Corvos
3mo ago
It means 'stateless', i.e. not drawn to have a specific ethnicity.
One reason that Japanese stuff is so popular at the moment is that it's almost completely separate from American politics. The Japanese aren't just not woke, they aren't not-woke. They just draw girls like that because they think it's cute.
Corvos
3mo ago
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way
For the obvious reasons:
- There is free movement within borders. Open borders for one part of the country means open borders for all.
- There is continuity of government within borders. Imported voters in London can and do vote on what people in the oh-so-condescendingly-named Lower Snoring are allowed to do, think and say. They also exert cultural control through more indirect means (quangos, pressure groups and so on).
Are you proposing allowing individual US states / UK counties to have their own legally-enforced borders and government?
peacefully breaking immigration laws is immoral on the level of filesharing or handling salmon suspiciously
This is, of course, the load-bearing item of contention. To me, and to many, peacefully breaking immigration laws is some combination of trespass, home invasion and squatting. If I come to your house, and I eat your food and I tell you I'm never leaving, and the police back me up, it's not really your house any more. If 100 people like me do they same, it's definitely not your house any more. You are vestigial. Maybe there are photos of your family on the dresser - what do those people mean to me and mine? My children's photos will look much better there. Your furniture is ugly and doesn't represent my culture - let's throw it out, sell it, burn it for warmth.* It doesn't matter how peaceful illegal immigrants are, or if they do odd jobs around 'your' (for now) house. Demographic change is demographic change.
That's ignoring the face that lots of illegal immigrants actually turn out to be neither nice, peaceful or helpful, of course. But is it any wonder that voters react badly to breaking immigration law, or helping others break immigration law, when seen from this perspective?
*You might feel that this is catastrophising, or at least very pessimistic. I think that anyone pro-immigration must feel that way, but post-woke I can't agree. The outbreak of statue-vandalism, proposed name changes to get rid of all the old English names on parks and streets (most of which didn't get pushed through because there was no yet enough support), the direct import of specifically American racial grievances post-Floyd, the constant drumbeat of 'X is no longer appropriate for Modern (Multicultural) Britain' moved me heavily on these issues.
Historically, it seems fairly clear that this is what happens: Lebanon, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Jerusalem, the spoils machines in places like New York in the 1930s (which used to be carefully split so that the major political positions were held by one Irishman, one Italian, one Jew and one protestant IIRC) and the black machines in places like Chicago.
From the outside, it looks like America is already heavily focused around ethnic spoils - some of your biggest political debates are about to what extent ethnicity is relevant in job and university applications, the appropriate ethnic composition of universities and good jobs (between whites, Jews, blacks, etc.). Where and how children of different races should be educated, and how they should be treated by the law when they grow up. In more integrated countries these questions simply don't come up.
Corvos
3mo ago
In this case I suspect you're right. But there is no law that bad people have to be cowards, or poor shots. Hamilton for example was killed by a belligerent nutbar, and I believe there were many such cases throughout history.
Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.
But it's so nice that she is ;-)
All these quotes seem unequivocably fair and true to me.
His Tuesday remarks made it sound like the white supremacists and neo-Nazis were a small minority of people who just happened to be at the protest and not the organizing force behind it.
I think probably true, yes. There really aren't enough neo-Nazis to meet popular demand. Nor enough white supremacists unless you use the Left's very expansive definitions.
He says the left is just as bad, if not worse.
I think definitely true. Antifa is both far more organised and unbelievably violent. They are also much more expert in turning powder-keg protests into violent riots.
And then he goes on to put Confederate generals in the same league as the founding fathers, just so you know whose side he's really on.
Almost certainly the side of people worried about the Left's eagerness to knock down statues of everyone who doesn't meet their approval, including those of the Founding Fathers who were slave owners. Certainly Churchill in the UK was not spared.
