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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
2d ago
Or put it this way - Trump chickened out of tariffs that would have been far less damaging to him than 10,000 American military deaths in a full or even partial invasion. Why would he TACO the former but not the latter?
Seems like a good opportunity to test the theory that Israel has a unique grip on him (directly, or indirectly by way of having a grip on his handlers/the top of the USG apparatus).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
The idea that the human ancestral environment was like this always seems like a mere just-so story to me. It seems sensible in our setting to believe that those who live in a state of nature outside of the reach of civilisation will behave in this way, because this is what we observe about people who live like that, but people who live outside of civilisation in the modern world are not a representative sample, and could easily have been selected for the sort of rapist anarchic tendencies you describe.
An explanation that requires much less in the way of assumptions about male/female relations in the age of Grug is that in a slightly more violent, slightly more anarchic society, the same guy who is an asshole to you is more likely to be good at being an asshole for you, in a setting where being an asshole is a good way to win competitions for limited resources. That would also explain the anecdotal evidence that women from slightly more violent and anarchic modern societies like Russia, the Levant or just about anywhere in Africa show a more pronounced preference for "bad boys" who may also be violent to them, over nice guys who will be continuously sweet and wont to get beaten up and robbed by the "bad boys" in those countries. In fact, Ireland as of 20 years ago probably also belongs in that list?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Sorry for the late response! I had a lot going on and it kind of fell by the wayside.
Gamelan is very nice. There's a few regional types extant in Indonesia; Balinese and Javanese are the major traditions. The one you posted (and the one that seems to have gotten popular among Western listeners) is the Balinese style, which I suppose is understandable since Bali was the first Indonesian island to be developed for international travellers, and it is fantastic - but I would actually say the Javanese style is the more elegant and delicate of the two.
I see! I was vaguely aware there were different styles, but never succeeded at finding good videos where you could actually see the players play.
My first introduction to Gamelan actually came from a 1993 video game soundtrack, which had several Gamelan-inspired songs going with its more generally Austronesian flavour.
How was Singapore, by the way?
Long story, but I enjoyed it a lot. Contra what everyone had been saying, there was easily enough to do for 10 days, even though I didn't manage to get out to Malaysia (I got close to one day but Shuttle Tebrau tickets sold out just as I was fighting the website, and the locals scared me off the other route by talking about 3h immigration queues). The food was great, highlights included climbing into the Labrador AMTB battery (was that your rec originally? It seems like it was open to tourists for a while but now it's just a ruin sitting in a patch of forest) and the NUS Gamelan club's weekly jam session (seemingly open to all). At the Asian Civilisations Museum, they had a special exhibit on games. I hyperfixated on the design of the Cherki cards I saw there and went on a wild goose chase to try to get a set, only to find that nobody in SG sold them anymore; in the end one of the local friends ordered it online from an Indonesian supplier.
As long as it's sufficiently local and hasn't been globalised in the same way that anime has (Nintendo would not be an acceptable answer either), Japanoposting is fine. I see your Shiina Ringo, and raise you another obscure Japanese artist called JAGATARA, here's an exceptionally funky album from that band I particularly enjoy.
Shiina Ringo is not particularly obscure, just popular with a very different crowd from the usual ACG circuit. The JAGATARA album is fun, listening to it now. You should check out other Shiina Ringo songs (ex., ex.) as well, if you don't know them yet.
Mainland Chinese media
I unfortunately didn't vibe with the RE-TROS songs you linked, but they remind me a little bit of this German techno(?) album.
In terms of more mainstream mainland songs I know, there's a lot of TV singing competition vocal fireworks stuff some of which is pretty good, e.g. Zhou Shen. For a while, Youtube would also shove songs by Lexie Liu in my face every so often, some of which are relatively catchy. The one I linked stayed in my memory for its fairly authentic use of European crazy girl woo as source material.
A decent Taiwanese song that was linked to me. I also enjoy this A-Mei depresso.
