BinaryHobo
10mo ago
you shouldn't be surprised when others seek to use force to challenge that hegemony
I'm not, it's exactly what I expect. Then again, I would expect it even if the US had an additional justification, such is the nature of power. Additionally I expect the rules based system to only last as long as US hegemony does.
But I also expect what comes next to be considered much worse, regardless of how much people talk now about America being evil. Despite getting to set the rules (and, admittedly, getting quite a few carve outs in its favor), Pax Americana has been good for basically everyone, save possibly the Russian elite.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
The new usage, where it's used to refer to individuals even when their gender is known (see what I did there?) is both awkward and frequently unclear.
Could you expand a little on this? I'm not sure how, once you've accepted the singular they for a person of unknown gender or perhaps an abstract person without gender, applying it to different individuals causes more ambiguity.
Or is it just that this previously rage edge-case is becoming more common which is leading to problems?
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
So the 'rules based order' has nothing to do with coherent, consistent law, it's just an excuse to do whatever NATO wants.
I mean sorta? Might makes right never went away, but the most powerful country generally wants a rules based system most of the time, and so one exists. With just enough exceptions and post hoc rationalization to prevent two nuclear armed powers from coming to direct conflict.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
The phrase "If you were to identify as non-binary, you'd be less likely to get hate-crime charges." is not legal advice. It's a statement about the legal system that is likely true (and might be useful for an accused person to know).
What someone else takes from that is not necessarily the lawyer's business.
BinaryHobo
6d ago
That's a fairly reasonable explanation, but there's been a ton of things that started out as "a thing dumb college kids are doing" and ended up in the wider world. Some take longer than others.
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
It gets a bit more complicated if you want autoupdates.
Put pacman -Syu in a cron job?
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity.
Maybe "traditional christianity" is doing some work here that I'm unaware of, but I'm going to assume that the text of the bible is still in play.
The bible does absolutely give us at least two classes of sin, with different punishments. For most sinners, once they have committed a sin, they are given a chance to repent and be forgiven. But for those that blaspheme against the holy spirit, this option is cut off (Matthew 12:31). It would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of the words of Christ here that at least 1 sin is viewed more harshly by the divine.
BinaryHobo
3mo ago
I see a difference in that. But that's not what we're talking about here, considering natural born citizenship generally passes from parents to children, not only to people that are born in a place. Being born in a place automatically conferring citizenship is kind of a new world thing, most places in the old world don't do that (source)
In the current world, you can be a citizen of a place you've never been to already. And you can be incapable of giving up that citizenship. And that doesn't seem to be an exception for you, so I'm not sure why it's an important difference here.
The relevant difference is:
- Place your family has history
- Place your family doesn't have history
If that's not the relevant difference, I think you need to start carving out some exemptions to your policy.
BinaryHobo
4mo ago
This is a fair response, but taking the accelerationist argument seriously for a sec, the argument is generally that it will be better for your granddaughter, not your daughter.
Which, y'know, choosing between the two is one hell of a sophie's choice level decision, but I don't think it can be dismissed off hand that easily if what you value is the safety/comfort of your decedents. I feel like a better counterargument is that there's a decent chance we never get advanced civilization up and running again if the whole thing collapses.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
That doesn't automatically mean they can be used for any reason and still be legitimate.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
As opposed to what the current pope is pushing?
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?
Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.
From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.
Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
I think that's only because you're only focused on Marx's side of theory.
Smith's theory is about the labor the buyer is willing to expend to obtain something. To quote the wealth of nations:
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.
Which, I think is the other half that you're missing.
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
I don’t think any of that disagrees with my point.
My point was that you can't objectively say that policing failed without consulting the local community, unlike with healthcare. Which makes the comparison you were trying to make really squishy and not very useful.
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
Do we accept that the point is to make it as safe and happy as possible, understanding that it may not be very safe and happy in an absolute sense?
This is a fair distinction, as there is no absolute safety or happiness. Utopia isn't coming, regardless of what the police do.
