Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
No bio...
User ID: 102
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
That would be a lot more convincing if we didn't incur permanent damage to our bodies merely by staying alive.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
There's a big rational component to this though. Medium is the message, speaker's appearance, tone and style of delivery are useful heuristics for determining if you should really pay attention to the particular end times prophet, or just not bother and do something more fun.
This woke plague kind of ruined many themes and tropes, and by extension many pieces of media that perhaps didn't deserve it, at least for me. My inner critic is always on alert, looking out for wokeness, ready to dismiss anything that sets off enough alarms.
I might exaggerate a bit, but it's at least partly true for me. Maybe that's my flaw, but the general instinct to use heuristics like that for quick judgement is sound and useful. So there's an ironic dimension to it - overflow of wokeness and focus on quantity, instead of quality of woke propaganda likely keeps a lot of people from treating it seriously. Well, I guess it's better than the alternative.
There seems to be a motte/bailey dynamic here. You put it more mildly, so maybe you will disagree somewhat with the bailey, but it's common enough that I hope you indulge me.
Motte: It's reasonable for states to care about their international influence, more so when their neighbors are concerned. When a highly culturally and linguistically related people and a former colony attempts to steer away, expect attempts to prevent this.
Bailey: It was predictable all along that these attempts include abrupt abandonment of other options in favor of an all out war, with all of the inevitable costs that would ensue in the best case scenario. It also includes doubling down for years when the best case scenario did not materialize.
Just tragic geopolitical dominos falling and rulers forced into ugly decisions, nothing to do with a septuagenarian autocrat gradually detaching from the real world, ending up spending fortunes and immolating hundreds of thousands of both his enemy's and his own citizens on sacrificial pyre of boomer retardation
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
What makes you think that the planet can support only 2 billion long term? "Carrying capacity" is just a function of available technology. We can support much more than few centuries ago already. Long term ecological strain, global warming and so on are likewise, merely problems of engineering.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
5mo ago
Mid by what metric, pray tell?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
It is a different situation.
It's like I'm asking you to spend money on something I think is worthwhile, and you say "but then I will have less money" except the government keeps the printer on 24/7, you know?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Is this right? Fifteen books, ranging from #1-6?
Six main novels, yes. I kind of forgot how many side stories are there, maybe I should read them.
The Book of the New Sun?
I recall reading the first book many moons ago, but I didn't read further. My written down impressions from back then are mostly complaining about overloaded, opaque prose, funnily enough. My taste might have changed, but I would still say that the style is quite different
Does this have an audiobook, and is the narration any good?
It does.
is the narration any good?
No. Though I'm not a fan of fiction audiobooks in the first place
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
So what is actually the point of rating random comments? I feel like I missed the memo
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Perhaps an analogy might help: I have ancestors who fought in the Red Army, but I would never stoop to branding them communists just because they decided to take part in fighting off Nazi invasion
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
What a great find, thanks for sharing.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
Latter. I just think that the times I live in are sufficiently interesting
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
The current model has many costs, and it's not obvious that the benefits are worth it or can't be achieved in other ways. More importantly, this would only justify a thin slice of what is subjected to copyright laws in practice, so it hardly deserves more than a passing mention in this context.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
I wonder what makes this line of thinking so tenacious that I have to keep having this conversation again and again. Maybe its time to compose a copypasta for this occasion or something...
Anyway, a state with a nuclear triad just doesn't suffer the same risks as Russia did during the times of Napoleon or Hitler. It's true that any state would prefer to not have potentially hostile neighbors on its doorstep, but for Russia, this train has departed long time ago. As for Ukraine, it didn't look like they would be invited to NATO anytime soon, especially not after annexation of Crimea. (I would say that, at least, was a well executed operation, but still argue that it did Russia more harm than good).
Moreover, let's say they seized Kiev, and everything to the east of Dnipro. Now what? You still got an aggressive "anti-Russian" half of Ukraine on your border. Let's say they conquered Ukraine in its entirety. It has to be pacified, at quite a steep cost. What is achieved? Security against Western land invasion (really outlandish scenario)? Not even that, there is still Baltic border, even closer to Moscow, and Kremlin would never have the balls to invade a NATO country.