Lastly, let me shill this Hungarian duo I got to see live a while back. They self-identify as jazz, but it's really more some sort of jazzy techno with vaguely Japanese melodic influences.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
The "signalling" perspective is not really that helpful. Sure, people get into things to signal, whether it's becoming goth to hit on hot goth chicks or going fishing to make your red-tribey dad like you. What's the evidence that (1) this does not result in them actually liking the thing, and finding ways of deriving enjoyment from it qua itself? I suspect that (2) this is how most people actually come to like things most of the time, and (3) there is a pronounced tendency to only see the signalling component of preferences where we don't like the signalling component. (This is so obnoxiously outgroupy! Surely they're just doing this on purpose to shit on the ingroup!)
I know, because whenever I see this for US red tribe culture (like gratuitously mentioning your gun collection or (non-furbaby) dogs), my gut instinct is also to cringe and interpret it as "pure signalling", in much the same way. Like, who would actually enjoy hunting? "Dude, I camped in the woods for three days during the hurricane the other day, just me and my .22, and shot a 400 pound buck! Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" - "I'm not sure I get what's so fun about that" - "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely got pretty grimey, haha." with the snide implication being "But me and my big masculine outdoorsy self had a great time." If any of our red-tribe denizens think this interpretation is ridiculous and sneering, good; consider the possibility that that is also how Infinite Jest enjoyers feel about the above dismissal.
(...and I say this as someone who hasn't read any of these books. The most stereotypically pomo piece of literature I've made it through was House of Leaves, out of a sense of duty to xkcd, and I found it silly.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
I don't know, my view from Europe is that our elites are so firmly in the US pocket that European non-participation on the US side in the case of a serious showdown of systems is still inconceivable. Europeans are mildly unhappy with Trump, but are only so in a way in which a battered wife is unhappy with her husband's temporary alcoholised and violent state but will still tell the cops to piss off if they come to investigate reports that he sexually abuses their child.
If they were willing to break with the US for real, maybe they would follow the Cory Doctorow suggestion and return US threats with threats to cancel DMCA analogues that were imposed on them, or perhaps even remember that their stance on the Ukraine war and EU eastward expansion in general are largely cuckoldry for US interests supported only by the barest minimum of rationalising wordslop to let the "politically well-informed" crowd maintain their self-image as such. In such a setting, the Greenland thing just serves as a reminder of who is boss, and/or anchoring device to make future humiliations seem relatively more generous in comparison.
(I expect that in a couple of years it will come out that Spain did everything it could to proactively help with the Iran campaign behind closed doors, while maintaining the public posture with restricting the usage of their airspace, as it turned out Germany did with Iraq.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I think this is not a very compelling thought experiment, because you clearly just took the present American dynamic about intelligence and imagined a world in which a completely analogous set of norms and hangups is in place involving height, without a believable story of how those dynamics would have developed over time or what internal logic makes them tick. Would height=morality world have gone through a phase where an elite of tall people was taken to have an unquestionable divine right to rule, with cautionary tales about the failures of countries where shorties called the shots? What sort of developments did it take for this phase to end? Height and intelligence are different in a great many other ways, like how your height is immediately apparent from afar, objectively measurable with little effort, doesn't change greatly based on environment or transient effects like substance consumption, and so on. Would this not make dissimulation about height much harder, and possibly (if the possible gains are sufficiently high) result in a development of a whole slew of social and physical technology to conceal height?
For a similar reason, I've been finding just about every "isekai where sociosexual behaviour of men and women is reversed" manga out there trite and disappointing. An allegory between things that are not actually similar, asking you to essentially imagine if the dissimilar thing were the same as your target subject in every way that matters for your argument but like its real self otherwise, does not add information for those who don't already agree with you - "imagine if actually pedophilia were legal and having sex with over-16s were illegal and taboo" "imagine if actually Crowleyan magick were real, and science and technology accepted to be woo" "imagine if actually communist societies were rich and successful and capitalism discredited for not being able to provide for the people's basic needs" etc.
Apart from faceh's argument below, it also seems to me that if a lawmaker passes a law because it seems like a good idea at the time, the times change and now it no longer seems like a good idea, then it should be up to the lawmaker to revoke that law. If you want this to be up to the courts, you at least ought to force the lawmaker to bundle each law with some text describing the contingent circumstances that the law is meant for, rather than simply letting the court and the commenting public engage in motivated guessing ("surely they said this because there was a frontier to settle and they needed bodies, which is no longer the case"/"surely they said this because they wanted to found a country to rule and represent everyone living in its confines, which is just as applicable today").
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