BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Not sure, but I've received a directionally similar warning.
Spitting facts! I, for one, endorse the idea that Yoruba are meaningfully different from Igbo, though this would be fantastically beside the point when the target is defined by her politics. It is not inconceivable for this to be mentioned. In the immortal words of Hakan Rotwrmt (RIP, even the archive):
High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work. You have to have working recall of at minimum eight or nine thousand distinct races, living and extinct, and run extensive simulations just to model the disgusting attributes of the most easily conceivable 2- &3-way crosses.
On the other hand, the screed, for all its uninspired vitriol, conspicuously doesn't insult her or her people's intelligence. It's overwhelmingly dirt, pure racial antagonism, and some envy: troublemaker, liar, grifter, filthy, ugly, nigger, gorilla, smelly, poopy-head, monkey, parasite, go away, give us back our space, our air, we want your nice house with nice garden (at least no mention of her nice TV). Honestly this is something I'd expect an upper-class black person with an inflated self-esteem and limited self-awareness to attribute to anti-black racists – mostly projecting one's naive tribal hatred. Assuming she wrote this, Dr. Adeshola (Twitter verified) cannot conceive of herself as not being clever, even when trying to put herself in the shoes of her mortal enemy. And indeed, she is an Author, Lawyer, Political & Women's Rights Activist, Founder. Not even a completely unhinged murderous racist would think to call her stupid! On this matter, I see that while white liberals have veeery specific pained reactions to the IQ discourse, most blacks act refreshingly casual, as if they do not distinguish it from generic poop-on-your-head invectives.
...Alternatively, she is quite aware of this and other rhetorical deficiencies, but wouldn't like to publish anything online that reminds people (to wit, those oversensitive white liberals) of hate-facts and, especially on occasion of the hoax being exposed, would get her in real hot water.
On the gripping hand, this is so bad it almost looks like a second order hoax. We'd accuse Shola of doing a Jussie Smolliay, then Bobbies apprehend real National Action London. In 2 years will be revealed as a honeypot with 15/20 undercover agents, but that won't be known far outside Steve Sailer's feed – unlike the boy-who-cried wolf moral lesson that we should believe victims and not assume hoaxes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Bonus @6tjk:
Throughout that period there were portraits of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky hanging everywhere. The quarrel between the two leaders began in 1921-1922. The Lenin-Trotsky revolution cost our people at least 10 million lives between 1917 and 1922. The destruction of the entire order and economy, civil war, hunger, military communism and mass disease were followed by uprisings, which were brutally suppressed. The Antonov uprising of the peasants was gassed by Tukhachevsky. The revolt of the Kronstadt garrison particularly spooked them, Lenin and Trotsky decided to manoeuvre and temporarily return to a market economy, introducing the NEP. They tore off the gilded roofs of churches and created fixed ruble. […] As a result of disagreements with Lenin in 1921-22rr. Trotsky found himself isolated among the Bolshevik upper class. Shortly after Lenin's death, Trotsky fell. The renowned monarchist Shulgin came secretly to the USSR in search of traces of his disappeared son; I have read his books describing these visits. In his book «Moscow, 1925» he quotes this anti-Semitic White Guard poem about Lenin's death: «To the noise of honks and cries of Jews they bury the new Messiah. And the grateful Rossiya, to the thunder of cannons and mortars, flushed Lenin down the latrine».[…]
My father entered his PhD program in 1927. This was the first year when new postgrads were not sent abroad. The old ones were still going – by the way, not with Bolsheviks' funding. Rockefeller and other patrons were paying. The process of building the Iron Curtain was gradual. A new phase of intense revolution came in 1929. This is nothing but a «permanent» revolution, in following with the teaching of Trotsky; Stalin destroyed Trotsky and changed the terminology, but certainly believed in his theory, as the facts show. He implemented its bloody aspects, hidden behind beautiful general formulations, with cold calculation. Collectivisation. Trials of the intelligentsia. The admission of only «record workers» to the universities. Teaching illiterate people for 8 hours a day – you had to work «like workers». This went on until 1933, when there was a particularly terrible famine in the countryside. My father told me that corpses could sometimes be seen right from the train, especially in Ukraine and other agricultural areas. This period could hardly have cost the country less than 10 million people in total. We must add to the victims of the, as they now say, Holodomor kulaks and sub-kulaks who were resettled into intolerable conditions and died there gradually; as well as the millions of street children who mysteriously disappeared. The then widely publicised orphanages were set up under the auspices of the NKVD. They were the subject of glowing moral writings and brilliant films, but it is unlikely that the orphanages accommodated more than a few tens of thousands before 1935. No one knows where the orphans who filled undersides of the cities suddenly went.
The Keldysh family and its history deserve special attention. The most conscientious and complete historical information is collected in the article of my aunt Vera Vsevolodovna Maykopar-Keldysh. (see [1]) This article was written for the 90th anniversary of her brother Mstislav (1911-1978) and reprinted in the collection for his centenary.
This family descends from Foma Simeonovich Keldysh, who was a low-ranking Orthodox clergyman in a church in Warsaw (a sacristan), in the second quarter of the 19th century. He married Aleksandra Josifovna Michomlom in 1839. Legend has it that she spoke little Russian, with an accent (I wonder which one?). Among their children was Mikhail Fomich Keldysh (ox.1840-1920).