As it is, I'm actually mad at Putin for not being able to present an alternative to the West, a multipolar world as he says. He had infinite money, common cultural heritage that he could leverage to expand influence in eastern Europe, instead he preferred to get high at his own supply, believing that Ukraine is a pseudo country that would collapse the moment Russian soldier's foot stepped into it, and that Ukrainians are Russians anyway, and decided to play conqueror.
Disagree. Satisfying social needs with AI is like satisfying sex needs with an inflatable sex doll, and both will stay incredibly low-status. Especially in the scenario of dramatic automation: if you have the time, you really run out of excuses to just sit in your room and chat with computers.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
I think that makes sense, we could use it to raise activity, at least until this forum is more stable
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7d ago
I'm not sure I understand what would it mean exactly for qualia to be physical. Isn't it like...obviously something fundamentally distinct?
Mainstream secular stance of "conscious states trace material configurations" feels more like soft-dualism where the mind part plays the junior role, but it's still there
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
Another part of the answer is status.
While smartphones may be counted as a necessity, you will be perfectly fine getting a $200 Chinese phone, yet iPhones have a huge demand. Same pattern with many, many other goods.
First, we don't really know how consciousness works (nor do we know how to even begin to study it), so we must place some discount on animal lives all things being equal. Of course, it can also be applied to other humans, but to much lesser degree. Wouldn't it be a shame to go through so much trouble if it turns out that all or most animals we eat are good old cartesian machines?
Okay, this point is more of a funny food for thought than a serious argument; it's far more likely than not that some animals have subjective experience and can suffer. But if they do...so what?
As buddists figured out millenia ago, suffering is inextricable part of life. But what makes a life, even filled with suffering, worth living, worth preserving? It's quite tough to grap it precisely with language, but here's my take - it's the ability to choose your path, to ponder life's meaning, to appreciate the moment. You know, metacognition. Agency. All of the things animals lack.
Imagine that you died, and arrived at an audience to some kind of heavenly authority and it said - “Your mortal coil is over now, you could go to heaven, if you so desire. Though they say it's bit boring, would you be interested in reincarnation?” You nod.
“Alright. Let's see what positions are vacant right now…I know, there's one that would fit you very well. How about a cow? You will be born to a nice pack, in a lovely farm in rural France. A couple of years of chewing grass and shitting on it. I'm sure you will fit right in. Ready to embark?”
Good set up, good punchline, good joke, by all accounts. Don't know about you, but I would smile, maybe politely laugh a bit. But of course I would refuse. Because that's all that is - a joke. A life as a cow is self-evidently worthless to me.
Another angle - trolley dilemma. Is there a point at which you would sacrifice a human to save X number of cows? 100? 1000? even more zeros attached to the 1? For me, there's no such point.
All these bazillions of cows can go to hell as long as there are human lives at stake.
Resources are scarce. Time is precious. Why on earth would I spend it on improving well being of cattle?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
It is a website, that "publishes a running list, and sometimes personal information, of people who are considered by authors of the website to be enemies of Ukraine" but without any official backing.
In post Soviet parts of the internet it's treated more like a meme, and sometimes site owners seemingly lean into unseriousness as well, but that some gullible American conservative picked it up and started wringing hands about "Ukrainian kill list" fails to surprise me
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Ukraine put the Pope on official list of enemies.
Worth noting that this didn't happen. It's not an official list of Ukrainian enemies (the Pope isn't even in that list, but that's details)
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
I would push even further than Nybbler and assert that "the Holocaust should happen" is not specific and concrete enough to be a candidate for "call to violence" exception.
Given the very special treatment of the holocaust in comparison to other genocides one could make a good case that the holocaust legislation amounts to little more than anti-blasphemy laws.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2yr ago
Certainly! It's the kind of book that is fun to analyze.
On the topic of boycotting woke business: did anyone bother to make a website listing all potential boycott targets and their offenses? It seems like an empty niche that could be filled fairly cheaply, though the list will be quite long. People just forget about yet another woke commercial outrage fairly quickly, having something that could be quickly linked might go a long way.
More options
Context Copy link