As far as I'm concerned Trump clearly condemned the actual bad guys and then commented about the broader situation in terms that were far more balanced than the rabid press. He never said that the man who was killed deserved to die, he never said that 'being a neo-Nazi is good, actually'. In contrast, the left never says, 'fine people on both sides', they say, 'okay, some of our people are violent rioters but most of them are peaceful protesters, and by the way anyone who gets in the way is a bigot who deserves what they get'.
If the left could reliably meet Trump's standard I would be much more satisfied.
Corvos
3mo ago
This was actually my suggested solution for solving faculty disputes in my old university. It would be so, so much simpler and more friendly than the backstabbing and politicking that goes on, and everyone's too scrawny to do any real damage.
Corvos
3mo ago
I'm old fashioned in many ways, but this reasoning seems so weird to me.
A: Threatens to kill B and his family.
B: Right. Tomorrow, at dawn, I'm going to give you the opportunity to kill me.
Very manly, yes, but not very helpful unless you're sure A is an abject coward. Hire somebody who knows how to use a telescopic sight or put a horse's head in his bed or something.
Corvos
3mo ago
The part that really seems to turn their crank is the idea that Us Dumb, Ignorant, Cousin-Fucking, Science Denying Rednecks will have a moment of clarity at the Apex of our suffering and cry out to them for help in the moments before our agonizing demise. Something about the idea of self-inflicted suffering seems to absolve them of any sin associated with finding pleasure in the suffering of others.
Made me think of
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."
Of course, Rorschach is a left-wing comic book writer's idea of a right-wing nut, so who's to say whether the fantasy comes from Alan Moore's brain or something he heard, or both.
Corvos
3mo ago
Old Testament, but The Promised Land is fun and free on Youtube:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HSI04-1oLwg
The travails of Moses and the Israelites in the desert, done in the style of the Office. Funny without being a piss-take.
Do we actually think some people are getting a helping hand through a shiny new loudspeaker, with the twin express aims of promoting their ideas and drowning out ideas someone doesn’t like? Or is it just the case that people whose ideas get more reach have skilfully figured out the content algorithm game?
If you look at any public statements made by Google, pre-acquisition Twitter etc. they are absolutely clear that they are attempting to promote trusted, authoritative sites (as judged by them). There is a reason that google medical searches always route to Healthline and WebMD: ever since the 'Google Medic Update' google has routed medical, financial and disaster-related queries to trusted and usually governmental partners.
Google also engages in strategic banning, throttling and promotion of information:
Tackling misinformation online is an ongoing challenge that Google continues to invest in, including researching novel approaches to the problem. For the past several years, Jigsaw, a unit within Google focused on threats to open societies, has collaborated with researchers from universities of Cambridge and Bristol and American University to study the effectiveness of a tactic called prebunking. While a more commonly known tactic, “debunking” seeks to correct false claims already in popular discourse, prebunking helps individuals build psychological resilience to misleading narratives before they ever encounter them.
Prebunking works by alerting individuals to attempts to manipulate them, along with the false claims or tactics likely to be used to do so, coupled with a thorough refutation of those claims or tactics. The approach is highly flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of media, from a simple billboard to long-form narrative content. Academic research has shown it to be effective against a variety of false narratives, from white supremacist hate speech to COVID vaccine misinformation. In the fall of 2022, Jigsaw ran a large-scale trial of prebunking seeking to counter anti-refugee narratives in Central and Eastern Europe following the mass influx of Ukrainians in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the country.
We will continue to fight this pernicious problem by taking a flexible approach to tackle misinformation across different products, taking action at scale, elevating trustworthy information* and equipping people with skills to detect misinformation.
Google literally says here that they are promoting some material in order to drown out and make ineffective other material. I can't even say that all of this is wrong, I am not necessarily keen on a laissez faire approach to e.g. selling medical products in all cases. But it is absolutely manipulation of the discourse by promoting favoured voices and banning, shadow-banning or drowning out others.
