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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
18d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
19d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d 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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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d 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.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
You know another outlier minority? /pol/ users. They are surely less than 10% of the population of the internet, but have a well over 0.5% rate of engaging in heat-over-light, culture warring and other conversational behaviour that degrades the quality of any forum way below what we are aiming for here. What do you say if we ban them on sight?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
I am actually not particularly interested in collecting trite propaganda, but I'm confident I could find a lot of material denigrating white men in like 30 minutes of looking. However, this is not rDrama, and so posting those would not be any better than what the parent poster did.
murder data
I did a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations with some 2019 data I found, and given that the male:female murder rate seems to be about 10:1 in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men. Either way, we're talking about tail events; even for black men, the same calculation said that fewer than 0.5% ever murdered even under generous assumptions (and most of those are probably locked up or socially segregated in a way that makes this hardly relevant for day-to-day choice of neighbours and interaction partners).
Be careful of proving too much: very similar figures tend to turn up as lower bounds of how much more likely men are to be rapists (based on sex offender registrations, inference from victim counts, etc.). If you think that a 0.5% percentage of murderers in one visible demographic is grounds to agitate for its complete removal from public life in a country - on a rationalist-adjacent forum, rather than the screeching pit of public politics, no less! - then you will have a hard time rejecting the bulk of hardcore feminist stances on principle, which generally does not seem to be an outcome right-wingers like. If the monkey's paw offers that you get to treat blacks as murderers but have to accept that men will be treated as rapists, do you take the deal? On that matter, it's probably not that hard to find some other correlate of being murderous in America that's at least as good as "is black". If such a correlate is found, do you support the removal from society of everyone who meets it?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
This transparently looks like you are feigning an academic interest for how the memes are coming along in order to show us your list of motivational propaganda for your position. Why be so coy about it?
A single incident in a country of hundreds of millions is not data nor does it form a basis for consistent policy, no matter how good the memes made of it are. The other side will have no shortage of incidents they could do the same with - remember the wave of wanton violence against Sikhs after 9/11 by Whites who couldn't or didn't care for the difference? (Here's one, and the perpetrator looks pretty pasty even though I'm sure some polheads will get hung up on the Hispanic surname)
At least the people of the /pol/ thread you linked had some awareness that they were being manipulated, though they had to couch it as "I'm as racist as you, I just hate even more groups" for acceptance.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Ah. Yeah, Sichuanese food seems rather overrepresented (I'd intuitively chalk it up to it having become the default hotpot flavour, and hotpot being the default social activity - the same "hotpotty" spice mix is also exceedingly good at masking bad flavours, compared to most other Chinese flavouring templates).
And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.
Breakfast food is pretty standardised in every culture though. Go to the UK and complain about twenty different places all serving sausages and baked beans.
In the week I spent around Shanghai most recently, as far as I can remember I didn't touch anything Sichuan at all, without actively trying to - from what I can still recall, the things I had were either local to the areas I went (neither Shanghai's blanched seafoods, nor the fungal wastes of Anhui, nor the kind of rich pickle stuff in the middle of the two were at all similar to what you describe) or some variant or another of Northern (copious amounts of yang rou chuanr, a pretty good "Lanzhou hong shao" noodle bowl, the ongoing fad that is biangbiangmian).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.
China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu (...)
Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
The implied proposition that raw/fresh plant-based food = healthy seems suspect to me. Several human populations historically either had no such foods available to them at all, or only seasonally (note that the overwhelming majority of our edible plants are, in evolutionary terms, very recent creations); it would be strange, and does not seem apparent from real-world evidence, if their health suffered for it.
If you are not dead set on raw vegetables, I found it quite easy everywhere I went in Japan to find teishoku places that would give you half a dozen small plates of stewed or pickled mystery sansai with your rice and tiny portion of grilled fish.
For your other examples - Thailand/SEA are among the few regions that have a long-standing native traditions of eating copious amounts of raw or minimally-cooked vegetables, Korea is just extremely far up America's memetic colon (while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat), and if you ask for raw vegetables in China people (locals and me both) will still look at you like you have a death wish.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
· Edited 24d ago
I'm playing (have just defeated the owlmoth thing
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the early areas somewhat lack distinctive personality
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the whole trap/consumable mechanic, so far, feels insufficiently impactful to waste precious middle-aged neurons on developing muscle memory for
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BGMs feel more ambient, while HK had some songs that stuck in my mind
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I agree with the sentiment below that many enemies are pointlessly damage-spongey (looking at you, red ant tribe).
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So far the driving plot feels too similar to HK, what with
the collapsing bug kingdom suffering from a mind control zombie plague that the protagonist has some mysterious existential connection to .
On the other hand, things that I feel are an improvement over the predecessor:
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The graphics and level design feel more polished. HK had some areas that looked pretty monotonous.
