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Butlerian

Not robot-ist just don't like 'em

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joined 2022 October 11 15:37:12 UTC

				

User ID: 1558

Butlerian

Not robot-ist just don't like 'em

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 11 15:37:12 UTC

					

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User ID: 1558

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:

  • The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades

  • The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent

  • 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 :^)"

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.

By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.

My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".

I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.

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.

So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).

Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?

I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.

In particular putting national pride above the lives of it's sailors seems like quite a tragedy for the families of those lost.

Question: do you think Ukraine should surrender to Russian demands immediately, or do you think that it should continue to lose its men at the front and lose its women (and therefore its next generation) to permanent refugee-vacation in glamorous Western Europe?

Because for one of those cases, you have no cause to be finger-wagging anyone else at placing national pride above human lives.

So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.

I always get ratio'd when I say this, but, well, that's what autism is for, to make me impervious to pro-Ukrainian social pressure.

To wit: have you considered perhaps that Ukraine is not embroiled in "full scale" war in Europe and is instead being subject to a limited and comparatively humane Special Military Operation? Y'know, like that one side keeps saying it is, but everyone just keeps disregarding in spite of mountains of circumstantial evidence (like this)?

This reasoning would be okay if treating the enemy as animals applied only to this specific enemy

I think not. The "drawbacks" that Halla identifies, "both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war" are SUPPOSED to impede your ability to wage war effectively. Because doing co-operate/co-operate on other-side humanisation is better than doing defect/defect on other-side humanisation. If Ukraine (and it's allies) defects and goes hell-for-leather dehumanisation, Russia is encouraged to do the same, which will lead to MORE damage to Ukrainian lives (via mistreatment of POWs, occupied civilians, etc) than if Ukraine hadn't started the dehumanisation spiral.

Indeed, "more dehumanisation please" is an ESPECIALLY dumb argument to make when it's Russia occupying Ukrainian land and not the other way around, lol. This is surely the time to ask for more clemency, not less?

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.

Because it’s a man’s fault if women his own age refused to date him when he was younger?

Well... yes? The implication is (both from a broad feminist narrative and in this specific case) that if you can't get dates from women your own age, this is because they can see the red flags of your unsavoury character. The solution is therefore to Be Better and self-improve until women your own age DO want to date you. The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.

t. Man dating a woman 13 years younger than him right now.

and is countered by point that Russia invaded Ukraine with the premeditated intention to set up filtration camps and start kidnapping, killing, and otherwise abusing pro-Western Ukrainians as a matter of policy

Well, (a) this isn't very charitable, given that Russia's stated aim is denazification and prevention of crimes against humanity against Russo-Ukrainians, and (b) even if all Ukrainian-US propaganda is true and Russia really is capping any Ukrainian who ever looked fondly at an EU / NATO flag... there is always more brutality to be had. Daring Russia to sink even lower by engaging in anti-Russian dehumanisation will not, I think, have the long-term salutary effect Halla thinks it will: any Ukrainian lives saved from acceleration in victory are likely to be more than counterbalanced by Ukrainian lives lost from the incrementally more brutal Russian counterreaction.

I wish we could all just agree that sex is biological and gender is a social role

But this is just begging the question, isn't it? It's like Byzantine Christian monothelitites saying "I wish we could all just agree that Jesus' nature is Man but his hypostasis is Divine". To even get into the hypostasis debate is to concede to your interlocutor's point.

The correct response to the Byzantine Christian monothelitites is "hypostasis is just some term you made up to try and make yourself sound smart and smuggle in a bunch of theological assumptions in by connotation, Jesus was just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be Divine by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'

You can probably see where I'm going with this but in the interest of plain speaking, the correct response to the gender theorists is "gender is just some term you made up to try and smuggle in a bunch of ideological assumptions in by connotation, Emerald Treespirit is just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be a woman by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'

There is no such thing as gender, the way you act is contingent on the hormones in your brain and the hormones in your brain are contingent on your chromosomes. A man acting weird is a man acting weird, not a man filling the social role of a woman (or being the Messiah).

I think sacrificing lives to defend a country's sovereignity against an invader is generally more excusable than sacrificing lives to a technical accident by not accepting aid

Why?

