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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
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14hr ago
Well, but it's a stretch to go from a medical procedure being mandated under threat of losing your job to that motto. There are many procedures that match the motto better than mandatory vaccination, while being very common - like, for example, state railways, public schooling with civics classes, and mandatory ID.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16hr ago
· Edited 15hr ago
I mean, I'm aware (and I think most others who have what I would consider this reading are) how centrally it featured in the agenda of Hitler and other core Nazis from the beginning. The "natural consequence" argument is not "they seized power first and then serendipitously decided to kill the Jews", but "someone seizing this much power and agency is bound to produce a pile of corpses one way or another".
This amounts to an almost fully general cynicism against action and ambition - the assumption is that the world frustrates and obstructs you if you want to achieve anything significant, and if you are the sort of person whose reaction to being obstructed is "we should find a way to root out the obstructionists" rather than to give up, then you will likely eventually mass-murder someone while trying to immanentize your ideals, simply because even Little Timmy probably believes in something that, if taken seriously, would require murdering millions and all that is stopping him is that he is quick to give up. This is of course pretty antithetical to the Yankee ethos, so it would not catch on in "Optimate/Vaishya" (or what those Moldbug terms were) America.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17hr ago
· Edited 17hr ago
The old tension between the "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they killed Jews" and "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they seized power and brutally eliminated all dissent, the Jew-killing just came later as a natural consequence" views? Americans are often programmed to favour the former, but I don't think the latter is so rare or unreasonable. This is especially so because I am European, but perhaps some American lefties are in the same memespace now. In our eyes, the Nazis would still have had the Nazi essence even if they hypothetically had left the Jews alone. Comparing to such hypothetical versions of the SS and Gestapo is still hyperbolic, but not in the way or to the extent you say.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17hr ago
Is this a thing that is associated with fascist dictatorships more strongly than with other forms of government? Usually "if the government forces me to do things I don't want, that's basically fascism" is a leap of nomenclature more associates with young lefties.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Fair. I mean, I want more people who want them to win around! In this context, it just seemed more expedient to talk down Iconochasm who felt besieged/mocked by and snapped back at an outgroup that most likely was not involved in that exchange at all.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
The Motte is a tiny and obscure forum. Posts here are not going to normalise anything or materially affect the outcome of the culture war, even on the off chance that they persuade a significant number of posters here. In fact, assuming this is necessary to make it possible to have a reasonable debate here at all; if you treat this forum as a pulpit where posts must be judged for their effect on the course of history rather than their factual content, you just reproduce the grandstanding popularity contest dynamics of Xwitter and Reddit.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Your attempt to pull a UNO Reverse card here falls flat, because the implied accusation against your interlocutor of concern trolling is not credible. On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win, and therefore the parent poster's concern (that ICE's strategy might lead to just that) is more likely than not genuine. On the other hand, you are not even trying to convince anyone that you would be unhappy if the Democrats' access to power suffered due to any putative bad optics.
The parent might not favour your specific brand of Republican politics, especially if that brand is just "more power to God-Emperor Trump and his goons", but it seems very plausible that they are coming from a place that is more like "please, surely none of us want to go back to the Obama/Biden years, so stop doing things that will lead to that" than "I want you to stop doing things your party likes and start doing things my party likes". It might of course be that the former is not very compelling to you because you are one of the people who have memed themselves into valuing everything other than "whatever Trump does, or perhaps more of it" at minus infinity so there is simply no viable solution that involves any form of restraint, but if so that would make you unusual enough that you should state your value function explicitly rather than just shit-flinging because you assume your interlocutor knew this about you and wanted to troll.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
His arrest seems fine to me in isolation, but I'm pessimistic about any prospect for an even-handed underlying principle there. A general legal framework against nonconsensual communication would be nice, but are any major political actors willing to forfeit their ability to impose their spam on others in return for being left unmolested themselves? I, for one, would be happy if this guy, abortion clinic protesters, university lecture disruptors, Samsung executives who greenlight patching your smart fridge to display ads and Motte ban evaders all had to share a prison cell going forward.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
I'm on board with the object-level counterpart to the first three points, but only partially with the last one, because I think standards for federal agents (who are supposedly a selected group) about killing should be higher than standards for men in general. Likewise, with the bar story, if you replace the generic man at a bar with, I don't know, a social worker involved with prostitutes, I would absolutely consider him not being able to resist the temptation to rape a slag a signal in favour of "male prostitute counselors are vicious opportunistic rapists".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
When criminals commit a robbery, and police accidentally shoot and kill civilians, the robbers get charged with those murders too for creating the conditions in which they happened.
