Fruck
Lacks all conviction
Fruck is just this guy, you know?
User ID: 889
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3hr ago
In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?
The simulation theory is unfalsifiable - due to the way we model brains we know memories can be altered and the emotions attached to them too (thank fuck for propafol) and they have even been able to implant a false sense of fear in mice by reactivating specific neurons activated in response to a shock without the shock, which implies our memories are mere playthings for a sufficiently advanced being. Once you accept that premise everything else falls into place.
It's a great irony that an atheist materialist would be more susceptible to that argument than a theist, due to the theist's believing we are more than just flesh and neurons.
I have to say though, I am now more interested in those 6% of people who I assume must be insanely depressed. Or just insane.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4hr ago
My personal caveat, and where I diverge from Jacque Fresco and friends, would be that I'm very partial to the notion that our 'possessive nature' is very much innate, along with a lot of other things. To that end I find imagining a society, even a post scarcity one, that doesn't have a problem with emergent hierarchies based on other peoples possessions to be very difficult.
It would also be dangerous even in a post scarcity society, since we are not the only sapient beings in existence and the other sapient beings are unlikely to have that attitude to property.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5hr ago
I don't understand - are you saying that in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating? And that during COVID you actually didn't follow the rules about distancing, masks, vaccines, etc? (didn't you get in trouble?)
As fc explains below, the principle of precommitment is sacrosanct to me. If I am not willing to suffer for my beliefs, I don't believe them. But there is a bit more to it than that of course - prior experience suggests a member of organised crime won't shoot over something so trivial, so yeah, I'd call the bluff. My fate was sealed in this hypothetical, but it has actually been an outrageously successful tactic irl, I wish I'd employed it a lot more during my life, everyone capitulates far too easily these days.
At first I thought my fate was sealed during covid too - I practice social distancing and proper hygiene because illness doesn't care about principles, but I live in Queensland and during the mask mandates and lockdowns I went out every single day, just like I had before, and I didn't wear a mask. I let the gold coast council bully my market into forcing masks on people for two weeks, then told them to shut us down if they didn't like us letting people do what the pleased (we would have had to shut down anyway if we'd kept doing it, I'm not claiming to be Terry Toughnuts, just explaining another covid rule that was primarily about throwing weight around). I got pulled over by a cop once, but no punishment, because the cop thought it was a stupid policy too (I assume, she didn't say that of course but she looked embarrassed pulling me over and barely even waited for me to give my lazy food situation excuse before letting me go.)
So I am not anti-vax (although I am anti covid vax) but I am not willing to force it on others. I might not like it when it goes against what I want, but I always respect people who are willing to throw there life away for there beliefs. I do think a high trust society could make an argument for vaccine mandates, but I don't think we live in a high trust society. We live in a society where they will mandate untested vaccines and lock people in their homes based on bad science, then refused to acknowledge their errors until they had no choice. That's a society that should not be trusted. That's probably the major disconnect between us it looks like (aside from our moral frameworks of course). I don't get the impression you think we have a high trust society though - do you see high trust societies as institutional facts in the Searle sense, sort of self fulfilling prophecies? Because I do think that's true, but we definitely don't live in a high trust society, and I am not willing to play along until I see something to trust again. I'm not saying all of society has to become deontological... But I can also think of worse ways we could go.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
13hr ago
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosiphizing it.
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
Refusing to be vaccinated
There it is! When I read the first paragraph I quoted here I was confused. I actually know full well that at least I am capable of not capitulating to threats, and it is crazy to assert, 5 years after covid, that no one would use the threat of deadly force to make someone 'close their fist' - aka give up bodily autonomy in a trivial way. That is not a convoluted thought experiment, it's actually slightly less crazy than what many governments in the world tried to do to their citizens. But you wanted to paint the people who refused to capitulate to the abrogation of their bodily autonomy as the ones harming society.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
Actually that would provide negative equilibrium, and it is the default I expect people would go to so I'm stepping in quick, because the equilibrium I'm looking for is in emotional valence. Too nice/too mean would solidify the manichean premise that one side are being 'good' while the other are being 'bad' and I think we see enough of that already. Some republicans might revel in the cruelty, but that's just the lizardman constant, some number of people are always doing that no matter the side. Republicans need a way to defuse that angle, and I think naive is a strong response - to the point without being too insulting.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
Can we call it too mean/too naive for a bit of equilibrium?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
Can you please link one of these leftist poster complaints? I haven't seen them and I appreciate a good argument.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
There's still quite a bit of concern in the male focused article too though. As usual it's that weird 'anything a man wants to bang has agency' angle everyone takes when dealing with male focused sexual entertainment technology where the big worry is the technology feeling underappreciated.