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Every boss fight so far has been great: they are unique, inventive, and the difficulty feels fair. HK suffered from the problem that a lot of the bosses were just finicky - you needed to learn the exact timing and hitboxes for their attacks so that you could get out of the way and strike back, but the mechanic would often just be "dodge this massive club swing by between 1 and 4 pixels and then run towards the enemy to get in a hit".
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It has doubled down on HK's strength of having an endearingly quirky NPC cast with funny fantasy-language exclamations and songs announcing their presence.
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I found the FOMO (what if some other set of powerups would have trivialised this boss?) of HK's knapsack-based badge/upgrade system to be more annoying than anything. The new one has less of that (though that might just be because so far I have found hardly any optional powerups that feel meaningful).
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I'm obviously not far enough in yet, but the narration of the main story feels more tight.
One thing worth noting is that I tried to play the game with my recently-acquired Switch controller (having been a keyboard gamer all my life, but finally folding because of some games requiring omnidirectional movement/aiming), but went back to keyboard after the first few bosses which immediately gave me a massive power spike. I am not sure the controls were optimised for gamepads.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
25d ago
· Edited 25d ago
In an actual scenario where they start a civil war and win, why would the Reds not rule with a jackboot? Even if they assure you, as a member of the Blue team, that they will not, as they try to persuade you to put down that big red button, why would you believe them?
I wouldn't trust any belligerent in the culture war to be magnanimous in victory on the best day, and here we are in a subthread where we're actually talking about the blog by some redtriber who is very openly fantasising about jackboots and lots of other redtribers are assuring us that he is very important and influential.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
That's a fair response to @hydroacetylene's argument, but the "this goes against what our elders say about gender roles" argument against transgenderism is itself a rather weak one.
I think a stronger one is the following: transgenderism, in its common form as I understand it, is totalitarian and intrusive, because it demands that I rewrite my mental categories in a particular way. It is fairly clear that, from the point of view of the transgender activists, someone who perfectly abides by all etiquette demands (pronouns, social grouping/shunning, social expectations in line with the person's chosen identity) but internally continues to believe that the person is, for all purposes other than adherence to the preceding rules of etiquette, a member of their biological sex, is morally evil, and this pattern of thought is one that ought to be rectified even if there is no evidence that it will lead to any etiquette violations. This is intrusive and totalitarian, in a way that otherwise only religions are allowed to get away with (you can't just go to church on Sundays and say the prayers, you have to really believe, and there will be busybodies trying to figure out if you secretly don't and do their utmost to fix you); and as a price for being allowed to keep that power, liberal societies have severely circumscribed the power of religions in other ways (they are not allowed to threaten you into conversion, use your belief or lack thereof as a criterion in hiring, etc.).
None of these restrictions are being applied to transgenderism, and in fact acting outside of those restrictions is central to its existence as a movement! "Test if your professor secretly thinks that transwomen are men, and get him fired if it turns out to be the case" is praxis. This is not some tangential feature of religions, either - if one were to create a quick summary of what was bad about religion before our present framework of regulating them, "they perform intrusive tests to distinguish true believers from fakers and exclude the latter from society" will probably feature prominently in some form.
It sometimes seems to me that progressives have performed a horse-cart inversion regarding the relationship between biological sex and "gender roles", and typical-mind themselves to assume that everyone else must have constructed their categories likewise. The traditional gender role believer will think, "you are a man; therefore you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions", but the progressive instead sees something like "you must wear pants, wield violence and hide your emotions; therefore you are a man". The former is a statement of fact, followed by a statement of "socially constructed" expectations contingent on that fact; the latter looks like a statement of arbitrary socially constructed expectations, followed by a socially constructed label for that set of expectations. I don't care if you think that way, but realise that it is not standard!
As it happens, I am not particularly attached to gender roles myself; if a man wants to wear dresses and makeup and act like a caricature of a Victorian damsel, I am happy to let him. There are plenty of people who do things that are more aesthetically displeasing or outright harmful to those around them. However, I will continue to think of him as a man, and I will consider a demand not to, for whatever reason, to be as presumptuous and intrusive as a demand that I make myself believe that Brahma created the universe. Hindus are free to believe this; they are free to be sad that I don't believe it; and they are even within reason to demand that I will not walk up to them and yell in their face that Lord Brahma does not exist/is an aspect of Satan/is a minor god that my god would make mincemeat of. However, if they presumed to demand that I publicly affirm Brahma as the Lord Creator of the Universe, made employment contingent on the belief, or subjected me to tests to see if my polite silence during their rituals wasn't because I secretly thought it is all bollocks, I would feel in my right to gently remind them that last time someone did that to my people, in the end we sent them to build railways in Siberia or gave them a one-way limousine ride to a nondescript downtown basement.
(...and to be clear, the asymmetry that I view "transwomen are men" as a statement of fact while you view "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are men" both as statements of belief/social construction does not matter, insofar as the demands of transgenderism would be hardly less presumptuous if we both accepted your premise that gender is socially constructed. Long before Europe went secular, it successfully figured out rules that prevented believers from forcing beliefs on each other!)
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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