Yeah, that always struck me as stupid tough-on-crime porn that creates wrong incentives too. It's not like the people who do messy robberies have the executive function or maybe even just the value function (would you not just think caught = it's over in the US?) to be influenced by this additional threat, but for the police it would just strip away incentives to pursue even low-hanging fruit as far as proportionality or care for bystanders is concerned. US police already looks spectacularly unprofessional compared to other first-world countries; I'm familiar enough with all the structural arguments about their job being uniquely hard, but it seems to me that forcing them to shape up has never really been tried.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
From whom? I'm not surrounded by enough Americans in real life nowadays to actually get organic interactions about this stance, and on this forum I certainly get the sense that a lot of posters think there ought to be zero negative consequences for the agents. I wasn't sure if OP was in that class, which is why I responded asking for clarification (as should have been made clear by the very first sentence of my post).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
That's fine, if that's all that is being pointed out. OP was not clear about that, and either way it's pretty pointless to point it out here where approximately everyone participating in the discussion is in agreement about the basic facts of what happened.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died"
I'm arguing those things (and not particularly much more, except perhaps that ICE is just engaging in accelerationism rather than acting rationally towards their declared aim, because I actually am against illegal immigration). I'm surely more "blue" than "red", so there, you're wrong.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
He interfered with ICE arresting someone else. There's no self-defense for him to appeal to. He could have simply done nothing and be alive today. It was his choice to involve himself in an arrest that set in motion the events that lead to his death.
The putative self-defense argument is for ICE, not him. There is no law that says police can just shoot you if you annoy or obstruct them; either they justify their choice to kill him by arguing that he was an active threat to their safety and they acted in self-defense, or this was a summary execution (definitionally, because it was not preemptively sanctioned by the legal system).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
I'm having some trouble discerning what exactly it is you are arguing for here. That there should be no negative consequences for the ICE officers who killed him? That it is a good thing that he died? That the circumstance that he was killed should not make people update in the direction of a negative opinion of ICE, their mission, or the way they are implementing it? These are all different assertions, and a post that only amounts to a nebulous "boo Pretti, and boo all of the people who say yay Pretti too" does not do a particularly good job of defending any single one of them unless all you are doing is playing the Ethnic Tension game.
However antisocial or stupid he was seems irrelevant to the immediate charge which got so many people (including, seemingly, ones who are otherwise sympathetic to ICE and police shootings) riled up about the case, which is that his killing was unambiguously unnecessary for the safety of the ICE officers who did it. Whether this charge is actually true can be debated separately, with no reference to Pretti's character or past actions. If it is in fact false, his character doesn't matter anyway because you have as much of a right to self-defense against Mother Theresa as you have against Hitler. If it is true, I wish you would be more explicit about the actual contours of any right to performing summary executions you want to grant ICE if the target is a sufficiently bad person.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
Yeah, these are both Xwitter posts shouting copypasta into the void? The point I was making is that this sort of troll farm activity is expected and sensible; the person nitpicking your post in some local newspaper comment section being from a troll farm is not. However, the latter is the setting in which people like throwing around bot/troll farm accusations the most.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
But, if we accept the premise that most migrants are not being personally sheltered by white progressive Democrats in Minnesota, why would white progressive Democrats in Minnesota fearing ICE solve the problem of large-scale migration? There is no clear mechanism by which the Democrats being afraid would translate into fewer immigrants, unless it's actually fear on the level of "ICE will find me in my house and kill me if they determine that I did not support ICE enough", and I doubt I need to argue that turning the US into an ICE-glorifying North Korea would be throwing a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
If indeed the mechanism by which white progressive Democrats implement and safeguard the immigration pipeline is saying "ew" at people who want to do something about it (and, perhaps, by extension voting and turning up to the odd protest), then inducing any fear that falls short of fear to do the aforementioned things seems highly counterproductive, because people generally hate being afraid and want to get rid of sources of fear, and contrary to what a red-blooded conservative might think most white progressive Democrats do not in fact already commit 100% of what they could theoretically give to migrant-maxxing.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
It makes a lot more economical sense that troll farms would be active on a maximum-reach platform like Twitter, and is a lot more plausible that they would repost (possibly with minor alterations) shovel-loads of cookie-cutter "viral" content, than the idea that they would produce bespoke comments and engage with people in a complex way that requires solid command of English in comment sections and niche forums. However, these accusations are almost always flung in "close quarters" by people who are exasperated that someone specifically disagreed with something they said, not at faceless Twitter accounts retweeting Indian link farm pages into the void.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
11d ago
Yes, this is a good point. It's a strange recurrent piece of internet psychology that people have a real aversion to believing in organic disagreement. Normie comment sections are replete with improbable accusations of Russian or Chinese payrolling; and even 4chan has traditionally conducted arguments by asserting that all disagreeing posts are made by a single person (even when this is at odds with post cooldown timers) or more recently that they are organised by a Discord cabal targeting the thread. Maybe this is the modus tollens of the democratic feeling that numbers and diversity make right: if you are convinced a view is illegitimate, you conclude that it can't be espoused by a large and diverse set of people.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
Well, first of all thanks for choosing to not offer examples of political movements you think fit the bill; that would almost certainly just have turned your post into a crude "DAE my outgroup is deluded" exercise that made some readers feel fuzzy and others mad, while this way we can discuss the proposition for its own value in the abstract.
