Eetan
4mo ago
Add some context to this hypothetical scenario:
1/There is whole huge continent out there, that is 99.9% white with whites in power, with numerous countries, and most of them are infernal hellholes of starvation, plague and war with absolutely nothing resembling any "civil" or "human" rights.
2/ You do not know it, and if someone told you, you would refuse to believe him. You believe that all wealth of the country was created by white laborers working for ten bucks a hour, and if the black bloodsuckers exploiting you went away, you will be fabulously rich and live like people in Hollywood movies.
Eetan
3mo ago
Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
Eetan
11mo ago
If it was about secret bioweapon research in order to DOMINATE THE WORLD, this whole ordeal would have at least some grim tragic dignity.
It is not. It is science working as intended, scientists working on their publications, grinding up their citation scores and metrics.
All in the open and still going on. Few thousands at most are playing Russian roulette with the whole human race, for some shitty papers no one will ever read.
AND HUMAN RACE IS FINE WITH IT.
Yes, I share your blackpill.
On the other hand, this situation had been going for a long time. Remember 1977 flu when 20 year old virus strain suddenly appeared somewhere in Northern China, spread all over the world and carried away few hundred thousands nobodies?
It was clear to the professional virologist community what was going on, but they kept ther silence in proper spirit of omerta both in West and East. Admirable devotion.
Eetan
3mo ago
Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week.
This makes it even worse. Running world super power on feels, making the fate of the world depend on how well the Imperator slept today, is unsatisfactory.
This shows once again that populism, meant as politics without theory is not a solution.
Answer to bad map is good map, not throwing away all maps and just running around in circles.
Eetan
3mo ago
Nuclear power is still banned of course.
Yes, this is the most egregious failing of our world from Dath Ilan rational paradise perspective.
Imagine alternate world that is just like us, except it has problems with food. Not like us, problems of too much food, but problems of not enough food.
In this world, in richest countries, people spend about half of their income on food, the poor regularly go hungry and it is not uncommon for the poorest to starve to death. And in poor countries, massive famines killing millions are normal occurence.
The world does not like it, and tries hard to remedy it. Every day, there is new government initiative to solve the food problem, every day there is new startup business promising new and revolutionary ersatz food from sawdust and coal. But the problem persists.
You, as visitor shocked with their plight, offer an obvious (to you) solution.
"Do you know you could use pesticides to kill pests and this way to raise agricultural yield by order of magnitude?"
"Here are some very simple ones your chemical industry can easily manufacture."
"This way, no one will have to go hungry, food will be in such abundance that even homeless could be as fat as millionaires!"
The locals, shocked and horrified, answer:
"This is organophosphate chemistry! This is NERVE GAS! Do you want to kill us all? Are you Adenoid Hynkel, the most evil man that ever lived?"
Eetan
4mo ago
In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen.
As spook world "standard candle" we can always use one well proven evil conspiracy, the infamous MKULTRA (and adjacent projects).
For 20+ years, in peace time, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of professionals engaged in Nazi/Imperial Japan style extremely unethical human experimentation. And it was all successfully kept secret (until handful of files who escaped destruction were discovered by accident).
All commonly proposed mechanisms to uncover and stop such nefarious activity failed.
No one talked (or if someone talked, no one listened to him)
No investigative journalists uncovered this scandal.
No elected representative of the people did anything.
No conspiracy theorist found what is going on, when MKULTRA was revving up, tinfoil hat crowd debated whether Eisenhower is willing Communist agent or naive Communist dupe.
One exception was this book from 1967, describes mind conditioning methods similar used by MKULTRA
If course, in the book the perpetrators are nasty South American Nahzees who want to manipulate stock market and get rich, not American patriots bravely fighting communism (and the book was, anyway, just drop that vanished in ocean of conspiracy/parapolitic writing at the time).
Eetan
4mo ago
No one even slightly mainstream questions that America in WW2 was good guy.
If "WW2 revisionism" means the idea that the major combatants, Nazis and Soviet, were just about equally bad (Nazis 100% and Soviets 99,9% evil), it is not universal point of view, but, by now, common one that can be published in mainstream academic press.
The implications are now just starting to percolate into mainstream debate, and the question "Was it right choice for High Elves to join fight between Orcs and Ogres, and if so, on whose side? is now open.
Eetan
4mo ago
If there was a large Jewish community being slaughtered in Syria, Israel would defend them militarily and they’d be right to do it. Christians get slaughtered anywhere in the world and Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less. Why would people want to join a faith whose followers can’t be bothered to stand up for each other?
There was large Jewish community in Syria.
It left, mostly to Israel. Israel is defending persecuted Jews by giving them asylum.
By analogy, does Tucker Carlson supports open borders for Christians? Does he advocate that any Christian in the world should be let into United States?
Eetan
3mo ago
"Guess which people are more conformist and which are more bold and daring?"
Descendants of serfs who were subjugated to their lords for millenia with little protest, or descendants of peasants who were continuously revolting for all recorded history? Hard guess.
Eetan
4mo ago
In practice, nuclear weapons have some tactical uses,
In practice, no one knows.
On both sides of iron curtain, thousands of books were written about tactics and strategy of nuclear warfare, but it is all, so far, only theory. It would not be surprising if real WWIII proves all of it as useful as was pre-1914 military science shown useful in WWI.
