They called it timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory on lesswrong
One of their beliefs is that unrelenting violence against oppressors such as BBQers, landlords, and elderly parents who keep calling you their son is justified even if it's not effective, because it can improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.
It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
There's a link to it in my post, but maybe not the specific article fc saw
So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture. they seem to be responsible for at least 3 other deaths (including family members and a former landlord who was going to testify against one of their members on a felony murder charge), but have taken 40% casualties in the process.
Here is an archive link to the leader's blog
As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all, although his summary seems to miss a lot of important details.
This is the same group that got arrested in Sonoma a few years ago while raiding a CFAR camp. I predicted at the time that this group would make the news again, so you can imagine that I am Steve's Complete Lack Of Surprise.
So, thoughts. San Francisco continues to generate weird murder suicide cults just as it has for the past... 80 years? This really needs to be investigated because the effect has persisted over numerous different ideological movements. My running theory outside of "something in the water" is that selective migration brings a lot of that sort of person to SF (with flowers in their hair); you'll notice the men in this group were from all over the country (and one from Germany), but were all the sorts of people who were looking for some militant cult to give them a sense of belonging.
Second, and this might be beating a dead horse here, consider the reaction of the "rationalist community" to this group over the years. Even after the murders started, the "horrible dangers of moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community" got oceans of ink spilled compared to one or two blog posts about this group. Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants. Here is another trans-vegan-r/sneerclub-LW activist who still supports them because murdering landlords is good.
The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of leftist power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.
Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual (it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple) Considering this case alongside the now-infamous "trans-alpaca ranch holocaust", it really does seem like sexual ideologies act as a social technology that allows disturbed and dysfunctional men to overcome social atomization and organize into warbands. "Cut off your family but keep demanding money from them to fund the group" seems to be the main way the cult leaders both control people and fund their lifestyles, when they're not getting grants or NPR fundraisers organized for them.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
Did you see the bio of the enforcer on the talk page?
/images/17381144853854256.webp
I need to reread the bioleninism series.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
Good example of the strategy I described here https://www.themotte.org/post/1405/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/285720?context=8#context
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
Bit of an aside, but it's incredible how the Internet allows people to contribute through sheer autistic dedication, even if they're literally deaf mute cripples IRL.
I'd also recommend oilfield rando if you don't follow him. He just does individual grants.
Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks
The largest vehicles use electric motors specifically because electric transmissions gain more advantages over mechanical ones the more powerful your engine. We've been building locomotives, heavy panzers, and battleships with electric motors since the 20s. Ironically trucks use mechanical transmissions because they're too small to really benefit from the low speed torque and multi-axle power distribution advantages of electric motors.
Most catastrophizing is based on this sort of weird mix of misunderstandings, half-understood factoids spun into narratives, and linear projections to infinity.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
The list came straight from the ACLU and was either not vetted or vetted by an intern with the same radical sentiments. A nice capstone to the "adults in the room" presidency whose policies were set by the prestigious Tumblr Kid think-tank.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
The speed of strategic evolution in multiplayer vs single player games is amazing. There's a bunch of autistic shipbuilding simulators out there (aurora, coade, etc.) where everyone has just been larping at strategy the same way for decades, whereas the nubulous meta looks different every time I check on it.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
but they're already doing it with new rail lines to Mongolia. The progress they've made in just a few years means it's not just speculative bullshit.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
I think he's got a point, and the ban was retarded. The funny part is that he made the same slightly catty remarks about white identity people that certain mods do, it was apparently just the wrong kind of catty.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
The guy who left a bacon sandwich in front of a mosque or something did die in prison, but that's the closest I can think of so far.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
I didn't buy Windows for my new computer
People buy windows outside the, uh, GitHub store?
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
How good are the new BP substitutes? Are they any cleaner?
I've always figured if I get into reloading I'd probably start with a black powder carbine
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
Does anyone else have a wood stove with a really long chimney? Mine is on a long side of the house, 45 degree roof, cap above the roof peak. Not exactly accessible.
