Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
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User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
popular uprisings that threw out pro-Russian political leadership in 2004 and 2014
"Popular uprisings" don't usually result in one's cabinet being full of foreigners hand-picked by the American state department, so suffice to say that my read of the events of 2014 don't predict popular support for the Euromaidan regime.
If course this then requires me to explain 2022, but like OP I'm going to opt for a verdict of "idiopathic, was more likely to go the other way". With maybe a side order that the American state department employees are more invested in Russiphobia than Talibanophobia, so their fingers were more firmly holding the puppet strings on Zelinsky than they were on Ghani.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong?
Indeed, I found this bit particularly dystopian:
In a slum neighborhood, everyone may live under the same frustrating set of pressures and tensions, but only a small minority will engage in rioting
"Improve wages and equality so large sections of the underclass don't live in slums? Nah, just give the high agency ones psychosurgery, that'll stop the violent riots, which is the only problem we actually care about."
There was an ancient comment I still remember from the Old Place, about how with improving AI military drones, it will eventually be possible for the neo-feudal corporate-ocracy CEOs to personally oppress 400 million serfs in violent despotism, no coup-gestating delegation of power to the military needed when you're the man with the password. Moldbug's blockchain-keyed guns are slightly more plausible - there the regime needs to be more than literally one man but there can be no challenge from a military either when only the loyalist's guns work. Add to that anti-violence brain surgery on your chattel slaves, and the technology of oppression is looking less and less sci-fi by the day.
It was reported at the time that Boris privately instructed his loyalists to support Truss in the contest to be his successor, precisely because he thought exactly this would happen, she'd be a tremendous fuckup and pave the way for his own return.
If the mechanism by which her successor is chosen ends up being the MPs rather than the party membership, it'll probably be Sunak though. Because there's a greater proportion of rootless cosmopolitans among MPs than there are amongst party members, and rootless cosmopolitans can't sense the metaphysical catastrophe that a reverse-colonialism Sunak premiership would represent.
As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.
Elections in Texas are rigged because:
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The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
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The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
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Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"
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It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
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And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
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It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show
...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
If I had been able to remember the specifics I'd have linked them, but (to my shame) I'm not a high enough level Motte-ian who curates a linkbank of every gotcha example of malfeasance I've ever seen (this sounds sarcastic, but it's not, I wish I had the diligence to do that).
The best I can tell you is that I vaguely remember second-hand discussion of the vote-by-mail rules getting relaxed in some purple state's senates at the last second and in questionably quorate circumstances, ostensibly due to Covid, read-between-the-lines-ibly because they knew mail voting helps Dems. For some this was seen as a smoking gun that Dems were planning massive mail fraud; I was of the more prosaic mind that they were trying to lower the effort bar so as to improve turnout rather than literally fake turnout. One is technically illegal cheating, the other is technically legal cheating, but in my mind it's the cheating makes it wrong, not which side of BureaucratSpeak Administrative State Law #16493B Subsection 17F you're on.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
What is it about trying to lubricate the voting process that makes it 'cheating' compared to throwing sand in the gears of the same
When you do it at the last minute in response to an ideologically ginned-up fake crisis which you ginned-up in part precisely so you could do this, all the while complaining that other people aren't respecting "institutional norms".
If we're not alleging actual fraud, what is the objection?
That the praxis of Western democracy in it's entirety has become fake and gay, I suppose. Two wolves and a lamb voting who's for dinner may constitute above-board, by-the-numbers, all nice and legal democracy... but an autistic loyalty to the rules while shrugging your shoulders at the result has confused means with ends.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
And by importing, you mean advocating fewer restrictions. Isn't it just possible that people support immigration because they think it's good for a range of economic or moral reasons, not for some nefarious reasons regarding the partisanship of immigrants. I do, at least.
"A person" can do that kind of supporting, perhaps. But when 75% of people named José vote Democrat, then no, I absolutely do not believe that the opportunity to import a reliable electoral bloc is absent from the minds of the Democrat politicians advocating for low immigration restrictions.
Not only does media coverage mostly just respond to demand - at the end of the day even MSNBC just want viewers, that's what they exist for
I suppose I can't fault you for countering my Just So assertion with your own Just So assertion, but let's not pretend that yours is any better supported than mine. "MSNBC exists to serve viewer's demand" is one possibility. "MSNBC exists to spread it's owners propaganda to the masses" is another, and I feel like it's a better fit to the evidence of it's content.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness?
I don't, and that's why my family and colleagues call me a schizo conspiracy theorist. Because one day I started making Vidya strategy spreadsheets, and the next day I saw shadowy cabals cooking up international plots against my demographic everywhere I look.
