Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Quite. The Mexicans in Mexico are the ones puppeteering the Mexicans in the USA: "Go to El Norte and send us some money" style. So yeah, they are invading the USA, in the same way that George Bush was invading Iraq - he isn't personally the boots on the ground, but the boots on the ground wouldn't have been there if he didn't direct them.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
just a 1000 km away
This is a very... American diagnosis of the European psyche.
Europe is smaller, and more crowded than America. And psychologically, Europeans are used to implacable hatred of everyone in the next valley. So 1000km away to a European may as well be on the moon. It is as much "not worth worrying about" as 13000km is to an American. So as far as agenda-setting of national policies goes, Russia may as well be as distant and irrelevant to European countries as it is from the USA.
Estonia, maybe, has cause for concern. But the Western European nations who are gun-running to Kiev? They have zero legitimate interest in Ukraine, just like America.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Russia has to spend blood and treasure to secure the rest of Ukraine. We just have to spend treasure to make their cost go up! And we’ve decided the exchange rate looks pretty good.
Who's "we", and what was the calculus? Because I have a strong suspicion that the "we" is just seething third-generation Russian emigrants still mad that great-grandpa was run off the shetl, lobbying and donating until the US's pay-for-play foreign policy let's them use America like a golem to smash their ancestral enemy.
I'm a citizen of the West and certainly no-one asked me about sending all my money to Kiev.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
8mo ago
You know that the Russian military is trying to wipe out a European ethnic group/nation like, right now?
I didn't know that. Can you elaborate?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
How do you figure that? In the case of abortion the mother has presumably agreed to the procedure
If you can do an abortion without the father's permission why can't you do it without the mother's permission?
...being the exact train of thought they don't want you to start down.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
how much info is ideal?
I've been to enough rodeos where my prejudices were thoroughly vindicated that I'm going for "Zero, my priors are great, judge purely from them".
We're a discussion forum, not a court of law. themotte.org has no standards of evidence, and that's fine.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
I'm not even calling for the establishment of a race of Ubermensch, I want everyone raised up to as close to equality as possible
Why?
Seriously, why do you think it should be some sort of teleological objective of mankind to have everyone calibrated to be of equal ability?
Even if these abilities are high, this is still some kind of Harrison Bergeron dystopian shit.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1mo ago
Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical?
I'm pretty certain it's this? I get the sense that mass incarceration + deprogramming + filtering out fifth columnists would be about a million times more expensive than just shooting everyone. And also wouldn't work. Western governments at least try to filter their immigrants for "not psycho killers" but lo and behold, you still get machete beheadings and trucks of peace every other month on the streets of London & Paris.
Say what you want about just making political undesirables dig their own trench and then shooting them en masse in the back of the head a'la Katyn, but that is at least affordable.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
2mo ago
He was in the equivalent of a supermax prison.
...in a country with a smaller economy than Italy's (notorious for losing mafia bosses from supermax). Russia can't afford to secure its jails from determined infiltrators.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
have an internal party vote and then everyone is bound to vote for the winner on the floor of Congress or they get expelled from the party.
I was under the impression that this was a specific trait of Leninist parties, which might contain the answer as to why the US Republicans don't do it.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
Just as plenty of Americans who illegally aided the IRA during the troubles were loyal to the US.
This is oxymoronic. If you violate the policies and laws of the government, you are by definition disloyal.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
This case, if true, is obviously tragic.
It's the "if" that should make it a scissor statement. It is very difficult to prove "medical murder", and therefore reasonable people may disagree on the implications of this case. The feminists could insist that Letby is a victim of a misogynistic society determined to punish women, and doctors / hospital managers are trying to use her as a scapegoat for systemic failures in the healthcare system. While on the other side...
...
...ok maybe that's why there's no toxoplasma around this. What bloc is going to be a loud comment section partisan for "Yes she did kill all those babies"? Misogynists who do want to blame women for everything are a boogieman that don't actually exist, so who is there to fill up the Internet for the prosecution?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Women buy an exceedingly large number of excessively expensive swimsuits. Do you have an explanation why?
Perhaps they know that they live in an attention economy, even as they wish they did not? They think it would be better if they were valued for their opinions and not their curves, but alas, it is not so.
(Also I don't think they're spending their own money on those swimsuits)
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
But who says 'slaughter the innocent, treasure and protect the guilty!'
I can actually defend Neely in the context of your analogy from a right-wing perspective. Bombing Afghan aid workers and not giving a shit but handling Neely with kid gloves is right and proper because he's American and the Afghan aid worker isn't. One of our guys is worth a hundred foreigners, that's the whole point of being a nation with national in-group preference.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10mo ago
Neither is the average grad student, or Indian call center employee, they just mindlessly regurgitate whatever is fed to them by their professors/supervisors.
Yes, but this is an argument for morally valuing useless demographics less, not for morally valuing babies more.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Given that Britains war aims were essentially to keep the continent pretty much as it was before the war and preserve the balance of power in Europe
"We want Austria-Hungary to keep oppressing everyone because the status quo is profitable to our top-hat class" is not exactly my definition of Just War.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
(remember that the military, the police, small-town local elites, organised religion and Fox News are all objectively part of the establishment)
This can't be a general rule - look how often establishments get military coup'd in Africa. Do you mean specifically in America 2023?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
Israel shouldn't lose points for preventing more Israelis from being killed and this making this comparison look bad.
How do you feel about the sentencing for murder being different from the sentencing for conspiracy?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
I love this comment as a glittering example of "Comes so close to noticing but then the crimestop kicks in"
To wit: don't you think it a little... suspicious... that the """reports from IRL""" that your news media pipes you from Ukraine, map so neatly into the tropes you've been fed for decades from your entertainment?
Does that not strike you as a little, err, improbable to be an organic occurrance?
(So no-one accuses me of not speaking plainly: I am forwarding this as circumstantial evidence that Western reporting from the Ukraine War is very, very contaminated by Western attempts to narrative craft it into the pre-prepared slot in the Western psyche of "Just like my Indiana Jones movies".)
It's really not any worse than various progressive ideas that are currently being pushed by academia
Exactly. Someone who believes the Earth was created in 7 days, 6000 years ago is substantially less dangerous (and, indeed, I would argue is substantially less delusional) than someone who believes whitey's oppression of minorities is the source of disparate racial outcomes.
EDIT: Apparently the new speaker believes both, so, heh, touché.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
6mo ago
I know the “Russian interference” or “Chinese interference” is a dumb conspiracy theory but if I were a KGB guy this is exactly the kind of outcome I’d be aiming for.
The countries that actually influence US policy prefer to direct the golem rather than render it inert.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
Some (me) would say the Iraqi one is much more benign because that invasion didn't leave millions of American-Iraqui colonists / anchor-babies there to cause further demographic and political disruption in perpetuity.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11mo ago
When or if reaction comes, it will have to feel as natural as say, supporting Ukraine.
...which is to say, not natural at all and entirely the product of MSM narrative-craft and bot astroturfing?
The only cure for this is practice. Many years ago I almost threw up with anxiety before my first dating-app date. Now, women are disposable playthings to me and I have absolutely no concern for their feelings at all beyond the instrumental requirements to get them to sleep with me. At a point you come to regard each one as an entertaining brain-teaser (how do I need to rotate this Rubix cube to get it into my bedroom?) rather than as a person to whom the Golden Rule applies. This makes dating totally stress-free because you just don't care if you go down in flames.
TL;DR: There's nothing to make your first forays into the pitiless jungle psychologically easier, but each foray makes the next one easier.
More options
Context Copy link