(Mikhail had brothers, as we have now discovered on the internet. […] Motchane, founder of the Institute of Mathematics near Paris, IHÉS, left Red Russia in the early 20s. His family was (or became) wealthy in France. He was influential in post-war France as an active member of the resistance against the Germans. I remember him well in the IHÉS. He was about 90 years old and liked to recall St. Petersburg, the name Leningrad he did not recognize, asked me about his nephew, the famous theoretical physicist Ales Anselm. He had once told my Israeli friend Vitaly Milman: We knew the Keldysh family well. We Karaite families knew each other. – This wasn't known in Keldysh family, apparently their grandfather hid it, or maybe Mikhail did. He had a brother in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Fomich, director of a medical hospital. They (Michael and Vsevolod) married noblewomen from military families. Were Foma and Alexandra Karaites? It is possible. By the way, looking around the internet for the surname Keldysh, my wife found Rabbi Vadim Keldysh, now in Berdichev. His ancestors are unknown to us).
Foma became a military doctor, promoted to general. He especially distinguished himself during the conquest of Central Asia, and allegedly compiled valuable medical notes. His appearance in the photos is not of the Russian type. He married a real noblewoman, N.N.Brusilova, a cousin of the famous future General Brusilov. […] Trotsky took Brusilov to plan operations. His position - chief of a special meeting under the Commander-in-Chief - I learned from an address by Lenin, Trotsky, Kalinin, S.S. Kamenev and Brusilov (with the title above) to the soldiers and officers of the White Army in 1920. This was before the assault on Crimea (see [3]): «Come over to our side, we will accept you into the Army». Then everyone was shot. After Lenin's death, Stalin arrested Brusilov, but not for long. Apparently he quickly realised that Brusilov was far removed from Trotsky and politics in general. He was released and sent off to die in Karlsbad. There he made excuses, writing that his signature was forged. […]
M.F. Keldysh died in 1920, reportedly in Crimea. He had several children. Two were officers (Iga and Giga). They were taken into the Red Army in the Civil War and disappeared. Apparently they went over to the Whites. A trace of one of them was found in Paris after World War II, in the 1950s and 60s. His French widow somehow found out about his relatives in the USSR: She needed their renunciation of their inheritance and it was given to her.
Two children – a daughter Ksenia and a son Vsevolod – lived in the USSR. They resembled their mother in appearance and were fair-skinned. We are descended from Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh (1878-1965). He was an outstanding civil engineer, the founder of concrete construction in our country. Khrushchev recalls him in his memoirs. He became a professor in Riga before World War I. In 1915, he was evacuated to Ivanovo-Voznesensk (the Bolsheviks removed the word Voznesensk [Ascension Town] from its name). In 1921, he received a rather large (due to 7 children in the family) semi-basement flat in Moscow, behind the Museum of Fine Arts, in the side street that was then called Antipievsky. There he lived with his family until the end of his life in 1965. I knew this flat very well. His university and department became a military institution in the 1930s. His first military rank was that of Lieutenant Colonel. He became a General and a member of the Party during the Second World War. Even in the early 1930s he grumbled that nothing would work out for the Bolsheviks. His wife, my grandmother, was arrested around 1933-34, when Yagoda was the head of NKVD. They thought they were hiding a treasure and wanted to take it away. Then they let them go, disappointed. I don't know the details. In 1953-54 I saw him as a Stalinist, gradually turning into a Khrushchevist. In the 30s, however, he had the courage to help arrested students. He never talked about his kinship with Brusilov, about his disappeared brothers, as if he was afraid of that. Their generation was afraid of everything - not without reason. There was much to be afraid of.
V.M. Keldysh married my grandmother Maria Aleksandrovna Skvortsova […] in 1903.
[…] Misha was a graduate student of history, chattering recklessly. He must have hurt Stalin's feelings too. Lèse-majesté in the case file was the worst case, but it did not get recorded in the court opinion. He was arrested in 1938 and disappeared. Apparently he starved to death «there».
And finale:
Alexander had the genius for mathematics. Alas, he despised science, especially pure math, as many did in the 20s (including their father, an engineer): 'you are too far removed from life,' he would say. His career as a theatre administrator did not go well. He was arrested during Yezhovshchina period, with grave accusations, and was awaiting trial. Luckily for him, Yezhov was declared insane and shot at the end of 1938, as it became known much later. He got replaced by the new «liberal» NKVD Minister (i.e. Commissar) Beria, who was allowed to stop the arrests. The new investigator removed heavy charges and put the case on trial with only the charge of anti-Semitism. Shura had two wives. The second one (Aunt Dina) I knew well – she was a pretty lady. Both Jewish. The things one can say when fighting with loved ones! At the trial, his first wife was a witness, and testified that he was not an anti-Semite. He was acquitted. His children by both wives were successful; both son and daughter became PhDs. Son Seva, named after his grandfather Vsevolod, became a good literary critic; daughter Marina became a doctor of agricultural sciences. Uncle Shura was painfully jealous of Mstislav's success, it was hard to watch. He probably thought he could have done just as well if he had made the same choice.
Yuri's fate is curious. He became a professor of musicology, a party lapdog. His wife Aunt Sima was ugly - as ugly as Jewish women can be; he was ugly too. But both his daughters Tania (1931- 1999?) and Lara (1937) were attractive. He attacked Shostakovich and other "modernists". Quarrelled with my father over Hungary'56.
I pity Marx: his legacy
fell into the Russian font
Where ends justified the means
And means shat on the ends.
– The legendary dissident poet Igor Guberman
Please Inform comrade Stalin that there has happened a monstrous mistake!
– popular paraphrase of the 2nd NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov's words on his trial
Bluntly: yes, they think it was all going perfectly well, or at least there was no credible indication of the opposite, until Stalin got possessed by the inherent Russian reactionary spirit and started purging them.
People are driven by status and animosity. While their individual and dynastic power and prestige rose, they were assured of the morality of Communism and the wretchedness of its enemies. Their prestige was rising, in large part, due to extermination of Imperial era elites, mainly middle and higher-class Russians and Germans. Seething provincial mediocrities or outright lumpens overnight became intellectuals, lauded creators, and inept but inimitably cruel managers of a great enslaved human mass.