Eetan
3mo ago
Czech Republic (one of the most atheistic countries on earth)
Here come bad news for both atheistic and religious talking points. Czechia (together with former East Germany) is indeed one of world's most atheistic countries.
Atheists would predict it would be earthly paradise of science, logic and reason, theists would predict it would be hell of earth, charnel house of ceaseless rape and murder.
In reality, it is ordinary small European country, not much different from neigboring heavily religious Poland. Maybe the real black pill is that religion (or lack of it) is really not much important.
Eetan
11mo ago
I disagree. Wanting Trump dead is political. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, and you draw it here. I feel it's arbitrary.
Line where free speech ends and crime begins had been drawn, in US, as "incitement to imminent lawless action".
"Billy Bob deserves to be hanged" - free speech.
"Here lives Billy Bob, go and hang him!" - incitement.
Eetan
3mo ago
No, this is a code for: "we want traditional European urbanism without traditional European rule of law"
Eetan
4mo ago
Why are NTY journalists who are literally on less than subsistence pay higher on the totem pole than your average chemical industry executive? Power. They can ruin that executive and make him kill himself if they round up enough of their colleagues. You can't buy that. Billionaires have tried and failed.
This is like saying that cop is more powerful than CEO, because cop can arrest the CEO not the other way around.
NYT can indeed "ruin" even otherwise rich and powerful people, but the decision to "ruin" someone is not made in any democratic way (by "rounding up" friends) and is made far above any "subsistence pay" regular journalist.
Eetan
4mo ago
In related news, coronavirus research in Wuhan lab goes on.
No need to be worried, plebes. Trust USG, trust CCP, trust the experts.
Eetan
4mo ago
Looked up the first person, Jeremy Kaufmann. More recent xeets:
Today I will be doing my duty to help save the word libertarian
Regardless what you think about Ukraine war, this perfect representation of Greedy American stereotype is not the best way to win hearts and minds for cause of libertarianism.
Most generous thing to say is that Mr. Kaufmann should concentrate on New Hampshire gasoline tax and leave world politics to others.
Eetan
4mo ago
If The Donald wrecks the economy enough to ensure blue landslide, then nothing of this would matter.
Eetan
4mo ago
how evacuating Crimea results in Russia collapsing.
Losing Crimea implies total destruction of Russian army as organized force, and this definitely means, if not Russia collapsing, Putin's system collapsing, with unpleasant results for Putin (and his friends who fail to swith sides early enough).
What, in this scenario, comes after Putin is debatable.
Eetan
11mo ago
There is none.
In 1980's, Soviet system was completely discredited among all classes and strata of population, the more educated the more so. There were not "true believers" anymore, there was no equivalent of people voluntarily defending the Party line (and professional agitators were despised by everyone, including themselves), no equivalent of people sincerely putting "in this house, we believe in the Party" signs.
It was age of universal distrust in any authority (mixed with credulous trust in astrologers, shamans, self proclaimed prophets, faith healers, UFO contactees etc...)
Eetan
3mo ago
They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population)
True if big, but is it big? I am really interested to see comprehensible statistics of miracles per capita.
Eetan
3mo ago
Xi is taxing his subjects and giving that tax as a subsidy to his industries
And now China has this industry, that can be in case of need repurposed to, for example, drone industry.
National security was always, since the beginning , the actual reason for protectionism, not "our precious jerbs".
Back in the old times of wooden ships and iron men, shipbuilding in England had no economic sense. Timber, hemp(for ropes), pitch, tar and other naval stores had to be imported from Baltic. It would be economically efficient to build the ships in Sweden and concentrate on wool and cloth production.
(then war would came, and England would have no ships, only sheep)
Eetan
3mo ago
This is supposed to be discussion forum of lasting value, not fleeting disposable shitpost zone.
Just reserve the power of deleting posts to moderators only. If you posted by mistake something that revealed classified info, broke some anti-terrorist law or compromised your OPSEC, the delete button will blank it temporarily and notify the moderators, and they will decide whether to keep it or not.
Eetan
4mo ago
In this clip, Sam basically fails to articulate a single moral principle beyond "Well, that's just what our society had decided is right and wrong" and when dude says society can change it's mind over time, Sam's only meek response is "Please don't".
Pitiable performance indeed, and the fact that we still have such debates is even more pitiable.
Morality based on divine command is, historically, extremely late development (and it is debatable how effective it was). 2000+ years ago, if someone asked: "Why shouldn't I rob, rape and kill my fellow citizens of my city?" the answer was not "Zeus forbids it" or "After you die, Zeus will torture you forever in Tartarus".
The answer was, TL;DR: "Because good person does not do such things, and you want to be heckin' good person" and "If you are caught, you will be crucified/impaled/skinned alive/fed to wild beasts".
Eetan
4mo ago
This is one of the drawbacks of a purely spiritual religion that isn’t concerned with genetic ties.
This is drawback of being world religion with billions of adherents. If you really tried to "defend" every persecuted Christian everywhere, you would find yourself in perpetual Iraq style quagmires all over the world (which would be rather suboptimal situation even for world's first super power).
Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.
What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.
Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
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