Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
My thoughts? I think think they're not "a necessary evil" only because they're insufficient. I think Neema Parvini has a point when he asks:
Tell me why the mayor of L.A. and Gavin Newsom aren’t arrested for aiding and abetting an insurrection against America? Why aren’t they arrested for treason, under the Insurrection Act?
and calls for the Democratic Party to be banned, and replaced with a left-wing party that isn't "mental":
And like I said, we're getting to the point where they just need to be banned. It's like, at what level of corruption, and at what level of stupidity, do you just say, look, this is not a viable party anymore. We need to just, like, ban it, and replace it with, you know— okay, it can still be leftist, but you at least have to be… you at least have to agree to basic things.
Like, one, America is an actual nation. Number two, the concept of having a passport and citizenship mean something. Being an American means something. Therefore, number three, different laws apply to foreigners, illegal immigrants, than to the native population. Number four, if people who are not native to America start burning things down, then you not only have to take action, you have to deport those people immediately. Number five, if foreign politicians like the President of Mexico starts cheering on, you know, effectively a kind of invasion into your country, you don't side with them, you side against them.
These are just basic, basic, basic kind of… I know there's no such thing as the social contract, right? But there's a tacit agreement between the rulers and the ruled in all societies that would agree to all of those things that I just said.
If you do not agree to that, you should not be allowed to be part of public life. You shouldn't be allowed to be an official if you don't agree to all those things I just said. These dickheads are meant to take an oath on the Bible. That they're meant to take an oath, you know, on the Constitution when they take office. This is treason. It shouldn't be allowed.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.
But does the UAE scale? Further, the UAE isn't exactly a democracy, especially not one with birthright citizenship. I've seen some open borders advocates argue for a "billion immigrants" America that follows the UAE model (Nathan Smith for one), but none of them seem very clear on how to get there from here — well, beyond something like just throwing open the floodgates and hoping that the resulting effects force our political elites to make the desired changes and adopt the desired system in order to keep the country from collapsing (and the answers to "and if that doesn't work?" tend to be rather disheartening).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
It’s like a tour of duty. There’s lots of industries that are hyper seasonal and / or are intensive for short amounts of time.
Oil workers are like that, for example. Fisherman, cowboys, that’s just off the top of my head.
We've got plenty of this sort of seasonal work up here in Alaska — and not just the oil workers and the crab boats, but also a lot of tourist-adjacent jobs, ranging from seasonal airport baggage handlers to RV park attendants.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
As one of "The True Psychos," I'd personally like to thank you for laying this out so clearly and in such detail. AAQC'd.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
That kind of transactional relationship sounds like the opposite of normal and healthy.
How many accounts — real or fictional — about relationships and marriage have you read that were written prior to the 19th century? Or from a non-Western culture (like any where arranged marriages were common). Marriage being treated to a great extent like a sort of financial/institutional merger involving two families, or a sort of "mutual physical/financial support" arrangement first, with "mutual love and desire" being a secondary factor — indeed, as something a couple deliberately builds over time — seems to be the more "normal" attitude across the history of settled human societies, with the 20th century West "all you need is love" attitudes being rather the outlier.
Edit: see also OracleOutlook's longer comment below.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
I mean, can you name any former porn stars who have gone on to become high-status, influential people?
Well, depending on how you define "porn star" (and how much credence you give to Procopius), Empress Theodora immediately comes to mind.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
Outside of Aella, the whole SAM (Speaking with American Men) initiative is indicative of this line of thinking. SAM seems to be focused on how to "market" Democrat's ideas to men instead of finding ideas that men actually want. I don't know if this is just me or if anyone else noticed this or if I'm just recognizing too many patterns.
It's not just you; I did a post on my Tumblr last week noting it as one of the three recurring elements in discussions about SAM. It's also part of my teacher/classroom analogy, specifically, the 'well, if some of the kids aren't absorbing the lesson, it's because the teacher isn't presenting in properly — she just needs to figure out those kids' particular "learning style" and tailor her instruction accordingly' part. (I'm also reminded a bit of a couple of people I've known who unironically endorsed Orwellian "duckspeak" — though not by that term, of course — as the ideal of human communication.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
I do think a lot of the conversations that used to happen here have moved to TPOT and postrat twitter.
What is TPOT? As with acronyms in general, Google is pretty useless at figuring it out.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9d ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment (you appear to have wanted the one above the one you replied to).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?
Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
But nothing ever really ends.
Tell that to the Tanguts, the Jangil, the Dorset, Homo floresiensis, or the dodos.
I don't actually believe that. The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window. If everyone fights maximally dirty, then, all my personal opinions aside, I'm betting Blue.
Not to speak for FC, but that you think that this is the only possible battlefield on which the tribal conflict can play out is part of the delusion ("sustained by ironclad control of the knowledge-production apparatus" as it is). Setting aside the literal bullets possibility to avoid fedposting (though, in my view, it remains a likely outcome), there's also a number of domains between the two. One example: infrastructure.
Who grows the food? Who keeps the lights on? What would happen if someone were to shut down the water pipe to southern California, or collapse the aqueducts feeding NYC?
