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ArjinFerman

Tinfoil Gigachad

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joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC
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User ID: 626

ArjinFerman

Tinfoil Gigachad

2 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:31:45 UTC

					

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User ID: 626

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I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year.

As someone who argued for "wait two weeks", I actually agree with this, but the core ingredient is that it has to be a deliberate choice, and that the speaker willingly puts his credibility on the line. I still owe @fmac, who couldn't quite believe I was being serious, a reply, but this is part of why I said what I said in that post. Exposing yourself to the possibility of having your credibility shot is the mechanism by which just going with your gut ends up yielding superior results to meticulously calculating all the Bayesian probabilities.

People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.

Sure, only making predictions on things you are confident making predictions on is a bit of a cheat, this is why I always rolled my eyes at Scott's annual "calibrating" predictions. That said, there does need to be some space for "I honestly haven't a clue". There are cases where I can see a clear signal in the vibes (see "tides turning on trans" or "Elon Musk is cooked"), but there are others where I try to listen to the vibes, and all I can hear is noise, and I think it would be unwise to stake a claim under those circumstances.

Well, like I told Netstack, I think the end result would end up coming off much more whiny than interesting, but I'll keep it in mind.

I don't know how you would arrive to that conclusion

It's simple - the "entry points" through which these ideas are spreading through society are centralized in the hands of a relative few. Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.

Believe it or not I'm fairly neutral on the valance of ideas spreading through mind control, and am perfectly capable of admitting my tribe is doing it's fair share of that, but you're probably guessing right about what kind of experiences about what kind of people shaped my views on the matter. So I don't know if I'll be writing any effortposts on this, pretty sure it will come off as whinging about past culture war drama, I think I'd prefer to finish the Psycho Pass review.

β€œThe damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).

I don't have an issue with everything else you said (other than it being a theory, rather than evidence), but I don't know how to process the last decade or so of my life, without "mind control works" being somewhere in the top conclusions. It's not just women, though. Men have proven themselves to be at least as susceptible.

Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable.

What's the evidence? Progressives used to like bringing up Valium and the like, but drug consumption among women has, if anything, only gone up since.

Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?

Because society requires active maintenance and not just mere inertia, and propaganda based around sowing resentment towards specific subgroups is quite effective.

can you give sine examples?

I don't see how that's related to anything, but sure, here you go.

What for? He'll intercept any missiles with his bare hands. Or feet, as it were.

Pro- one country and anti- another is one thing, I thought we were talking about why it's dangerous to antagonize one country, but somehow safer to antagonize a bigger and better armed one.

People exclaiming loudly about how dangerous this is while also campaigning for increasing escalation in Ukraine against an actual nuclear adversary are not serious people.

I'm not that plugged in to the American commentary, so I might have missed something, but are there people doing that? I agree it sounds rather schizophrenic.

It's not what he said. He said "that argument wouldn't hold against any other group".

We literally just came off a decade-long purge of "ironic" offensive humor precisely on the grounds that the irony may be used to cover up a true sentiment, so what's so outlandish about the claim that "end whiteness" actually means "end whiteness", and the general condemnation of "all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry" not carrying much weight when people notice they only seem to come out when it's the author's own ethnic group that's under attack, and also that he comes from a school of thought holding it's impossible to be racist against whites?

but I think there are certain rights that enlightened humans converge upon as being worthy of protection.

Can you name a few? Are you sure you're not going to make the word "enlightened" carry all the weight, and make it conveniently align with your moral principles?

Unless I'm missing something big, your argument for why human rights are different from borders feels like actually arguing for why they're the same, particularly the mechanism for "convergence".

I guess I have to take the L on not realizing fairy tales are a different genre from parables and other forms of didactic folklore, but apart from the supernatural element, the shoe does seem to fit right in, in particular "usually with simplistic moral themes designed to teach people life lessons".

There's nothing wrong with them, but they shouldn't be the basis for government decision-making.

I disagree, every policy will reflect some moral principles, and these (including liberalism itself) often come from religious texts.

Kinda wish he put up his notes and sources in the video.

Which university professors and medical doctors willingly participated in...

I just want the regime to change,

Well, my first instinct is to chastise you for your recklessness, but if I'm being honest this is not much different than how I feel about Europe, so fair enough, especially if you have ties to the place.

Iran has significant brain drain as education levels are high and emigration's unrestricted. I see between 3 and 5 million emigrants for a population of 80 million 2010 and ~90 million today. I'd guestimate emigration up a bit,

No total regime collapse? No neighboring countries swooping in to setup a puppet state? No civil war? No refugee wave?

Iran was able to build many impressive things in-house, so I don't doubt there are many educated people there, but I distinctly remember people telling me the same thing about Syria, to the point where "doctors and engineers" became a meme.

All things being equal, I'd expect some sort of secular military government, where the army puts down the IRGC.

That sounds like the good ending, but I have my doubts. "Khamenei is a religious fanatic who hates us for irrational religious reasons, and so cannot be reasoned with" is a common argument, but I can't help but notice that Putin is secular, Hussein was secular, Gaddafi was secular, Assad was secular, and none of them had better luck being seen as rational people to be reasoned with. So unless it's possible to impose a puppet regime of the US and/or Israel, I don't think a secular military government will be accepted by them any more than the theocratic one is, and so, we'll see a descent into chaos. Hope I'm wrong.

I resigned myself to the soft bigotry of low expectations, and came to accept the need for some affirmative action of dissenting views. That said, I agree his influence here is rather negative as shitposts beget shitposts.

I don't disagree with the first statement, but it feels like moving the goalposts. About the second one: I don't know if you can call a society consisting of two groups that hate each other a "cohesive" one, even if there's high cohesion within the subgroups.

Guy writes fun short story.

Who? Where?

... and decrease even as it's GDP is increasing. This is true especially if we assume the liberal theories on the benefits of free trade and immigration are correct.

Everything. GDP, murder rate, life expectancy, etc.

I can give you the murder rate, what do the rest have to do with social cohesion?

MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives

Don't forget the brain surgeries.

But over the last couple of days

I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days? His posts were full of bait and snark from the day I first saw him post here. If anything, this one is way more high-effort than his average comment (though sadly most of the effort is going into trolling).

Most Iranians are not religious and do not support the government, which sics foreign militias to oppress them. I speak Persian and have spent much time among them. Every couple of years there are massive riots, with thousands of deaths, as people fight back.

That only makes the question of what do you think is going to happen, once the regime is overthrown, all the more important. Presumably it being able to hold on to power, despite the majority not supporting it, is a sign of a lack of unifying goals among the resistance.

Why? Political ideologies, liberalism the prime example among them, are fairy tales.