That being said, I don't agree with your thesis. The part where you say
The people pushing the Experience Machine would promote the idea that the life you live inside the machine is actually reality; it's everyone else who is living a lie.
bears a lot of load. It may be philosophically/poetically appealing to draw comparisons between ideological frameworks/theories and a putative machine that literally puts artificial data into the user's brain's input stream and tries to pass it for real, but at least at the current level of ideological framework technology, the political Grand Theories, which both with an outside and an inside view are purporting to explain how actual, material, top-level reality functions, are not at all similar to a Matrix-style spinal tap, which explicitly aims to input something that is self-evidently not reality; and nobody would have trouble distinguishing them. What would a convergence of the two classes of technology have to look like, for your argument to work?
A Matrix that is more like ideology would have to be some sort of neurolinguistic programming scifi device, where hearing the right sequence of words can force your brain to non-consensually perform essentially arbitrary computations. Perhaps 4chan's Tulpamancers are moving in that direction, but otherwise this is not where the smart money in the building-the-Experience-Machine business is right now. Even with a streamlined process to induce full blown schizophrenic psychotic breaks where you move to TulpaTown, there would be no obvious way to reframe the process as bringing you closer to reality.
An ideology that is more like the Matrix would maybe look like They Live-style goggles that purport to reveal the true face/hidden aspects of reality to the wearer. The problem there is a chicken-egg issue: anyone peddling such goggles would have to convince the potential user that they actually reveal reality before they agree to wear them. This puts strong constraints on the shape of the Experience that can actually be conveyed: you can't just take people straight to TulpaTown (or anything else too obviously different from the world they saw with bare eyes) and you can't even really make them happy in obvious ways, since political movements only really recruit through misery. This looks quite different from the original thought experiment where people are straight up asked "would you accept fake good qualia to replace all your real bad ones", and I suspect political movements wouldn't be very successful if they even just made the implicit deal that is a very weak form of this ("would you accept the fake good qualium of purpose to replace your real bad one of your life being pointless") explicit. Every step further away from reality would also come with additional friction, in the same way in which every failed prophecy of a doomsday cult whittles down its follower base.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
America's jilted bitches still have a handful of trump cards up their sleeves too, like e.g. repealing the DMCA-equivalent legislation that they were treaty-compelled to pass, or, as was suggested elsewhere in the thread, giving China access to ASML's crown jewels. If the rest of the world stops honouring American copyright, what can they do? Build a great firewall of their own to stop the jailbreaks and pirate sites from washing back in, thus actually surrendering the soft power playing field to China?
Especially when there are existing issues with Chinese influence and espionage (not that China did Venezuela much good). It's a bit of a rock and hard place.
Does anyone outside of their Asian periphery actually have a problem with Chinese influence and espionage other than that it makes the Americans really unhappy?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
The "IP theft" thing seems like a forced/propagandistic framing of something that only really amounts to "they are different from us", because it's using the non-central fallacy to associate a nearly universal among humans moral principle (no taking someone else's exhaustible goods) with something quite different and more narrowly distributed (no copying ideas).
Going down this route just will result in us relitigating multiple decades of standard internet piracy arguments, but you need to acknowledge that at least "the notion of intellectual property is fake and gay corporate propaganda that Western culture was successfully brainwashed into believing" is at least a view that exists and therefore nonchalantly using it as an argument that Chinese society is "morally bankrupt" is a form of petitio principii.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19d ago
Well, whether it is actually growing is what is yet to be established.
If both sides feel that they must "fight fire with fire," it's easy to envision the situation spinning out of control.
It sure is easy, but that just sounds like an indictment of us here. This community and its predecessors have been in the business of Envisioning various happenings of the sort for as long as we have been around. The lesson to learn for the internet culture war commentator is that the sheeple can remain asleep for longer than you can remain solvent (in testosterone needed to be excited for a paroxysm of political violence).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19d ago
So, how big or significant is this group? "Got quote-tweeted by the outgroup and caused a wave of outrage" is not a good measure of relevance, and all Wikipedia has to offer is that it once got nominated for some award (that I haven't heard of). It's not like the other side doesn't have self-published clickwhores who fantasize about political violence to give their audience warm fuzzies.
My point is just that "mandatory medical procedure" does not code "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" to a greater degree than other things which are very common, so unless all these other things are also signs of fascist dictatorship, to whatever extent "mandatory medical procedure" signals fascist dictatorship at least does not factor through any similarity between it and "Everything in the State(...)".
The connection to Trump is downstream from the discussion that preceded it: @birb_cromble was trying to argue that Trump is not closer to fascism than his American predecessors on the basis that Biden before him imposed mandatory medical procedures, which he presumably sees as a very fascist thing to do (more fascist than any of @guy's examples). I argue contra this in the direction that mandatory medical procedures are not actually all that fascist, and hence @guy's examples about Trump can't be flatly dismissed with something to the effect of "Biden was very fascist so none of this should even rise to the point of consideration".
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