Galkovsky:
A sleight of hand is committed: the Soviet intelligentsia is contrasted with the Soviet authorities. In reality, the relationship was different: the Russian people and the Jewish upper classes, which, in turn, were divided into the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and the powers that be – roughly speaking, the Russian village and the Jewish city. At the same time, the connection between the remnants of the Russian urban classes and the Jewish intelligentsia was much weaker than the connection between the Jewish intelligentsia and the Jewish bureaucracy. The latter were simply relatives (cf. Mandelstam's family). They were "their own".
Osip Mandelstam's wife Nadezhda Mandelstam-Khazina admitted with brazen naivety [while proving her dissident creds]: «We all 'went to someone'. Pilyniak went to the Yezhovs, my husband and I 'went' to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin. […] We still belonged to a privileged class, albeit of the second rank. … Sometimes Mandelstam was mistaken for one of their own, and he, too, received a gobbet. From '20 until his arrest in May '34 we received our groceries at a lavish distributor, where there was an advertisement at the cash register: Narodovtsy served out of turn»*.
Bunin wrote on the victory of the Revolution in Moscow:
«All obstacles, all barriers divine and human have fallen - the victors freely took possession of her, every street, every dwelling and were already hoisting their banner over her stronghold and sanctuary, over the Kremlin. And there was no day in my whole life more terrible than this day, - God knows, indeed so! … Left alone at night, naturally being quite disinclined to tears, I finally cried, and wept such terrible and abundant tears, which I could not even imagine.»
And this is how Nadezhda Mandelstam met the Revolution:
«We (a group of young artists) got pelted with piles of cheap Kievan roses, and we came out of the theatre with huge heaps… We were busy, then with theatre productions, then with posters, and it seemed to us that life was playing and boiling … my little herd was to the left of the left. The boys loved Mayakovsky's 'Left March' and no one doubted that he had a drum instead of a heart. We yelled rather than talked, and were very proud that we were sometimes given night passes and walked the streets at forbidden hours.»
Bunin wept in Moscow, and Mandelstam laughed in Kiev. (She made «garlands of fruit-like phalluses» for the revolutionary theatre there, with Isaac Rabinovitch). This is youth. «The morning greets us with a chill». Not just physiological youth, but a metaphysical one: Russia's new elite.
Of course, Mandelstam's life also developed quite tragically, but the Russian Soviet tragedy and the Jewish Soviet tragedy are very different (even chronologically). It is only now that everything merges and gets confused in the past. The text of the play has been lost and all that is known is that at some point Prince Hamlet and his uncle die.
While immoral Slavic thugs like Yezhov of Molchanov who reached the top were uprooted individuals and lost the plot completely, perishing in gulags or dissolving back into the commoner class – Jews like Mandelstams or the Eichenwald/Gorb family and, to a degree, other active minorities quickly rolled back to their ethnic solidarity. Thus, disillusionment and gradual pivot into «human rights activism», tryhard dissident poems and such.
Same happened, with nary a lag, to their fellow travelers on the West, like Arthur Koestler, Richard Hofstadter and other «thinkers». Many in the public sphere, however, remained wedded to Socialism, just without Russian (and Georgian) shit. Completely uneducable fools like Jean-Paul Sartre even remained pro-Stalin.
I've translated pieces from another memoir not long ago, one of a Fields medal winner Sergei Novikov. I'll add a bit more, straight from the opening pages; it's an interesting contrast to Eichenwald's narrative, touching on the pre-1937 period – and to the current American «coalition of the fringes» dynamic. There's plenty of such reports, just not promoted like those of «dissidents», and my own family stories, which I am unwilling to share, corroborate as well.
My father Peter Sergeevich Novikov (1901-1975) was a renowned mathematician, famous for his ability to solve unusually difficult problems. His famous works (chronologically) relate to Descriptive Set Theory, Inverse Newtonian Gravity Problem, Mathematical Logic, Algorithm Theory and Combinatorial Group Theory. He descended from a Moscow merchant family: his great-grandfather the merchant Podyakov went bankrupt, but his five sons made a fortune building Orthodox churches around the Kerzhenets and Vetluga Rivers, probably after driving out the Old Believer teachers from there. They (the sons) were nicknamed "Noviks" there. They returned to Moscow. Their children were already Novikovs. Of these, Sergei Novikov - my grandfather - lost all his property with the arrival of the Bolsheviks (1917). His eldest son, my father, was drafted into the Red Army from the University; his youngest son Boris too, but later. Boris shot himself in the army. Apparently, his psyche could not endure the hardships of those "Cursed Days" [Bunin's diary book]. My father, on the other hand, served in Taganrog, where the army played the role of police. He told amusing stories.
A new «policeman» joined them, a career beggar. It was a hungry time. The new member of the squad suggested the following: let someone take turns leading him around town, going into houses with «look, we don't have food for this convict. Give him something if you can». Then he would share it with the guide of the day. Father's turn came. They went to a house and he was horrified to see that their company commander's family was living there. But it was alright: the man was not present, and his wife shared. They were mainly fighting moonshine there – partly via consuming it.
