HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Now you are claiming that people who disagree with your assessment of Jan 6th are as bad as the pro-BLM riot people. Suppose that is true: so what? The pro-BLM riot people were rewarded with vast political, financial and social benefit from their actions. Negative consequences were extremely rare, limited to only a very few of the most egregious examples. Why should one be ashamed of an action to which no shame or censure seems to attach?
I'm not sure I'm accurately understanding what you're saying. It seems to me that you're saying it's acceptable to lie about what constitutes violence as long as the other side got away with that lie too? I'm all for holding people to their the standards they set, and as such I don't want to hear one bit of whining about January 6 from people who defended the 2020 rioters. But I'm concerned that some people here seem to be actually believing that January 6 wasn't violent and wasn't a bad thing simply on account of the other side being dishonest about these categories the year prior. I think it matters what's actually true and it's important not to become so focused on pointing out the Calvinball the other side is playing that we convince ourselves that falsehoods are true.
I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits. And that's not to mention how impenetrable the prose is (apparently translators always think their job is robotically faithful reproduction instead of their best guess about what a modern writer would have written if attempting to express the same thought.)
You say they "speak to" people in some deep way. I'm not really sure what that means, but if their ideas are that impressive and timeless then surely someone more modern has has said the same thing but without the handicap of an ancient person's understanding of the world and our place in it?
Are you sure "read the classics" is an imperative containing much more than signaling about the speaker's supposed learnedness and sophistication? Because it's always been extremely hard for me to shake that impression, and I'm afraid I'm definitely not disabused of it from reading your response to Hanania. I see no good defense of the merits of reading those works.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Some people are only attracted to certain races.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients. Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better. That's my point. I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
It seems you're suggesting that women attending domestic violence shelters are concerned that the men there (who would themselves be victims of domestic violence) are going to attack them. Am I understanding you correctly? If so, I don't think that concern is something the shelter should indulge at the exclusion of male victims. I see no reason to suppose women at domestic violence shelters are at an elevated risk of being attacked by strangers compared to walking on the sidewalk.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
it would be an act of insane hubris to imagine that you could know better than him.
Would you still feel this way if you discovered that God said raping and murdering strangers for fun is always good?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
I don’t think my point hinges on it being exactly 8 hours, though.
No, but it does hinge on it being a substantial enough amount of time that parental substitution is required. I don't think schools need to take over duties from parents when parents have possession of the kid for 5/6th of the kid's waking hours.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.
We could also have kids decode, by hand, arbitrary sequences of words written in ROT13. The question is, is this more useful than anything else we might have those kids spend that time on?
(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).
This is indeed probably the best argument for literature, but I don't think it's compelling enough. For one thing, I think kids understand and internalize their civilization without formal instruction. It's just "in the water", as it were. But secondly, I suspect much of the Western canon is more likely to turn off any interest a kid might have had in their civilization. These works of fiction tend to be extremely difficult to make any sense of or derive any value from. Some of that is because the metaphors and allusions are completely lost on a child (or in many cases almost any modern person) or there's a reference to something contemporaneous that's long been lost to time. But, frankly, a lot of it is because the language is just sorely outdated and teachers seldom want to "sully" the work by using modern translations. For example, Shakespeare uses "a haggard" to refer to a falcon. Just fucking say "falcon"! But noooo, that's not "poetic" or "authentic" enough.
If anything, subjecting kids to this stuff and telling them this is an iconic and beautiful important part of their civilization is just going to result in kids thinking their civilization must be pretty fucking boring and unimportant. And I care too much about Western civilization to inculcate indifference to it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad. Or do you suspect that the people on The Motte claiming such things are being mask-on even here?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
That system, which is what we have and has existed for a very long time, is not communism. The government telling a paper mill that they can't set up their mill in the middle of a residential neighborhood does not make the system communist, so it certainly doesn't make it so when it comes to regulating where houses can be built. If you want to advocate some new understanding of the word "communism" that means something that no one else means by it, you can certainly try to do so, but I doubt it will catch on.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Or, of course, you're mistaken about how readable and enjoyable people thought these works were in the past.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Now, you could argue that grammar isn’t all that important, but if it is, I don’t see how you’re going to teach it in history class.
I just want to make sure I understand: you are claiming that you don't understand how one could teach grammar in a history class?
You could teach grammar using any written sentences. You could teach grammar using the comment you just made!
