ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
If the current state of the international arms market is any indication, large, relatively respectable countries like the US and Russia will give them to smaller sketchier allied countries like Pakistan and Iran, those sketchier allied countries will then give them to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Lashkar-e-Taiba. So it might be pretty difficult to prevent. Also you have the problem of private firms in Europe and Asia selling them to rouge-ish nations like Lybia.
Look buddy, if Pastor McGee’s sermon ever causes me to have a late night premonition about the Whore of Babylon, it’s going to be a sweet wholesome REAL AMERICAN Jezebel harlot like Taylor Swift playing her, not some E-lectronic Celebrity from “California” who posts naked tik-toks on the OnlyFans.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I can’t tell if this supposed to be humorous or if it’s just genuinely delusional. No one who goes to a “pointy house in the sticks” has even heard of Aella. Her fans and her haters are both among the terminally online.
I made a rather uncontroversial (if snippy) assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley. Which is something that many many other conversations on here basically take as a matter of fact. Suddenly you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork to gish-gallop me with user survey statistics and bizarre and nonsensical arguments about Mormons. And now I am uncharitably accused of “sneering Bulvarism”.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Maybe not a 100 percent overlap on the Venn diagram, but certainly a very strong correlation. Frankly I don’t know why you are so perturbed by the idea that you feel the need attempt to employ such casuistry to push back against it.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
And? That’s completely orthogonal to the point I’m making. Joe Sixpack from Indiana didn’t hear about Mormon polygamy and then because of that decide to log on to the Motte and write a 2000 word essay about Bay Area rationalist polycules and what that says about Scott Alexander’s moral fibre and views of society. That’s clearly a very inside-baseball take from someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu.
We’ve already spent the last 250 years automating as many physical labor jobs as possible out of existence. The last 5000 years if you include domesticated animal labor. So what we’re left with are the 1 percent of physical labor jobs that are the absolute hardest or least cost-effective to automate. Whereas intellectual jobs are still pretty early on in the process, we only started automating those in the mid 1960s. So there’s a hell of a lot more low-hanging fruit to be picked even with fairly basic advancements in AI.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
So? Those aren’t the people making long winded analyses of polyamory and the efficacy or lack thereof on the Motte dot org.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Frankly, I don’t even think college students at liberal universities in most of the country would know what the hell you were talking about if you started going on about your polycule.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
@faceh @phailyoor It wasn’t done with AI, but one guy in Latvia already managed to effectively make an academy award winning box office success from his basement. It’s called Flow
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.
History didn’t end up going that way, partially because the federal government finally put its foot down, but the first five years of the civil rights era and the first five years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are almost beat for beat the same. You even had American equivalents of Republican and Unionist paramilitary groups forming. The main difference is that in Ireland the military rolled in to protect the old social order, not to impose the new one.
There’s a saying in war colleges that you don’t notice the successful counter insurgencies, because the successful ones deflate the causes of the insurgency before it breaks out into mass violence. The civil rights era was a successful counter-insurgency. And I think had the situation been handled differently by the federal government it could have very well exploded into a 30 year long bleeding ulcer like Northern Ireland did.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
The “mineral deal” is basically just a shuck that allows Trump to give Ukraine security guarantees in a way that he can plausibly sell to his own base. Zelensky was too much of an obstinate fool to see that and had to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way to getting what he wanted.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I would suspect criminality would be much lower regardless of genetic disposition, because generally if you want to get seriously in to crime, you have to actually know some criminals. The average suburban shut-in of any race probably isn’t going to have the resources necessary to join a street gang or become a drug trafficker.
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
The Motte doesn’t like unions because most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley where until recently individual employees had an unusually large amount of leverage. In five years when they’ve all been fired they will probably feel differently about the idea.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked.
One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Leftist handling of 'Oppressed groups', in which the oppression is centered and what the group actually believes/practices just doesn't really come up despite the fact they're some combination of borderline theocratic, hardline conservative and run contrary to woke culture.
Ironically both Israel and the Provisional IRA are good examples of this. Both are basically bog-standard 19th century ethnic nationalist movements that spent decades getting glazed by the left wing because they bothered to give the bare minimum of socialist lip-service. The difference is, the Provos never won (not completely anyway), so unlike Israel they never got the chance to reveal that their left wing commitments were a paper thin cover for their real goals. Whereas Israel has the misfortune of being a leftist bette noire due to their socialist apostasy. This apostasy is also why most of the left hates modern Russia so much.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people...
That actually was the usual didactic approach to the Holocaust in America in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. Portraying it as a more general crime against humanity. The number of deaths was often described as 10-12 million and it included Soviet POWs, homosexuals, religious and political dissidents like Jehovah’s Witnesses, other miscellaneous ethnic groups like the Romani people and Polish Slavs, Rhineland Germans of African ancestry, and the disabled. I don’t know exactly what the politics behind the shift was, but that approach fell out of favor in the last half of the 2010s and it started being described again as mainly a crime against European Jews.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
Given his difficult relationship with Ms. Swift I suspect that might be intentional.
ABigGuy4U
1mo ago
There is an idea of an @AvacadoPanic, something illusory. But there is no real him.
Fuentes, who I'm not sure if he was behind Ye's ideological evolution or was just there to cheer it on, seems to be recognizing the Right's strategy of relentlessly and exclusively appealing to low human capital is not gonna go anywhere good:
Special Agent Fuentes was more than happy to pal around with Kanye when his ridiculous cringe mental illness antics were making the far right look like a bunch of unserious clowns. Now when Kanye knuckles down and independently puts out an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda, Nick is suddenly hammering the “uhhh actually guys we have to distance ourselves from this, it’s making us look low status”. Even though Nick’s own low human capital has been making the far-right look low status for over half a decade.
I for one like your India-posting, I think it’s an interesting look at a topic that I don’t know much about. I’m referring to a lot of prior posts by other posters about caste discrimination in the context of Silicon Valley tech industry hiring that were an almost bi-monthly feature here for a long time.
More options
Context Copy link