In 1922 my father got tired of waiting and deserted, as many did then. The whole regiment packed his stuff for him: «Petya is leaving to study». He went back to Moscow, to the University, to PhysMath. At times, he got weeded out as being of «non-proletarian origins» - but the campaign subsided, and he returned. There were also raids on deserters; they went to hide in the Alexandrovsky Garden. Finally he was caught and put on trial. His friends told him that the Bolsheviks loved talent. There is a professor who is ready to help everyone. (I wish I knew who it was.) – ask him, he'll give a glowing review; go to court with it. That's what my father did. Got 3 years probation, but released from the army. Immediately after Lenin's death, the new regime abolished the «Dry Law» and all deserter's convictions too. […] In those years, when my uncle shot himself and their father died of grief, father stayed with their mother. […]
After Lenin's death, the Jews were squeezed out little by little, starting at the top of Bolshevism. This process was a long one. Their expulsion from the punitive organs was completed in 1949, during the struggle against cosmopolitanism. The Bolsheviks spread the false message that they had given equal rights to Jews and other peoples. In fact, equal rights were given by the February Revolution. Many Jewish Mensheviks and SRs were elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1917e, for example. Bolsheviks disbanded it; they had only 13% of the vote. What is true is that Lenin and Trotsky, shortly after the October coup in 1918, called for «peoples oppressed under Tsarism» to take power. The Latvians, the Chinese (there were many of them in Russia, then Stalin evicted them), the Jewish community, excluding the rich and rabbis, as my Jewish friends told me, and a number of other ethnic groups - all joined the commissars, the ideological and punitive bodies – Cheka, Revolutionary Military Councils … It was a mighty force. My student Andrey Maltsev made an interesting historical observation. Please note that the “voluntary” going to work on weekend was then called Subbotnik. Why? Christians have always worked on Saturdays. The answer is simple. Apparently it was aimed at Bolshevik Jews, a symbol that they were renouncing their rabbis and sticking to the Party. In our era of late Bolshevism, the source of this has been forgotten; often Subbotnik was already called Voskresnik [Sundaywork]. The White gentry saw the Bolshevik power as Jewish. An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine once expressed to me his dismay that there were many Jews there. But in fact they were called, promised, «This is your power…» - so they rushed to it, as they should have. And then, in the next stages that started after Lenin's death, they were thrown out.
So it went.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
If you're testing in the 97th percentile I can't imagine why you'd feel biased against IQ tests, which seem to be telling you something most people want to hear: that you're really special!
Why wouldn't he be?
I'm not sure there even exists any group biased in favor of IQ, except for communities self-selected on this exact condition – psychometricians, biodeterminism evangelists, and Mensa losers who do not have any other achievement in life; ironically, this makes IQ an invalid metric in their case, and largely redundant in every other. Most intelligent people have external validations of their superiority – diplomas, professional outcomes, power. An IQ number adds nothing legible to that social proof.
Indeed, they have very good reasons to be biased against IQ. Fittingly, one of the smartest people in my network, who easily maxed out any test, was also the most dismissive of the idea. A pure math student. The notion that your intelligence is measurable at all is insulting on its face to people who have built careers in highly competitive cognitive fields. Do those mere psychologists assert to comprehend dimensions of my mind? Moreover, using some two-bit puzzles? And putting a single number on it?! One who has spent months to decades mastering challenging problems, crossing inferential distances, is naturally incredulous. And is not hard to just memorize patterns in a typical IQ test – why assume others have not, if that is something ostensibly prestigious?
Such people also inhabit filter bubbles, where understanding the idiocy of the average does not bring any benefit – you can go your whole life humblebragging that any poor schmuck could be in your place, you just were lucky and worked hard. It even sounds encouraging, egalitarian. IQ realism is, of course, anything but.
And finally, if one takes implications of IQ reality seriously, then there is a question: are those credentialized people truly the best of the bunch? No matter how much improvement training brings, it stands to reason that a higher-IQ type would be able to wrangle ideas that lesser people are cognitively closed to; see farther; dodge easy mistakes. So, perhaps, there is some fault in the criteria of success in their institutions? So perhaps their status, too, is not quite merited?
People who don't score highly are biased against IQ for obvious reasons.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Or maybe I'm just unconsciously seeking out the arguments I like from the side I unconsciously want to like
You're missing one possibility: you like the argument that might is right, because the natural reaction of the powerless is to suck up to the mighty.
I've updated my estimates for his poisoning story and other botched poisonings to near 1.0 in light of the war. Main reason to doubt them was not lack of evidence but the prior for FSB, GRU etc. not being staffed by actual retarded mooks from some Austin Powers movie – I've lived my whole life under kakistocracy, but still… – uh, well.
With that out of the way: Navalny is a simple honest guy. He's not a liberal nor a Western agent of influence nor «another Putin». He is an extremely rare sort of a political figure – a Russian ethnic nationalist, with necessary civnat aspects. The notion of Russian Nationalism is, in the corner of the world that @Stefferi speaks from, usually conflated with «Russian Imperialism» and just generally «Russian», which is to say, dangerous scum. There is a difference, however. Nationalism holds that the state exists for Russian people, while Imperialism says, in effect, that Russian people are to be abused and impoverished, so that they seek dignity and livelihood through the collective greatness of the state.
This distinction may be hard to parse for Russian neighbors, because 1) they live in nation states or indeed ethnostates, and 2) their political culture is democratic – putting it bluntly, attuned to sensibilities of a humble xenophobic peasant. That implies absence of reciprocity, game theory, or any other nerdy high decoupler shit we indulge in here. The late Krylov, a more extreme nationalist than Navalny but of the same basic mold, had spent his life trying to explain to Russians why this is the way to go. His quote comes to mind:
If Russia is part of Europe and the Judaeo-Christian civilization, then it is among European countries. And it should behave like a European country.
How do European countries behave?
1 No European country recognizes itself as «on the fringes», even if it, in fact, is (like Romania, Croatia or Lithuania, say). On the contrary, it invents a version of history in which it has at least a place of honor. At the slightest opportunity this place changes from honorable to central. Or, well, one of the central ones.
2 Arrangements in the country are determined by considerations of convenience of the nation inhabiting this country. Moreover, every European country tends to impose (by force or covertly) those convenient arrangements on everybody else. It is possible to deviate from this principle and submit to supranational forces - but then those must PAY for it. Preferably not even with money but with market shares and a place in the distribution of labor. And respect for the identity is NON-NEGOTIABLE.