My expectation is that yeah women will use it more (it's more imagination based) and we will eventually discover women have wayyyyyy darker fantasies than men when they think nobody is looking, and then we'll quietly drop the subject and get awkward if anyone brings it up.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2d ago
That's fascinating, @greyenlightenment said similar, but aside from one retired teacher and a group of finance guys who I can never be sure are serious most of the qanoners I know are actually closer to fringe class than working - like my cousin who'd be a drug dealer if it didn't require so much effort and discipline. Could it be geographical? What state do you live in, if you don't mind me asking? And same question for you grey?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2d ago
I think the data does bear this out. (15% unemployment and 35% underemployment (rising to 41%in recent years) means we have too many degree holders. And you know profit often isn't the only motive these days, ESG demands environmental and social engineering too.
But like Hani said to Nara, this is a distraction. If the elite ran society well we would not have populism or Donald Trump because they would have ameliorated enough of the concerns of the working class before they snapped and it was too late to do anything. It's not like they were demanding the impossible - they weren't even demanding anything substantial - bread and circuses worked for Rome and it works for America too. But our elites didn't make the bread and circuses for the people, they didn't even make it for everyone - instead they made it for themselves. They can't claim they didn't anticipate the issue, they very loudly did, but they handled it so incompetently that they may as well have not bothered.
And yes it is not deliberate and it's all stochastic or distributed or whatever - like you said in your reply to Nara, it's status games. And sure, on an individual level, if the only thing that concerns you is you, status seeking is a very smart idea. But if you want the prestige attached to running society, if you want to be respected for the way your achievements improve the country, they have to actually improve the country, not just line your own pockets. You have to actually be a better person if you want people to think you are a better person than them.
I can't remember how old you are, but I'm pretty sure you are old enough to be familiar with the way humans can very easily deceive themselves into thinking they are doing good when they are actually only helping themselves. I think that self deception is the core of the current zeitgeist. It's like the unifying principle of the west these days is 'you don't point out my fuck ups and I won't point out yours'. This is a much much larger problem for the elites than the proles, because without competence to back it up status is like running in mid-air like wile e coyote.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
You reckon it's the qanoners ruining everything?
I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.
I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons. Qanoners are overwhelmingly uneducated and our Elite Human Capital are overwhelmingly cowardly, narcisstic, and just not that bright. They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? "uh it's right wing! Hitler was populisty! How about it's racist? Or toxic masculinity? It's very passe ok, he's eating McDonald's for fucks sake, what more do you need?!"
Populism is actually pretty simple to understand - it is the game theoretic optimal solution to a democracy for any underclass in a country where they lack (or think they lack) unifying principles or values - if you think, due to a warped media environment, that you can't rally with your neighbour over the constitution or that Jesus is lord, you can still rally around a popular figure. It's basically a coin flip between finally being heard and the stamping boot, so if you already have the stamping boot in your face it's a no brainer.
And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something. They even mock the idea of government transparency! Like they either think government transparency is a bad thing, or are just too dim to understand that they are participating in a meme that can directly harm the concept, as that kind of negative association is part of how perverse incentives kick off in the first place.
If only there was some simple fix, like listening to the working class occasionally. Then again avoiding them as much as possible, still sneering at them at every opportunity, but pretending you do care about them has worked out great so far!
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.
The weirdest thing about gas stations stocking porn magazines was the 711 policy of stripping the cover off the damaged magazines and giving them away to customers. It was such a weird blend of considerate and inappropriate.
I was playing this rpgmaker horror game my brother recommended earlier this week, called Look Outside. It is phenomenal, the way the horror is presented is fantastic - it does a really good job of selling that sense of 'I don't want to look into this any deeper than I already have, but I know I have to if I'm going to survive. You play a guy who wakes up in his apartment after a terrible nightmare about the sky, and now he has the urge to go look outside, but he somehow knows he shouldn't. Instead he has to wait for whatever is going on outside to pass, which means keeping himself healthy clean and sane for at least a month without leaving his apartment building.
Basically you explore your apartment building - where people have been looking outside - for food, cleaning supplies and ways to keep yourself entertained (exploring just stresses you out for reasons that are immediately apparent when you start playing). You can of course look outside if you like - there's a window in your bedroom even, but you instantly learn why you shouldn't (in game terms it's an immediate game over) and most of the horror comes from interacting with your neighbours who have, because whatever is going on out there fucks people UP!