I have a civil engineer friend who has gone on at length — repeatedly — about the vulnerability of our cities, and how easy it would be to get urban Americans to "start eating each other." He argues that in many cases, it wouldn't even require active sabotage — just for a particular relatively-small group of almost-entirely Red Tribe men to stop showing up to work.
FC mentioned "thrive vs survive." Which tribe is better positioned to survive, and come out on top, in the wake of the sort of infrastructure collapse I've outlined above?
The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
Or we can get non-selective application of the second amendment after we crush the Blue Tribe, by (per Sun Tzu) ignoring all that social shaming/Overton window/think-tank space in favor of a battleground that favors us.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
Counterpoint: I wish a mothafucka would. Unfortunately right-wing nationalist violence often seems to manifest as mass shootings carried out by clearly mentally unstable people that target the entirely wrong targets. I.e. random people in a school or grocery store instead of assassinations targeting politicians, the leadership of NGOs that help illegal migrants illegally migrate, etc
First, this reads as a touch fedpost-y (I say as someone who's eaten some bans for the same). Secondly, I don't recall where I've read it, but I know I've encountered at least a couple of people on the right arguing that the Labour Party of Norway was noticeably weakened by their loss of up-and-coming young talent at Utøya, and thus, contra Yarvin, Breivik did make a difference for his side. (I'd argue that this is actually why Yarvin spent so long pooh-poohing ABB, because — particularly after listening to him on podcasts — so much of Yarvin's political program seems to be aimed first and foremost at preventing this sort of thing — for entirely understandable historical reasons.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
Perhaps, but Moldbuggian solutions in particular seem, at least to me, more about making High Modernism more efficient — and cementing the power of technocratic Blue elites — through eliminating (the pretense of) democracy (and the Landian variety is anti-human).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
To actually take it seriously as something that matters in the world, including the present day; and not just treat it as a creation myth — something of the long, long ago — to serve as an alternative narrative to Genesis.
In slightly less broad terms, to recognize things like Darwinism meaning you can have telos without a (conscious) telos-giver (what makes an adaptation an adaptation?); or to reject the creationist-adjacent idea that evolution is always so "crude" and "random" that even the smallest amount of Intelligent Design will always do better (that's how you get High Modernism). Back in the last century, quite a lot of effort into AI was about trying to work out how to Intelligently Design a mind top-down, while others worked on more evolutionary, bottom-up methods like neural networks. Well, who proved more fruitful there? Or recognizing that there isn't one single "environment" to which creatures — or social institutions — adapt, but countless local ecosystems. Just as there's no "perfect bird" — only birds perfectly adapted to particular conditions in particular places — there is no single "ideal government," only governments ideal for a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular culture, at a particular time in history. (I seem to vaguely recall de Maistre having said something relevant to this point.)
It's about recognizing that the idea that some armchair "experts", with just a couple months of mental work, will necessarily "outdo" the products of evolution — whether that's the folks confident about vast enhancements without trade-off via genetic engineering, tankies who think that this time their socialist central planners will beat free markets, or Seeing Like a State-style High Modernist social engineers.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
14d ago
That might be a subcategory of what I'm talking about, but not everyone goes as far into laissez-faire as they do (after all, we're social animals, and building cooperative communities is part of our extended phenotype).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
Is there a general term for the sort of broad political position of 'secular/atheist individual who believes in Darwinian evolution so deeply that he is led to reject liberalism, high modernist utopianism, and much of the "Enlightenment" project'?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
Count me as another one who found this through the AAQC roundup.
As an inhabitant of the state with the highest population fraction Eastern Orthodox, I feel like I should say something here; but I don't exactly have much relevant first-hand knowledge, except to note that our Orthodox population is, as one might expect, disproportionately Native (what with many of their ancestors having been first evangelized by Russian Orthodox missionaries, back before Russia sold the place to the USA).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
Maybe incel isn't the correct word stricly speaking. It's just coded in the sphere of ideologies such as red pill, mgtow, mra, pua, etc.
Again, what does that have to do with whether it's true or false, correct or incorrect?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
a very incel coded conclusion.
You use the word "incel coded" (and "incel worldview" above) as if said modifier implies, or is synonymous with, "incorrect." It's a sneer masquerading as argumentation.
If a conclusion is true, then it is true regardless of how "incel coded" it is.
What does it add to the conversation, except as a verbal "boo light"? I mean, at best it's Bulverism — "You only believe this because…".
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
28d ago
And wouldn't it still be useful to be able to spin up an arbitrary number of genius AIs to think about any problem you wanted to?
Sure, but more in the "putting people out of work"-style future (a la Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over"), than anything like the revolutionary futures envisioned by singularitarians.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
I'm very not certain, but I seem to recall a study they did on female teenagers back when they attempted to educate them on the benefits of abstinence by making them carry around a toddler-like doll for the entire day. IIRC, the result backfired, as the teenagers reported wanting to have children more afterwards, not less.
It was a 2016 Australian study; this piece discusses it. (I previously brought this up on the Motte here)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
Yes, the decline of alloparenting and loss of opportunity to develop child-minding and child-rearing skills shouldn't be underestimated. I made a similar point here 5 months ago (along with discussing children's toys and sex ed classes fighting teen pregnancy).
Consensus building
So you're a mind-reader? You're not going to engage with the argument being made, but only with what you think the "real" position is?
Plainly uncharitable.
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