3 All those who oppose or doubt theses 1 and 2 are representatives of Evil so concentrated that everyone who «thinks the European way» should fight against them and stoop to any low, for the nature of this Evil does not allow squeamishness. If they call themselves «Westernists» and «liberals», they deserve especially cruel extermination - for blasphemy.
And so on. The problem is that our «Westernists» DO NOT WANT to be European and do NOT consider Russia to be a part of Europe. They regard it as the COLONY of Europe, and themselves as colonists. And as such – yes, «sodomites will walk in his streets and enter his house and sit on his head».
A typical Westernist in Russia is someone like the social anthropologist Alexandra Eikhenwald, who has said just a month ago that «The Eichenwald family has contributed enough to Russian culture and we don't belong here any more». What contributors does she include in her boast?
Uncle-in-law Semyon Brudnik, commissar of the 3rd Insurgent Regiment of Bogun, the first Ukrainian division of the Red Army, commanded by Shchors, which was particularly cruel to Russian officers and intelligentsia. «Was head of the finance department at Mosfilm», together with her aunt actually raised her. Grandfather Alexander Eichenwald who scientifically justified collectivization – «He had a paradoxical way of thinking, and tried to get to the bottom of everything. He stood for social justice, joined the Bolshevik Party at 16, was a member of the Bukharin School and authored the first monograph on the Soviet economy» – which contributed to a famine and several million deaths under Stalin. Got purged. And another grandfather, the most fondly remembered, Moysey Gorb - NKVD Senior Major, Molchanov's loyal aide. Purged too. Wiki about Molchanov: «1931-1936. - Head of the Secret and Political Department of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) under the SNK - GUGB NKVD of the USSR, Commissar of State Security of the 2nd rank. As head of the key department of the GPU-NKVD of the USSR he was engaged in arresting all real and imaginary opponents of the Soviet power - peasants who opposed collectivization, Trotskyites, supporters of «rightwing opposition», clergymen, monarchists, ex-activists of minor parties, national movements, members of foreign communist parties, etc». Her parents already regressed to the mean: «dissident, poet, translator, critic», «teacher, human rights activist». All those names are mentioned as victims of oppression and great noble souls, with the quiet dignity of a lineage that has left an indelible mark in the history of Russian people.
But I digress. Hopefully you can understand, if not endorse, the fact that such candidates are non-starters in any sort of a democracy that asks Russians; and their friends too. Navalny is not a Westernist in this sense. Thus he is popular, yet harassed both within and without Russia. I suspect he came back after his poisoning precisely to avoid getting killed by some zealous «anticolonial» activist.
His position is unapologetically pro-Russian and pragmatic. Wars of expansion are bad because Russians die in them for no gain; some purported greatness of the Empire does not matter more than this toll. This calculation could have been different in another age; we should be content with how much was recognized after ages have changed. (The implication that things could conceivably change once more is not lost on readers seeking to find fault). Liberal parliamentary democracy is good: it allows for easier development and removal of corrupt parasites. Wokeness and anticolonial apologetics are bad because they get easily exploited by e.g. tribalist peoples from Caucasus. Racism bad: leads to delusions and precludes the possibility of cooperation with non-Russians who are amenable to that. Deportations of illegals and criminals; concerns about demographic replacement due to an open border with Muslim states; all that stuff. And so on and so forth – a systemic application of a position of a right-wing European politician who has a shot at winning, someone like Orban, Meloni or Zemmour. Even Trump, perhaps. That thread of his of his linked by @sliders1234, and the original Russian text, are both written from this perspective, and thus concede: commitment to 1991 borders, non-intervention in Ukrainian affairs, reparations, for the Russian benefit.
But consider QTs. «your country shouldn’t be developing. It should be paying for the development of the countries it hurt.» «The world needs sanctions to be sure russia doesn't have a possibility to start the war again» . «no no no. You guys have no say in it. You will pay reparations whether you like it or not. We don't care what is acceptable to you.» etc. This is a popular sentiment. Think of this for a moment, can you imagine an electable politician in any Western country – strike this, any country – being expected to cheer for his country' loss in a war? However, what is expected of Navalny is not that but unconditional submission and kowtowing. This is clearly a politically suicidal attitude, unless imposed by outside force; which is also admitted by some as the goal.
It's worth pausing on Galeev's tactics. Here he frames Navalny's old gun rights ad as part of a campaign advocating violence. It is unseemly, but the situation with guns in Russia is that they're mainly owned by cops and [ethnic] mafia. The video about deportation of illegals that he opens with is supposed to enrage the same crowd that hyperventilates on Twitter about genocidal Trumpists; it explicitly denounces violence of the sort that Galeev seeks to pin on Navalny for the rest of the thread.
Navalny of that era is a shitposter and an equal opportunity dehumanizer – calling Georgians during the war «rodents» (it's a one letter substitution), depicting ethnic criminals as the Men in Black cockroach, labeling Russian Neo-Nazis «Caries», with solutions being respectively: an HQ missile strike, legalizing guns, and «sanitizing». But also, arguably, he was a deradicalizing force. This trend persists: he offers Russians a way to step back and make amends with a semblance of self-respect.
But that is no good to «Russia experts» from Baltics or Poland who drive these decisions in Washington, nor to peoples near the border. Russia is a historical threat. Therefore, no positive – for Russians – movement ought to be supported, while separatism and all harmful tendencies – including tyranny, corruption, militarism! – aided and exploited. Helping the enemy die is worth the temporary pain, they think.
So even if Navalny miraculously took power and proved to be the opposite of Putin in all ways that matter, he'd still be decried as a tyrant, and likely a worse one. The only good Russian is a dead one; the only good Czar is one who presides over Russian deaths.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Distributed Gish Gallop
Earliest mention I see via camas.unddit.com is here back on the mothersub by @TracingWoodgrains; the original comment by /u/saladatmilliways is unavailable (Culture War Roundup for the week of June 25, 2018). Maybe there's some way to find a copy but a quick look didn't help.