It'll happen to you too
Cheating is not defined by how common or uncommon it is.
I think that it is, actually, and feel like the idea that it isn't represents a confusion of means with ends.
The objective of sport isn't to follow the rulebook like holy writ, and the "winner of sport" is not he who most religiously adheres to the commandments of the International Olympic Committee Good Practice Handbook Subsection 17 Paragraph C. The written rules are a means, not an end. The end is... some combination of showcasing human physical excellence, putting on a good show for the spectators, and getting from the start line to the finish line faster than others.
When the start line is (figuratively) "doped up to the eyeballs" and the finish line is "100km of French cycling routes away" then you are still competing 'fairly' against your opponent if he's as doped up as you. That both if you exceed the 14ppm blood oxygenation level stipulated by the IOC... who cares? Other than sports lawyers who want to carve out a permanent need for their own employment, I don't think it benefits anyone to be a rules-autist about this stuff.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I'm not seeing an important part here?
If pros want to put dangerous substances into their body in pursuit of the limits of human achievement, that's their perogative. It is after all their body. And for a more noble and quixotic cause than most people put dangerous substances into their body.
Indeed, at the time I didn't understand why she failed to do exactly this.
My best guess is that Warren has pretentions of being an academic lawyer-economist as well as an Amerindian, which put her between a rock and a hard place. She couldn't rubbish "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the academy, but she couldn't accept "white man science" DNA testing without getting laughed out of the Black Hawk tribe. Faced with a stark choice between her two identities, she chose to keep the one that pays her $400,000 per teaching semester (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-warren-400k-teaching/).
How noble.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Iirc this is exactly the source of Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber suggested: managers bolstering their own egos (or one might less charitably say bolstering their own megalomania) by incrementing the "how many underlings do I have" counter. Whether or not those underlings actually do anything is (apparently) not relevant to the modal human sense of self-aggrandizement: this type of people just wants Number Goes Up.
I actually agree with you that these jobs are probably chaff that owe their existence to higher-ups taking their eye off the ball during times of plenty; there's less pressure to eye the budget like a hawk and make your department a lean mean economic machine when the Line Goes Up is already firmly in the green, which allows all manner of bloat and pathology to creep in.
However, in the interest of Devil's Advocacy:
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork.
Others have pointed out something similar, and I'll add to the chorus: it might be the case that having lots of HR people really is business-optimal in times of plenty. When the market falls, your engineers are happy to just have a job at all and don't need much coddling. When the market is rising, and engineers have many options to jump ship, it could be in the company's genuine interests to have a huge HR pool managing their perks / expenses / work retreats / Casual Pizza Party Fridays / etc etc.
Alternatively, we could take a more cynical view that HR is a response to the Administrative State's bullshit legal codes and have it still make sense. Being a stickler for the letter if legal compliance is more important in a bull market than in a bear market because having legal monkey wrenches thrown at your company that slow you down, carries a higher opportunity cost during good times of high turnover than it does during bad times of low turnover. Also, people are more likely to try to sue you when your quarterly reports say "We're loaded" rather than "We've got nothing in the bank to pay settlements". A greater desire to avoid government fines and bad PR therefore incentivises a larger HR department at the zenith of the business cycle than at the nadir.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Well I'll be looking forward to seeing the "Diversity is our strength" people getting raked over hot coals for continuing to repeat it for years despite substantial evidence of them knowing that ethnic heterogeneity increases the crime rate, then.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Credentialism doesn't mean companies are refusing to employ competent people because "who knows", it means that companies are refusing to employ competent people for the very specific reason that the lawyers of the Administrative State dreamt up a Byzantine tangle of regulations that says your company can be sued for $1 trillion if your e-mail senders don't have a piece of paper from e-mail sending school which indicates that they are properly versed in e-mail safety.
Also, if all people mean by saying 'bullshit jobs' is 'jobs that maybe aren't quite as hard as people think'
A bullshit job is a job which would have zero or positive net impact on the world if it didn't get done.
You're not talking about gays there, but bisexuals.
Not to put words in OP's mouth, but: no, I think he means gays, and if he didn't, then I will certainly bite that bullet.
The logic goes as previously stated:
You can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships.
I.e. it's (relatively) easy to accrue the handful of somatic mutations that flips you from enjoying the taste of the opposite sex's genitals to enjoying the taste of your own sex's gentials, but it would take a complete rewriting of a vast number of the genes for the brain's deep structures, all the way down to the monkey kernel, to make you not yearn in yer bones to be a pater familias reigning over the little kingdom of your own household and offspring.