Just had a sootfall from the cap that blocked the draft and caused a very smoky disaster while lighting. Need to get up on the platform I built on the roof years ago, but not without a safety rope: it's probably kinda rotten.
I'd much rather be tinkering with my other projects than the consequences of deferred house maintenance.
Tbf it's probably easier to make full cards fall off the truck on their way to a distributor than batches of cores vanish on their way to board manufacturers. That part of the chain is watched closely.
The Chinese already have a huge scam infrastructure for pulling cores and returning the boards as broken. Lotta people getting the ol Chinese open box experience lol.
https://hardforum.com/threads/4090s-being-sold-from-china-containing-no-gpu.2032868/
I think you can fit a lot more than 5000 gpus on a shipping container. Only the core is really needed; the Chinese have no problem buying memory chips or making VRMs and fans to turn the cores into boards. Those outer components are probably made in China or Vietnam already.
I just checked because it was a childhood favorite, apparently hasbro published MechWarrior 3. I can never remember the big licensing crossover thing with fasa, hasbro, and grand wizards of the coast. Remember the latter had a battle tech cockpit sim arcade at their HQ back in the day (...I think?)
(Edit: oh, but fasa itself belonged to Microsoft Game Studios at the time, I never knew! But they didn't develop 3 either: that was zipper. Microsoft published two Mech Assault games and then seems to have totally abandoned the franchise)
So I read the local power co-op's plan for "local resiliency to prevent the Climate Catastrophe through public utility solar." And then I did a bunch of math with PVwatts and the state grid data and wrote a whole essay about why it doesn't make any sense, and it's obviously just smearing around a few million in federal and state subsidies to local party members. (Surprise surprise, the landowner's "farm" has a Land Acknowledgement on her website, but she doesn't seem to be giving any of the lease money from the utility to the natives whose Unceded land she's grant-farming.)
But what's the point in posting it on the local boards? This isn't how things work. Nobody's going to be convinced, all it's going to do is paint a giant target on my back. Worst case, it will put me in the company of the guy who got sued for exposing county government corruption with foia requests, or the guy who got fucking prosecuted for talking about a ballot initiative on the radio, because speaking in public counted as making an Unreported Campaign Contribution under state law.
I guess the question is how do you guys deal with this shit? What do you do with the autistic urge to check the numbers of looting racketeers and go "umm excuse me, I think you made a math mistake in the section on 'Confronting The Whiteness of Wanting Reliable Electricity', yes, down in paragraph 7."
I wasted about six hours last night when I could have been sleeping doing math that nobody will ever see because nobody cares. Judging by their shoddy work, that's about how long the project managers spent on their federal grant proposal too, which made them several million dollars richer. Surely there's a way to just stop caring about all this.
Gooofuckyourself
6mo ago
Credible total commitment is an interesting angle, isn't it? He's now the one man Trump knows can never stab him in the back, because he'd be stabbing himself.
Is there a factions of the rightosphere article you find accurate? Because sometimes I get lost and end up wandering into a fight between Mexican Catholic integralists and their most hated enemy: Mexican-american born-again dominionists.
None of that's an issue, and both I and my father already have wills as backup anyway. But unless we die in the same accident there shouldn't be anything for the executor to do.
I was very young at the very tail of that era, but in retrospect I notice people used it to launder the old-maoist policing through a layer of irony. Middle class UK academics in education were my only real exposure though.
I remember a lot of conversations that went like
A: "Have you noticed all the new restaurants are run by Pakistanis?"
B: "Yeah, what am I supposed to do if I don't want curry (lol)?"
C: "now now, that's not very politically correct of you (tee hee but with an edge)"
It defuses the conversation passive-aggressively, reducing the whole thing to a joke-but-for-real though, and forestalls A from following up with "I'm serious though what's with all the fucking Pakis, are we really ok with where this is going?"
In 2014ish millennials did exactly the same thing with playing Cards Against Humanity and joking about how "tumblr's gonna get you for that," then a few years later the exact same people dropped the mask and switched to open confrontation once they felt powerful enough.
Of course they reported it lol. Thanks for the extended cite, I was still looking for it in this giant pile of tabs
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