Checking out that thread was interesting, and of course nostalgic. Much was lost.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Actually looks more like a misplaced response.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
As @Amadan notes, vintologi was removed for violating generic rules we have, not because his beliefs are considered morally noxious. It isn't even clear he's uniquely bad. We have a self-identifying pedofascist here, if you haven't noticed – but he's not an obsessed manifestoposting troll, so he is tolerated.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).
From a Russian (headquartered in Riga, Latvia, ofc) liberal globohomo news portal Meduza.io:
At Berlinale 2023, Manodrome, a psychological thriller starring Jesse Eisenberg, was screened
You immediately recognise the protagonist - not Ralphie himself, but the type he embodies. A frustrated, lonely, struggling to cope with his impulses, obsessed with childhood trauma, a taxi driver in a metropolis at night: a direct descendant of Travis Bickle from Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Nowadays, such a loner drives an Uber. The director brilliantly defines his character in the opening scene: he's looking too intently in the rear-view mirror at a female passenger who has decided to breastfeed an infant right in the car. Calling the driver a pervert, she exits halfway through. In fact, Ralphie's interest can be explained. His girlfriend Sal is pregnant and about to give birth. Struggling with irritation and fatigue, she ploughs on at the supermarket cash register while Ralphie, who has recently lost his job, drives customers around. The only outlet in his life is the gym, where he works out to a deafening heavy metal soundtrack.
[...] The only hope for success comes when the guy is welcomed into their circle by members of the mysterious «Manodrome», an elite fraternity of men. Its members call themselves «sons» and its leaders «fathers». In this phantom club, Trengov has developed the dreams of hundreds of thousands of alpha males, venting their frustrations on the universe in the social networks. He has created the perfect ersatz family of incels, where women are not allowed.
The word «incels», as you can see, is helpfully disambiguated:
From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibacy", meaning "involuntary abstinence" [rus]. These are people who feel unable to find a sexual partner, despite wanting to do so.
Fair enough. However, doesn't this seem at odds with the text around, where incels are simultaneously alpha males who also avoid the company of women? Web archive, yesterday's snapshot:
From the English "incel", an abbreviation for "involuntary celibates". These are people who have completely renounced sex because of their own belief that they are incapable of building a romantic relationship.
I think this is telling. The notion that men can be genuinely not guilty of some failure relating to relations of sexes – whether to score or to sire – is about as far outside the Overton window as HBD. It just feels weird to those progressive journalists and the whole «Cathedral». There must be some mistake, or barring that, a conspiracy of alpha male incels who just refuse to pull their weight... It can't be that the solution lies in any conceivable change to female behavior, except even more emancipation, even greater triumph over toxic masculinity. Так победим.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The answer is that none of this is true, China was literally never (in historical record) as backward as Africa, despite value judgements of some racist whites who pooh-poohed remarkable Chinese traits as «mere» industriousness and servility or some such. China was in a very bad place very recently; but it has not been barbaric for millenia.
It's disingenuous to compare, say, modern North Korea (73 years life expectancy, universal literacy, zero AIDS, regimented functional society, nukes, ≈$1300 GDP per capita) and Mozambique (61 years life expectancy, 63.42% literacy, 13% AIDS, anarcho-tyranny, no industry, $1300 GDP per capita), and claim this is an argument against HBD. This is an argument against GDP, if anything. Likewise disingenuous, only for more complex reasons, to compare China and Africa as a whole.
When Sub-Saharan Africa has had stability, peace, and relatively good policies, it's prospered more than China: see Botswana. And I don't accept Botswana's diamonds as an explanation
See what?
65 years life expectancy, 86.82% literacy, 20.8% AIDS, all economy runs on a De Beers mining contract. Botswana is maybe a big success by African standards, but that success belies the hypothesis that Africans with unusually good policies would just converge with non-Africans in all other things that matter – matter for maintaining stability, peace and good policies, too. So it will not be a huge surprise if Botswana one day just fails.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Don't be so confident! He might have required external help, but I still would expect him to give @f3zinker a run for his money.
In general, blind geniuses may have much less of a problem with spatial reasoning than one naively expects.
Antoine’s Necklace is not a mere curiosity and has very interesting properties. One would suppose that constructing such a structure would require considerable visualization, which is indeed true. However one of the most interesting things about this knot is that it was formulated and studied by Louis Antoine, who was blind. After he lost his eyesight, the famous mathematician Henri Lebesguesuggested to him that he study topology.
I have noticed (it is a common observation) that it is almost a rule that mathematicians who are blind are usually geometers/topologists. Such a correlation can not be mere coincidence.
Before reading Sossinsky’s book which also mentions G. Ya. Zuev as another influential blind topologist, the two best examples that I was aware of were L. S. Pontryagin and the great Leonhard Euler. Pontryagin is perhaps the first blind mathematician that I had heard of who made seminal contributions to numerous areas of mathematics (Algebraic Topology, Control Theory and Optimization to name a few). Some of his contributions are very abstract while some such as those in control theory are also covered in advanced undergrad textbooks (that is how I heard of him).
Pontryagin lost his eyesight at the age of 14 and thus made all of his illustrious contributions (and learnt most of his mathematics) while blind. The case was a little different for Euler. He learnt most of his earlier mathematics while not blind. Born in 1707, he almost lost eyesight in the right eye in 1735. After that his eyesight worsened, losing it completely in 1766 to cataract.