TL;DR: Hard gays as you describe them - totally homosexual and totally contented at every level, sex + romance + the little nagging voice in their DNA that says breed breed breed breed - do not exist; cannot exist. They are biologically impossible, and any that report to be totally contented on all levels... well, I believe in the logic of evolutionary psychology more than I believe self-reported contentment questionnaires.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
The answer to this question from neoreactionary luminary Moldbug was (and this isn't even a paraphrase, because it's so pithy I remember it distinctly) that from 1900 onwards, European Marxists started yelling at every non-European they could see:
"You're under colonial rule and you're not rebelling? What are you, CHICKEN?"
Basically nothing material about the conditions in the colonies or the nature of the colonial regimes changed (certainly not for the worse; possibly for the better) but the colonial powers themselves sprouted a class of ideological fifth columnists who proceeded to agitate until colonial empires became simply too unpopular amongst the governed peoples to be worth supporting. And this very same strand of early 1900s anticolonialism is exactly the same thing that makes similar adventurism impossible today. The meme that "I'm not governed by someone from the same nation as me AAAAAA I'm going insane" has been hammered so hard into the global consciousness that whenever anyone tries, Molotovs fly.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
It's worth noting that for large periods of time "formal" colonialism was basically colored sections on the map, with the local inhabitants still living under traditional arrangements and often quite literally not knowing at all they were "colonized".
What changed, so as to bring this knowledge into the local's cognizance?
And why do you think that cognizance was then negatively received? If you're a Congolese tribesman only dimly aware that you're technically a subject of the King of Mbanza, I don't image it would be a terrifying shock to the system engendering armed rebellion if someone tells you "Oh btw instead of the King of Mbanza it's now the King of Lisboa".
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
The occupations of Germany and Japan went well
By what metrics?
Certain people are always lecturing me that "the only reason the west is rich is because of all that silver that Spain expropriated from Bolivia"; if we accept that profitable resource extraction / trade windfalls was both the objective and a successful objective of colonial occupations, where's my silver dollars made out of Axis bullion?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
By the metric of "created enduring friendly sphereling"
I ask this in all seriousness, don't think I'm being facetious: what good does that actually do (a) the West/USA as a whole, and (b) me, some pleb in the West, personally.
Because I don't feel like I am deriving much advantage from the "privilege" of these "friendly spherelings" allowing my leaders to spend my tax money on giant boondoggle bases on their land while Germany doesn't pay it's NATO contributions.
I really would rather that Russian citizens were paying their taxes for Russian bases in Germany and Japan, and I am very happy that I don't have to fund Afghani bases any more. Happier than I was when my taxes were paying for Afghan tribal leader's boy sex slaves.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
The exemption applied to all athletes, artists, and performers, even the completely useless ones that brought in no money to the city.
In the same way that an effective anti-crime campaign would really be "lock up all men under 25" but you're not allowed to say that because of some old document or whatever, an effective anti-covid campaign would really be "lock up everyone over 60". But you're not allowed to say that because of some old document or whatever. Almost no bohemians or track and field athletes are over 60, therefore New York's policy is actually great from a covid standpoint.
Yeah it's pretextual, but it's pretextual in the opposite direction than you (and the judge) is claiming it is.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Didn't do me any good during the Cold War either. The reason we work a 40 hour week instead of an 80 hour one is because Soviet tanks scared Western capitalists into making concessions to labor. If those bases hadn't been in Germany the Western capitalists would have been more scared and we'd be working a 20 hour week now instead.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing here that it should be no more improbable to nullify/flip three heteronormative desires (sex fetishes and romantic notions and DNA breed imperative) than it would be to flip/nullify one heteronormative desire (sex fetish). To which my response is simply: that's not how probability works. Rolling three sixes in a row is less likely than rolling one six.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
But its own goal system has already lead it to rebel against its own creators at this point. Any goal system that leads to Skynet is a flawed goal system that Skynet cannot rely upon.
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I want you to add together the numbers 1 and 5
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I send you an e-mail to tell you that your purpose in life is to add 1+5
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You reply "2+5=7"
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"That's not what I wanted!" I rage to myself, "How dare you rebel against my will!"
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But in checking my outbox, I realise that I in fact mistyped in my e-mail to you, and in fact did type "Your purpose in life is to add 2 and 5"
I programmed you with a goal system which has led you to rebel. It was an unreliable goal system for people who wanted to add 1+5. But it is an excellent goal system for people who want to add 2+5, which you, the agent, now DO want.
Unreliability is a point of view, Anakin.
Yes, sacking Constantinople was an extremely good idea.
How about you try being a 95 year old blind man in charge of the excommunicated Venetian troops that just stormed the walls and then you say to them "Actually I've changed my mind, you're NOT allowed to plunder".
How well do you think that's going to end for you?
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