National sovereignty is just national pride writ large.

He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.

This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:

if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation

...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?

We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?

I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence

When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says

...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.

"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?

Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will,

I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".

"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.

This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.

If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".

Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.

Don't sanction the city, sanction the people. The city didn't delete texts, people did. Throw those people in jail

I said it with regards to a suggestion last month about making examples of gain-of-function researchers for Covid, and I'll say it again here: you can't fine people for fucking up on high-skills jobs, because if you do you'll never get competent applicants for those positions - they'll go study a discipline with a career path that doesn't carry a jail risk, instead. So then you'll only get incompetent applicants who didn't have the brains to switch to a less risky career, having incompetent people in the position is more dangerous than having criminal people in the position.

This sort of thing is one sphere of human activity where holding people responsible for their crimes is actively detrimental to the greater good.

Sorry, but the current (terrible) practice of punishing a faceless organisation is nevertheless the least terrible of all the options. Well, aside from encouraging voters to stop electing crooks, but no-one's cracked that problem since Pericles.

The rightoid conspiracy theorists are directionally correct, though, aren't they? "The elites want a future where blue collar people to eat bugs and live in pods" is a reasonable extrapolation of (a) the elite's climate doomerism, (b) spiralling (upwards) urban house prices, and (c) the Davos class' obvious contempt for the Western working class.

If Klaus Schwab and his more successful attendees don't want this future, it's only because they haven't played out their own beliefs far enough in their own heads, not because it's anathema to them. It will be their intent if it's not already; they just haven't game-planned that far. This is precisely why the rightoid memes are believed - because they're credible, because they're consistent with what we know about these people, because they're coherent with the visions of the future which they have stated publicly.

Trying to tar belief in these conspiracies as "embarrassing" is just shaming tactics, and you'll not "tut tut how gauche and low status" me out of them by making irrelevant points that Klaus Schwab himself is kind of a loser (to the extent that a man with a million dollar salary can be a loser). Yeah, he's not in the Illuminati, but his opinions are representative of the heads of government that come to his ski resort, who are.

I can see some similar parallels here. From Hatred towards the mother-state, lack of a unifying identity that is separate from the mother-state and fostering snakes in their own backyard.

Pakistan, Ukraine, Ireland... anyone else?

There's nothing strange about nations resisting invasion to anyone with a passing familiarity with history

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".

I did think Rishi reading "We give thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the son of God and etc. etc." was particularly farcical.

I guess it just feels like an extra notch in the subsumption of British particularism into the soup of globohomo when the Establishment doesn't respect the culture enough to even try to maintain the kayfabe. I mean, sure, I doubt Bojo's a sincere Christian at heart and him reading epistles would be rank hypocrisy, but even purely nominal Christianity is better than official Hinduism. With Rishi, you know it's just his mouth making sounds and the words are not believed. With Bojo, you'd merely strongly suspect it.

Much was made during the Trump years of "Why are you supporting this man who from his actions clearly doesn't give a shit about the white working class", and the answer was often "I can't get positive actions from any of the candidates, so I'll take the one that at least one pretends to care over the others who don't even bother with the pretense". Having a Hindu read homilies during the King's official pledge to protect the Christian spirit of Britain? That has to me the taste of a ceremony that didn't even pretend to care about the ancient mores of the sceptred isle.

It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.

But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.

And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.

So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?

Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.

As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.

How exactly do you know their political alignment and level of engagement?

It's an old canard, but I always thought it had unimpeachable logic:

The more time a person can spend powermodding on Reddit, the less likely it is that they have a job, and the less likely it is that they have a job, the more likely they are to be poor, and the more likely they are to be poor, the more likely they are to be leftist.

TL;DR: conservatives have less time for Internet drama because conservatives go to work for 8 hours a day.

It's not a PROOF of their ideological bent, but it's a constraining of their probability density in a leftwards direction.

t. Monarchist neoreactionary phoneposting from his directly taxpayer funded job

And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against.

I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away. Oh, and also, those refugees? Doctors, lawyers, scientists. White People are only 56% of the births now? Nah, that's not important news, no need to report that.

Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.