“It is not surprising at all that almost all blind mathematicians are geometers. The spatial intuition that sighted people have is based on the image of the world that is projected on their retinas; thus it is a two (and not three) dimensional image that is analysed in the brain of a sighted person. A blind person’s spatial intuition on the other hand, is primarily the result of tile and operational experience. It is also deeper – in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. […].
recent biomathematical studies have shown that the deepest mathematical structures, such as topological structures, are innate, whereas finer structures, such as linear structures are acquired. Thus, at first, the blind person who regains his sight does not distinguish a square from a circle: He only sees their topological equivalence. In contrast, he immediately sees that a torus is not a sphere […]”
I imagine, in my mediocrity, that crosswords are in fact much easier solved using a visible 2D grid as the foundation. Who knows if that's true. Maybe «seeing» some modular-alphabetic arithmetic, or word embeddings rotating through each other and locking upon letter matches, would make for a faster solution.
Learn something new everyday indeed.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I guess It's how Brits supposedly invented Brahmins to delegate them power over the oppressed proletarian masses. Turns out, made them genetically more Aryan too. And of course language families are spread by emancipated women who love traveling and acquainting themselves with fascinating diverse cultures – not with the edge of the battle axe.
Once you notice that those 20th century historians and anthropologists started from a very particular, very self-absorbed theoretical lens, you develop a certain... prior for every time you hear about some clearly hereditary group being a social construct.
That said, @veqq is correct that Soviets, who took that lens as both an explanatory framework for things that work and, logically enough, an instruction manual, did invent a bunch of peoples, or at the very least redefined their distinctions and populations –Tatars and Bashkirs are the most glaring example.
Well this went poorly. You look like you are going hard into your bonsai-trimming power trip. Do you plan to monetize this place of what?
but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem"
Well, what else could we say – that it was a mistake to commit a stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast? I believe such regrets are expressed as silent evaporation.
Are you impressed with the intellectual culture Bakkot et al. have built? Get a load of those mod notes. Be honest. It is objectively a normie culture, a culture of shaming and shooing and unquestionable sanctified priors instead of rational discussion. When the choice is between scholarly epicycles in the manner of Marxist theory and a possibly more parsimonious explanation, they are being told to praise the amazing complexity of the former or shut up and «go elsewhere». Elsewhere where if not here?
I realize that «normie» is just a psychologically healthy normal Hajnali human, and as one of those you too might have a hard time distinguishing between very consistent «shame on you, cringe, do better, imagine your mom reading that, we do not need this, removed» etc. signals and a reason to value one's opinion less. But those are still different things and the former is still poison for any serious rationalist-ish place, and is still far less desirable than «dogpiling» in the form of tonally correct objections. At least that's how I see our value function.
if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting
Really? You would prefer people who «read the room» over people who can't – as in, who believe that «no culture war» should apply fairly and not privilege a side in it? The mods implicitly precommit to a culture war position that requires righteous combat, under the justification of «no culture war». This is a deceptive signal, and a profanation of all that the sub stood for. Are you saying you endorse that? If even we pick people who are adept in reading the room over autistics irritated with inconsistencies and double standards, where are people who are bad at that supposed to go – straight to nazi imageboards?
right now the traffic honestly isn't bad
It's not so much the traffic problem as diversity problem. And I do not mean political compass distribution but even just topic distribution. More people means less banding. For example, nobody has mentioned Turkish earthquake (okay, here) – a NATO state has suffered a major disaster, tens of thousands dead, possibly immense geopolitical ramifications, partially because Erdogan has appointed his fellow right-wing theologian grifters throughout the system. I might do a writeup as a community service and as the resident Turk, but more people could help with such stuff.
Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.
Have you not understood my argument? People uncomfortable with /r/slatestarcodex modding are leftier than the median user here, and realistically as far left as you will get now, barring a complete reinvention of this place. You will never again get the «diversity» we had on Reddit by virtue of dipping into Scott's captive leftwing audience, unless you ruin TheMotte in the manner not much different from Bakkot's – and then, you'll probably just chase everyone away, like you've repeatedly threatened to do.
It is inevitable that the discussion evolves and some opinions disappear, while others emerge. This is what it means to have a honest non-compelled discussion. If you fetishize access to the frozen equivalent of Scott's captive audience from 2010's, with their particular distribution of opinion, over the value of this community where genuinely all hypotheses can be discussed and the worst that could happen is «dogpiling» – then you, like many people, are a rigid old fart fixed on the object level, unable to recognize the worth of your creation, and should stop wasting our time, much less soliciting our help and money. Pull the plug ASAP.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Exactly my point.
Well, @ZorbaTHut, how's that for a recruiting pipeline? I gather you still haven't decided what to do. I foresee your objections along the lines of diversity, but people who still hang around captured subs might well be the closest thing to a leftie you can get.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Yeah, could be phrased better. I referred not to the evidential superiority of my own opinion, but to the possibility to entertain any opinion you deem better-supported – not just the most plausible thing still allowed by Bakkot. They are explicitly prohibited from discussing HBD to any serious extent, beyond a snarky hint or a perfunctory denunciation. Sure, some of that is community sentiment. Consider such brilliant rationalist logic as:
Jumping straight to an IQ answer is antagonistic and uncharitable to a whole group of people, and more importantly, a thought-ending cliché that's likely making you stop looking for actual answers.
But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.
As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I am not a total relativist. What is the difference between dogpiling and fair criticism of intransigence? This depends on merits of the case, and a proper rationalist should at least entertain the possibility that he's egregiously wrong about a subject he has not studied, thus take an apparent dogpiling – or «mansplaining» or any other sin from the list of progressive anti-cognitive memes – in stride.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is a strange notion of an echo chamber. By this standard, any group that has reached effective consensus on a partisan issue is an echo chamber; in reality this is a necessary (arguably: in my view, 4chan/pol/ is an echochamber despite it being filled with contradictory bullshit of the same genre), but not a sufficient condition.