Or take metaphors and figurative language.
Perhaps it would be helpful to use a made-up sentence or short dialogue for the purposes of educating a student about metaphors and figurative language. I guess that technically counts as fiction. But do they really need to read a Shakespeare play or Swift or Lewis? I'll be honest, it seems to me that you really want students to read classic literature and are perhaps reaching for whatever justification is handy. Am I way off?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
2 is the best option, you'll notice that everyone from amateur streamers to professional e-sports teams use it even when sitting right next to each other. The same is true for any team doing anything remotely high performance even if everyone is sitting in the same room- ie NASA mission control, military command centers, Formula 1 race teams, etc.
Alright, we've given this a try, but the problem seems to be that our voice is picked up on the other person's microphone, creating an echo. For example, if I talk, I can hear myself in my headphones because my voice reaches my wife's computer's microphone. I'm not sure how this can be avoided - obviously microphones aren't intelligent enough to know whose voice is being heard and selectively mute if it detects a voice other than the person using the computer associated with that microphone.
Is this perhaps solved by using microphones very close to the mouth (e.g., on a headset) and setting their input sensitivity to a level where the user's voice is picked up but another person in the same room is not?
Or do people in this sort of situation just tolerate hearing themselves through their own audio?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:
- We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
- We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
- We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
7mo ago
Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are. They explain our emotions (including love), desires, perceptions, and so on. Everything that makes us what we are is the product of evolution. Atomic theory and neuroscience explain consciousness (although, of course, much mystery remains), personality, and provides good grounds to believe that no soul exists that can persist after death. All of this information informs our understanding of human nature.
Here are a few concrete examples just off the top of my head:
Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree. These would have been mysterious to the ancients. But we understand, to some extent, how things like neurotransmitters affect depression, addiction, anxiety, etc., and that helps us come up with better ways to deal with it and also to sympathize with people who suffer from it.
Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).
Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples. As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally. Evolutionary insight would immediately reveal the folly of that. But without an understanding of evolution, or at least trial and error, how do you suppose an ancient person would know that this project would be unlikely to succeed? Even if they could figure it out (probably by trial and error!) it seems obvious to me that an evolutionary insight into this aspect of human nature is a superior way to nip that sort of thing in the bud.
Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from. For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government. All else being equal, people with more history to draw from will simply be better able to find enduring answers to timeless questions relating to how to organize society (politically, legally, etc.) and minimize common failure modes.
Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society. And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Hmm, what's going on here...
I feel like a cat cautiously exploring a new object in the environment, ready to startle-jump straight upwards at the slightest sign of a potential threat. But I'm just so damn curious that I can't help it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
What do you do when the adherents talk to you and inquire about something theological, to which you'd either have to lie or admit your atheism?
I'm an atheist and I've often contemplated going to church with my Christian fiance, but I'm always halted by the thought of what the hell I'm supposed to do when people start with the Jesus-speak one-on-one.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I haven't thought about this before, so this may be a dumb question, but why wouldn't men go to the same domestic violence shelters women do? I can't think of any sex-specific services that would be required, or any reason people would be more uncomfortable around the opposite sex than the same sex.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I feel like loot (by which I think we both mean currency) isn't a challenge because you can get it trivially without any risk. And at that point, you're just boringly grinding. Of course, you can choose to engage in harder content for more loot per hour, but you don't really have to because you can just grind easier content. And if the loot isn't a challenge, and your build wasn't really "yours" to begin with, at what point do you do anything that you're proud of and that you're responsible for? That's what I feel like is missing by just buying and following a build.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.
Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I'm not sure I understand why top-level comments have a hidden vertical bar under them, as opposed to the visible bar of child comments. Consider this screenshot. I suspect if you show that screenshot to anyone familiar with reddit-style comments and ask whether pro_sprond and Quantumfreakonomics were making top-level comments, they'd say yes.
Am I missing something?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
Which ones? I've literally never ran into one. Safari blocks them by default, I really doubt any website would risk cutting off the entire Apple ecosystem.
It's been years, but I recall it being more common when attempting to login or make purchases. I don't remember exact sites. However, googling the phrase (including quotation marks) "Your browser is blocking third-party cookies" reveals many people struggling on various platforms to do various things, including Google and Microsoft, and receiving that error message.
Then, by my estimation, you're no different than the people who stood in front of the scenes of riots in the Summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. Sorry.
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