For an example, one morning when you go out into the apartment hallway you meet one of your neighbours who is looking for toothpaste. He has additional teeth you see, his baby daughter's crib was in front of a window when the event (remain indoors!) occurred and he doesn't know what it did aside from make her cranky, and wherever she bites new teeth grow, so his arm is growing teeth. The teeth eventually take him over, and you have to either kill him or run away, but after that you can also explore his apartment, where his family lives - his wife, baby daughter, and two sons. And let's just say they've all been bitten. That doesn't mean you have to kill them all though - after finding a plastic army man I managed to convince the mass of teeth and flesh and polyps that was the younger son to play with me, and have some fun in his final moments. It still tugs at my heartstrings now, and keep in mind I am jaded as hell.
And yeah the game is full of tragedies like that. I don't think I'm out of line saying it was inspired by the work of Junji Ito and Lovecraft, and equally inspired by the covid lockdowns, and it is a bit less frustrating than the average rpgmaker game, but it still has most of the flaws of that engine - so make sure you backup your saves just in case. But for a game made by a single guy - Francis Coulombe, who I've never heard of - it's a spectacular effort.
I hope you are jumping everywhere like a good TES player should. I don't think they rebalanced sneak very well when they sped up the movement mechanics - sneaking is still shit when you are low in stealth and you'll easily get spotted, but the extra speed of your character means when you stand behind a column near a rat or the like and tap directions so you move a fraction you build up stealth a lot faster than you used to, so you can easily clear 30 stealth before you have finished the tutorial.
Edit - also I went with my standard TES build since morrowind - Breton race of course (I'm racist), key attributes intelligence and willpower, sign of the atronach (broken as hell in this game) with major skills - blades (short blades previously), alchemy, stealth, destruction, mysticism, armourer and light armour. The class is called a gigolo, naturally.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
Humphries was mostly g-rated, his persona was that of the spinster aunt with delusions of grandeur who made innuendo sometimes but was mostly oblivious - like a drag version of Hyacinth Bucket. She claimed to have a son who lived with his chum, and she was sure both would find Mrs right one day. But right now they're looking in all the wrong places (with a suspicious glance at the audience) - for an example of the Dame Edna kind of risque.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5d ago
There is a sexual element involved, in that it used to be inherently ridiculous for a man to dress as a woman, the opposite sex. But not as in relating to sex - 'ordinary men doing ordinary things, but they're dressed as women' was enough to sell Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari's Bosom Buddies to ABC! However once they started developing romantic plot lines for the characters in the second season, people got uncomfortable with it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
6d ago
Well what he actually says is he does martial arts and if someone started shit he would consider pulling a knife proportionate. Either he does Kali or he is waiting for the bus on the way to school. Those are the only times anyone should say that and not expect to be ridiculed, because it is ridiculous. Knives are a shit ton more dangerous than any body part or fighting technique. That's their purpose.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
6d ago
Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.
What? What martial arts do you do where it's acceptable or proportionate to pull a knife? Kali?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7d ago
Sounds great. Then I could scream "Outlaw Country!" and mean it! As a declaration of intent.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7d ago
That sounds like it would be an interesting and useful story, if you ever feel like chronicling it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7d ago
Fate zero is the king of the crop for sure, characters will happily spend half an episode sitting and discussing their perspectives on various topics, it's great. Revenger liked to waffle a bit, but the reason people should watch it is because I feel like being betrayed by your job into killing your family is a resonant issue today. The Godzilla anime movies for Netflix are next in the list I'd say, with their explorations of what it is to be human and a monster. If you can do visual novels, song of saya doesn't waffle, but it does get into the philosophical weeds quite a lot and is an awesome story. And of course Madoka, but everyone knows about Madoka.
I've also been watching Thunderbolt Fantasy recently, the puppet wuxia show he made with the popular Taiwanese puppet company Pili. The puppety nature lends itself well to waxing philosophical and its a neat story too if you like Eastern fantasy type stories about named heroes fighting demons and having duels that destroy random villages.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
8d ago
But that is actually an important distinction, between 'nobody (well basically nobody)' and 'nobody at all (but some people are trying to revive it)'. The meme of biblical literalism is still alive organically.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
8d ago
Ah yeah I forgot he did Invincible! Alright awesome, I know what I'm doing this evening.
Excellent write up. Psycho-pass is great - although I usually prefer when Urobochi is allowed to waffle on about philosophy more, pairing him with the heavily animation focused Shiotani allowed them both to shine (which is also why the nose dive in quality the series briefly takes after ep 16 is so noticeable.)
Edit: SwiftKey adding extra words for some reason, I swear it's not fucking user error, I have been touch screen typing for a fucking decade now and this was never a problem before.
Because it didn't belong to their heir and they had a strong sense of ownership!
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