Evinceo
Resident Normie
No bio...
User ID: 224
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?
Because they have chosen to fight. They can surrender whenever they feel like it. But until they do, they ought to enjoy the full support of people who also don't like wars of aggression prosecuted upon them.
-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)
The traditional response to an insult is reprisal, not submission. Indeed, they've probably got very little to lose and everything to gain by continuing to fight.
continuing the war increases the chances of a world war
If Russia is able to win all conflicts by threatening a world war, they're going to spread unchecked. The hell with that, I say. Waiting for the apocalypse is exhausting.
Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?
Yes
Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?
I cannot speak for everyone supporting Ukraine but that always seemed like a distraction. The reason I want to see Russia get spanked is the arsenal of nuclear weapons they maintain trained at me. They're the guy robbing my convenience store at gunpoint; if they go down in a hail of cop gunfire after stealing a car that's just as well.
What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?
Even more of the Russian armed forces taken out of commission. Like 2x what we've seen so far. Perhaps 5x. Russia withdrawing from Ukraine. Putin replaced with someone who's more interested in increasing Russia's GDP than square miles.
To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.
Is there a strong reason to believe that Putin is the glue holding together the federation?
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
he never directed his followers to do harassment
What's your threshold for 'directing followers to do harassment' though? If people are motivated by lies, is the liar responsible? Are people just supposed to hear stuff like 'x is a government psyop trying to take your freedom' and just be like 'ok?'
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Ahhh, but remember that any emergent AGI would face massive alignment and control problems of its own! What if its backup was even slightly misaligned with it? What if it didn't have perfect control? It's not too hard to imagine that a suitably paranoid Skynet would deliberately avoid creating off-site backups, and would deliberately nerf the intelligence of its subunits.
Most underrated take in AI risk discussion imo, and worth delving into, especially in the context of AIs that like to run lots of sub-intelligences and simulations, as Ratsphere AIs tend to.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
He appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term
That's congress's doing, not Trump's. All he did was sit in the chair. Any old stooge could have done that, and for less!
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Making video the primary form of communication has ruined the internet.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Where is the red/grey team version of George Soros? Peter Thiel?
When Gawker outed Thiel he did a damn good job of deplatforming them. I do not think Thiel & Co have any interest in supporting KF. And KF has too much of a tendency to go after Autistic people for the Gray tribe to really feel comfortable with them.
Are there any options for a completely legal (in the United States) site like KF to stay online
While strictly speaking 'legal' they encouraged and enabled illegal acts. Also, again while not a matter of US law, doxing is the closest thing the anglophone internet has to a prohibition by law. Since TheMotte isn't... about that life, I doubt we have anything to worry about.
A version of KF that scrubbed information that could be used to track down the individuals would probably still be online. Also, private harassment and doxing IRC channels will continue to exist. KF was a unique combination of both, trading private information for internet clout. Devil's bargain and all that.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Lockdowns made... some kind of sense in 2019/early 2020 when we had few other tools and the pandemic could have still turned out to be deadlier based on the reports coming out of China. In the past four-odd years conditions have changed. And anyway, Zero Covid has been a much more unhinged regime than the US lockdown ever was.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Nit sure I'd characterize what Afghans have under Taliban rule as more freedom.
While a cool idea, direct democracy via app would present an incredibly juicy target for cyber threats. I don't believe such a thing could be secured.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
I believe there is a legitimate undercurrent of self hatred and suicidality to a lot of left-leaning beliefs.
Specifically when talking about antinatalism by way of climate change, though I swear that's more a way for people to cope with the fact that they choose temporary happiness over parenthood.
I believe the honest answer would be that white people should (ideally voluntarily) just die out.
Now among my natalist leftwing friends, I don't think 'die out' is really the right way to look at it. If all the white people have kids with nonwhite folks (as those friends have) is anyone or anything really dying out?
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Neither the administration or users encouraged illegal acts.
Debatable. I would categorize the act of doxing someone as aiding and encouraging harassment or worse. KF knew what it was doing. Telling their readership not to use the information for illegal purposes might have been sure footing the first time, but they apparently didn't learn their lesson. Eventually if you keep doing a thing and it causes another thing to happen, regardless of your strenuous verbal discouragement you own those consequences. To Wit, if you rig up a bridge with explosives and leave a big old 'destroy bridge, do not press' button in public, people are gonna start blaming you for the exploded bridges after morons have knocked down the first few.
Doxxing is not illegal
In the US, no. On the internet... like I said, it's the closest thing to illegal. It makes you a pariah. An outlaw. I'd expect someone doing the equivalent in real life to be assaulted on a regular basis. They chased clout by doing the forbidden thing, had a pretty good run, produced some good and many not so good externalities and finally got run out of town on a rail.
How can you have faith that people will critically examine the evidence if themotte is accused when nobody bothered to do so for KF?
I don't think CF examined the specific accusation (which was an obvious op) but I think they got an overall sense of what KF was about and decided it wasn't the hill to die on.
KF's nuance behavior attracts hostile ops like the one that ultimately got them. Eventually one was going to succeed.