Yes, the point would be to make the community as safe and as happy as possible. And if the community as a whole doesn't feel that the police are doing that, then they've failed regardless of how many regulations they followed.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
inventing machines is much easier than altering human biology.
Then imagine a small machine that repairs telomeres or something.
If you want to be taken seriously, you first need to provide some evidence not that such experiments might be run, but rather that they might succeed.
I really don't. If you go look at the thread, TheDag advanced that part of the argument. I'm not responsible for other people's arguments.
I just got annoyed by The_Nybbler's bad shutdown that amounted to "It hasn't happened, yet", which is a completely useless statement during a conversation about future tech, both true by definition but not relevant. I might add, that you also engaged in during your first response to me.
I have advanced plausible interpretations, but I've reached my limit, as I'm not the one that advanced this argument, and so I have no real idea what they were thinking.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
So what technology has increased the maximum lifetime of humans so far?
It hasn't. But technology obviously can fundamentally change human limitations. Before the airplane, what technology had increased the maximum flight distance of humans?
than why should we think that future technology will do so?
Because there are several examples of biological immortality in nature (just as there are several examples of flight in nature), and we've gotten pretty good at stealing ideas from evolution. We know it's possible for a biological organism to be immortal.
Now, will the first couple thousand people who try such a genetic alteration probably get some weird form of super-cancer? Sure. Probably. But if we're talking of the elite of the elite pursuing their goals, that's not that many bodies. Elites have thrown way more bodies away in pursuit of mere land.
all concrete science so far indicates that maximum human lifespan is really quite a persistent and narrow range.
Without running crazy genetic experiments, sure. Do you have an argument for why we will never run those experiments in the future?
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200".
You can't take the average argument for a position, you have to engage with the argument in play, because it only takes one good argument for something to be right. I can generate several hundred bad arguments for any position you want right now.
Even further, that wasn't the case this time. TheDag explicitly called out a technology change.
Quoting them:
I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever...
And when talking about what science is coming, they don't talk about past medical advances, but reference AI, presumably some sort of intelligence explosion.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
So the argument is that, as the aristocracy moves to extracting wealth from human capital, the propaganda naturally moves towards methods designed to protect that human capital (and the related heavy infrastructure)?
That seems plausible on the face of it. I guess, does anyone know if we see more glorification of war in official propaganda from resource-extraction based economies (e.g. petro-states, countries that make most of their money on diamonds, etc)?
Even if so, that seems to conflict with the recent rise in pro-war messaging we've seen over the Ukraine issue, though. The left has been pretty gung-ho on it, as well as being the political side that generally benefits from higher quality human capital.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Sure, but that's not... exactly my point.
Why is the current aristocracy behaving differently than past ones?
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Perhaps some of them have power as thought leaders or community leaders. Perhaps people who are thought leaders or community leaders think they might get bought off with sinecures if they can produce some big riots.
This seems unlikely. To the extend that older women have sway in urban minority communities (especially as community leaders), it tends to be through church involvement. The folks that get DEI jobs generally aren't the type that attend church services regularly, so far as I'm aware.
It seems more likely that there were already tensions in these communities, and a spark set them off and people just rioted. Humans do this occasionally under certain circumstances. The DEI consultants seem more like outside opportunists, capitalizing on the riots and internal progressive (mostly white) status games.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
That doesn't seem like something the US didn't like. It seems like something the US didn't care too much about, and Pakistan was useful during the Cold War.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
The problem with woke movies these days isn't necessarily the wokeness, it's that the writers seem to think the wokeness was enough and they forget to make the movie good.
Hasn't that been discussed as intentional? That is to say, if the movie is good, you might catch a bunch of people who just like good movies with your signaling. If the movie is bad, the only reason to signal that you like it is to endorse the message.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
Isn't that every bank?
I don't want to comment on the neo-pronouns, but I have a question about this bit:
The singular they goes back to at least the 1300s, at least according to Merriam-Webster. What kind of pedigree are you looking for in your english words above and beyond a word usage that literally predates modern english? Is it just that the same word can refer to singular and plural? Does the word "deer" bother you in the same way?
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