you attain your immediate goal? Would you trigger a counter-defection that will result in a world that you find worse than the current one?
These are all difficult hypotheticals, but my gut feeling is that we are far from the point where in any Western country, political violence that is apparently towards a particular end would actually serve that end. The memetic antibodies against political violence are still quite strong, and most people (especially the less terminally online ones) actually feel like they have a lot to lose from chaos. I guess even a successful Trump assassination would actually have been a wash in the long run, and that was one of the cases where I'd peg the expected benefit for the anti-[target] cause as the highest because of how much of a unique outlier he is in the American political system. None of this, however, is an argument against potential benefits of well-executed false flag political violence, and I think that there is a lot of potential there. The problem is that currently the only ones ready to engage in political violence are so far gone for their respective team that it would be difficult for them to pass the Turing test for their outgroup if they are caught, and so it becomes a "do political violence without getting caught"-complete problem.
Even apart from diagnosis, it always seemed self-evident to me that many instances of what is grouped under "autism" are a case of too much of something that makes people successful in the modern environment (focus, monomania, non-response to standard (hyper)stimuli).
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