The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
If you dislike this, consider organizing a pipeline from there to here, privately or publicly. Bakkot says:
As a reminder, culture war topics are forbidden. That includes "maybe these people are genetically predisposed to be lower IQ or otherwise less suited to build modern economies". I've removed a few subthreads to that effect. Please don't make any more of them. If you'd like to have a discussion about that particular hypothesis you'll need to go elsewhere.
This pissy attitude openly vilifying the very clear and well-argued line of thought in the corpus of writing of the guy he owes the community to is deserving of some pushback. I'm permabanned there (for mocking Kevin Bird's beliefs), but if I were not, I'd have written something like «and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community». What's he going to do? There are no normie reddit rules against promoting other places, far as I know. Will he remove it as culture warring unto itself?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Since you are clearly aware of Jensen's answers on the matter and perhaps of this issue's discussion in e.g. Wade's Facts that need to be explained– how do you figure skepticism is a tenable position? Sure, maybe the genotypic potential of those Sub-Saharans isn't in the 50s or even low 70s like Lynn et all argue, maybe they'd get to 80's with a proper societal infrastructure (which is to say, under a regime they themselves fail to establish). I personally buy that at those low levels, in conditions of scarcity, every minor institutional slip-up can lead to compounding loss on the environmental side: they dumber you are, the more you fail, and the more you fail, the lower your IQ goes, so equilibriums of underperformance of groups separated by a few genotypic points may be more than an SD apart. Okay.
But we have a great control case in the form of American Yoruba-White mixed population, that displays differences which map perfectly onto the HBD framework . Unless one takes seriously the hypothesis that systemic American racism/Black culture degrades environmental conditions of affected American children to the level of a third world nation, in a manner that is resistant to adoptions, educational interventions and so on, and allows some to become billionaires and public darlings and political figures, but exclusively through sports and entertainment and never anything recruiting the extreme right tail of the distribution for legible tasks (and so on, and so on, and so on) – it seems inevitable that HBD explains at least a great chunk of the disparity. I won't even discuss that we've had some progress on education PGS delta since then, because obviously those results are easy to suspect as being underpowered. But... it's really hard to see how HBD could not have a substantial effect.
Even if they simply show more abstract failures like difficulties with planning, at the scale of a ten-year-old's type of planning, this should show up pretty quickly during normal conversation. But for the model to be true, the actual matter has to be yet more abstract still: Equatorial Guinea has more than its fair share of problems and corruption and lackluster decisions, but they're not The Three Stooges.
Have you spoken to a functional adult person who tested below 70? My impression of Haiti stories is that they really have next to no rigorous abstract thinking but have otherwise healthy nervous systems – as would follow from the conjecture that White/Asian IQ advantage is a product or relatively recent selection and not-as-smart but functional peoples have existed and survived in the wild for a long time. They talk like... rather dim but normal people I know. And not to dehumanize anyone, but it doesn't surprise you that animals with literally zero ability to take an IQ test or have their g measured orient themselves in space well enough, does it?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Sigh. A Harvard medical ethicist of all people ought to know the nosological difference between «actually literally retarded» and «very low IQ», because those are, in fact, different conditions.
Then again, maybe it's the opposite and his job is to not know the difference – who am I to tell, not being Harvard material myself? Like the Chinese say,
“We need to teach machines not only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”
And more is expected of experts.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
seemingly for the reasons he thought they would (I.e Russias bad demographics and obtaining a more defensible border with Europe).
How do you know those were reasons that actually factored into the decision? That's just Zeihan's own hobby horse, he always explains things with demographics, hell, he predicts AI being essentially a nothingburger because the world will start running out of 20-somethings in 30 years!
For all we know Putin was mainly driven by the impression that his subversion network is successful. Russian demographics are at least better than Ukrainian, and on par/perhaps better than European. Zeihan's «natural borders» story is, uh, I'm not sure it's even a sincere argument – he oscillates between treating it as a realistic consideration and some Russian neurosis from the time of Mongols and warfare dominated by low-tech infantry.
This orthodoxy, opposed to your orthopraxy (incidentally, all of Judaism is more like it) might just be the downside of individualism. Americans are descendants of people who have chosen their own destiny (except, I suppose, ADOS), the can-do nation. If your religion is bullshit with nice Chestertonian fences, then that's a bummer – why not go for the one that also has tradition but isn't bullshit? Or maybe has cooler bullshit and more rad tradition to boot – with golden icons and UFOs and other bling? Really, why not have it all? Why cope? The ultra-Orthodox (or perhaps it'd be correct to say ultra-Orthopraxic) are cognizant of the fact that they will never receive more support than in their extreme corner of the tribe, nor will they have hope of such guarantees that the society around cares about the healthy perpetuation of their bloodline. Europeans you speak of are simply selected for conformity and brokenness. Americans are builders of globe-spanning business empires that solve problems you didn't even know you could have. They take spirituality to be a matter of finding good consultancy. Surely, if my enterprise works, at least one of those must work too!
But on the other hand, I reject the framing. Americans are simply victims of professional brainwashing; they correctly believe the required consultancies exist, and are oblivious to having been engineered this way by them.
For the masters of the cult, your cynical attitude of going through the motions to reap a modest benefit is quite a problem; it's at best a necessary cope when the mappings and keys are lost, and you can no longer afford or guide zealotry, but also cannot divorce it from sincerity. Such in the late age of a dying faith. How do you know what the benefit worth seeking, while discarding the mumbo-jumbo, even is? Common sense? But common sense is the product of what one feels to be the true religion, because it is not even questioned – its truth apparent viscerally, in senses of dread, cringe, exhilaration, craving, even apathy. American betters want Americans not to accept some mere redistribution, but to desire racial equity on the fundamental level of terminal values following from basic ontology. Their racial religion is fertile and young.
And of course plausible deniability helps in the long run.
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