The Dept. of Health also cites communiques from Facebook, Twitter and TikTok to state that:
Some technology platforms have improved efforts to monitor and address misinformation by reducing the distribution of false or misleading posts and directing users to health information from credible sources
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf (page 6)
Corvos
3mo ago
Well, yes, your example causes a lot of misery too.
Like I say, I understand the reasoning but getting punished for being virtuous is still very frustrating!
Corvos
3mo ago
It’s annoying when ‘I am very careful about borrowing money’ gets interpreted as ‘I am a bad credit risk’. One understands why but it’s still insulting.
But if, to take an extreme example, I lock you in a soundproof box in the basement of a castle for spreading incendiary rumours, it seems very peculiar to say, ‘no, you have free speech, I’m just not helping you distribute that speech to others’. I think we agree on that much.
To take a less extreme example, if there are two speakers on Speakers Corner, and I give a giant megaphone to the other one that totally drowns out your voice, that doesn’t exactly seem like free and fair speech either.
In actual real life, there is some level of ‘not helping you distribute your ideas’ that is equivalent to ‘shutting you up’.
It doesn’t maybe mean you have to give big megaphones to everyone, but maybe you do have to give them all a soundproof room and make it known where they are and direct people on request and not actively direct them away.
Corvos
3mo ago
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, your ideas bring true can (from this perspective) be a significant disadvantage because you cannot dress them up as prettily or make them as appealing as someone whose ideas are all lies.
Corvos
3mo ago
You can run a homebrew LLM (7 billion parameters / 12bn / even 24bn) for nothing on any decent PC with a GPU. It will be lucid but really pretty dim.
You can rent a RunPod server pay-as-you-go and run a 70bn / 105bn / 200bn model for a few dollars an hour. It will be smarter but not quite GPT / Claude level. You can also pay 25 USD a month for Featherless, which is the same thing but less under your control.
Or you pay for the APIs.
Corvos
3mo ago
I think @zoink's point is that you shouldn't be handling Iraqi oil in the first place. If you aren't prepared to kill and destroy everyone there, you have no business getting involved.
In practice, I don't think this works - if pirates are intercepting 30% of American shipping from their base in heavily-populated Lebanon, you need some kind of response between 'let them' and 'kill everyone for 10 miles'.
Corvos
3mo ago
The confounder in all of this is the intelligence of the person being discussed of course.
I thought it might be. You need to be able to step back, look at yourself, and say, 'Even though I feel like I was obviously right, I got arrested, plus I know there is this disease called schizophrenia which everybody tells me I have and which does seem to make other people act this way. Maybe I should consider that my decision-making faculties aren't the best'. Not easy.
Makes me feel more impressed by deBoer than usual, although it's a shame he can't turn that self-awareness towards his Marxism.
Corvos
3mo ago
It’s interesting to me that this is exactly what certain reasoning LLMs will do. Not making any strong claims, just noting it.
Corvos
3mo ago
Kind of. All of these are serious beliefs that a huge number and I think an actual majority of Muslims hold. Being a Muslim and taking your tenets seriously pretty much requires this.
Likewise, if you are a serious non-self-contradicting Christian then you pretty much have to wage culture war on some fronts. That’s why it’s called a culture war - it’s a battle over whose culture can be expressed, when, and how, as well as a battle over whose culture dominates when there are clashes.
Okay, I get this. So the fundamental delusions (the police want to hurt me / nobody's protecting these children / the CIA is watching everyone) are still there, just toned down and without the madder edges. They don't think, 'I was crazy before and now I'm sane', they think, 'I was basically right before, probably I was overreacting a bit but I'm better now'.
That's kind of the point, though. Dogs weren't forced to participate in hunts. They do it themselves, they love it. Depending on the breed, they were bred to do it almost compulsively. Stopping a dog chasing things is hard, that's why you have to keep them on a leash in the park.
Whereas any dog breeds that are not lapdogs have immense difficulty staying still. According to https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/mastiff/ a mastiff has middling energy levels i.e. is not a lap dog, and almost certainly finds it very difficult to stay still for lengthy periods.
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