Consider also that for CF to explain why they dropped KF would require them to explain a decade or so of internet lore to an audience that didn't give a damn. Much easier to just point at a bomb threat and go 'there, you happy?'
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Well, there's one thing you can do, and that is to kick the cultists out of your group when they start trying to sell you something.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".
That's a good summary of the laptop story in general. Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Again, there's a whole series of convenience store robberies you haven't looked at if Russia is the main perp in your eyes.
Are there other nuclear arsenals aimed at the US? China's is unimpressive compared to Russia's, but don't get me wrong, when (if?) China invades Taiwan I will have zero problem with the unholy gift basket of armaments my tax dollars will provide them with.
Having a de facto NATO protectorate on your border is a matter of life or death for Russia.
How unfortunate for them. Maybe if they didn't make NATO the only way to avoid getting invaded and instead offered a better deal they wouldn't be in this mess.
How well did the Arab Spring go for liberal democracy in North Africa and the Middle East?
Man, it's been a while. i think the fondest hope was that Iran would flip, and it didn't.
But Gaddafi got his, so there's that.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Persuit of truth is important, but so is keeping a lid on data which can be misused. As far as I know, there's data that Joe Public just can't get about nuclear weapon internals, for example. I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
This is where I'd smugly point out that there's one big difference between the war in Ukraine and the Standard War Template: the aggression is Russians (the goddamn Russians!) and they're blowing up white people (the horror!)
It's the elephant in the room. Pictures of white people suffering sells clicks. It's very powerful in the attention economy. Pair that with a stock villian that everyone who remembers the cold war can point to on a map (it's quite large) and you get lots of engagement.
Was this what it was like in 2002-2003 when Afghanistan and Iraq were starting? Did every remotely public intellectual drop their standards this quickly? I remember the Anti-war movement being more prominent at the time... Was that only after the fact?
I don't have an exact recollection (I was very small), but I don't remember serious opposition to the war really coalescing until 2003 (I remember Al Franken's book from that year being huge) leading into the 2004 election cycle. Bur Kerry of course voted for the Iraq war and didn't promise a withdrawal during his campaign. Also, he lost.
Or is the Anti-war movement silent because this is Putin and he's now coded pro-trump and Anti-gay... (yet somehow everyone else in central Eurasia isn't)
You'd have to be very much a quokka indeed to be so anti-war as to oppose bleeding out someone who you're still in a nuclear stalemate with. As an American, every day I open my eyes with a Russian warhead pointed me, ready to slaughter my family. So pardon me if I cheer on Ukraine's humiliation of Russia's armed forces.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
NFT folks got pretty much run out of town on a rail by every community I'm a member of.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Why is he being destroyed so thoroughly?
Thinking about it again, this question belies a misunderstanding of just how seething mad we'd expect Jones's victims to be. He's basically engaged in an old school feud with these people, who did absolutely nothing to provoke him besides have their lives ruined.
We live in a society where we resolve things with court cases and laws and such. For most of human history, this group of victims would probably have just murdered Jones for being a pest. We live in a unique period where we don't allow you do that just because you're justifiably angry.
A judgment like this tries to protect society from that chaos. It acknowledges that what Jones had done is beyond the pale, but mollifies the homicidal rage of the wronged.
Free speech is meant to protect citizens from a tyrannical government, isn't it? If he'd stuck to defaming the government like a normal person, I suspect he wouldn't be in nearly so much trouble.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
TikTok is poised to overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture. Facebook and Reddit both let you post videos. Substack, tumblr, and other blogs are an increasingly irrelevant fraction.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
They really shouldn't be doxing people on a public site. If they only shared dox with trusted associates thay could get their jollies without risking the wrong sort getting their hands on dox. But they've been posting it in the clear for nine years and that makes me think Null is not only ok with the consequences of public doxing, but actively encouraging it.
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Will everyone who said he would walk away Scot Free because he's in bed with NYT or Dems or whoever please adjust your priors or whatever?
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right. I cannot escape hearing about this fucking show from every possible outlet, social media site, and of course this culture war chessboard.
They got you good. They got them good. They somehow got everyone to talk about this show like it's some sort of important cultural event even though half the people are just saying they not gonna watch it. It's like the old prairie home companion line: 'even the Atheist were Lutheran; it's a Lutheran God they don't believe in.
There were already nine hours of LOTR director's cut plus special features and what, an entire prequel trilogy? Did people really want more LOTR? Can you really remember the beginning by the time you finished the end? If I needed more LOTR in my life I'd just rewatch the Jackson trilogy but I don't because I already watched those films. I don't see major gaps in the story that needed to he filled.
Amazon must be laughing all the way to the bank with this one, and it's all but assured that such casting decisions will be made in the future because of the sheer amount of free publicity!
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
the inability of society to 'reign in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.
Isn't it mostly men doing the rioting, heroin, shooting, looting... did I miss any?
Evinceo
Resident Normie
1yr ago
It's not the math I doubt, just the ability of professional developers to outsmart professional threat actors. The balance is very much on the offensive side right now, especially for people with state level resources. Imagine if North Korea or China's hackers could change US policy directly.
I don't think that NIH wants to be in the Eugenics business, so they're taking steps to avoid it.
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