BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
No, Im saying that the facts as presented by yourself and others are incomplete and do not support the sweeping conclusions that you seem to be trying to draw from them.
I've answered your question, you can stop following me around now.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Again, I would have swapped the casting around and had either Anya Taylor Joy or Lea Seydoux play Irulan and Florence Pugh play Lady Fenring but that's me.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
And yet from only a page before we have...
Rautha picked up the knife, balancing it a moment in his hand to get the feel of it. Excitement kindled in him. This was a fight he had dreamed about, man against man, skill against skill with no shields intervening.
His whole thing through the rest of the book is that he's a striver, wanting to prove that he is better and more capable than his uncle and older brother, and thus take the throne. See also the bit about wanting to give the Atreides slave in gladiator pit a proper burial.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
I'm not sure I've ever seen the "you don't actually exist" argument deployed before.
I didn't say that I don't beieve they exist, I said that I don't believe that they're posting about HBD or complaining about "blank slatists" on theMotte.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
a staunch social conservative known for his pragmatism and willingness to compromise with Democrats.
I'm unsure whether this is intentional comedy or unintentional, but it is amusing either way.
This is kind of where I'm at.
I watched the first movie and reread the first 3 books in preparation for the new movie and if nothing else I feel like Denis Villeneuve deserves credit for accurately capturing "the Vibe" of Herbert's books. Dune is big, it's weird, and it doesn't hold your hand. There are some changes I disagree with but like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings they at least feel in line with the original work. I'm still annoyed that they dropped the line "Are you suggesting that the duke's son is an animal?" from the Reverend Mother's test in part one but so it goes.
The handling of Alia was annoying from the outlook of a purist but understandable from a cinematic perspective and in light of the compressed timeline, and as such I was broadly ok with it. In Hindsight I would have swapped the casting around with either Anya Taylor Joy or Lea Seydoux as Irulan and Florence Pugh as Lady Fenring but that's neither here nor there.
I've seen people complaining about how Stilgar is portrayed but over all I feel that it was pretty faithful. He is the true believer, and he does volunteer to let Paul kill him so that Paul can be the de jure leader of the Fedaykin and Sietch Tabr not just the de facto, to which Paul gives the famous reply "I'm not going to break my knife before a fight".
Christopher walken was wasted in the sense that they cast him in a position of authority and then didn't give him an unhinged monologue to deliver a la Poolhall Junkies, Pulp Fiction, King of New York, the Rundown, Etc... and I agree with @naraburns criticism of his characterization.
On the flip side I disagree with Nara's complaints about Fayed Rutha, wanting a fair fight (or a minimally unfair fight) feels very in character as a major motivation of his in the books is wanting to prove that he his better than everyone else, and overall I agree that "Austin Butler as psychosexual Darth Maul" was the correct call given that truly book-accurate Harkonens are not compatible with a PG-13 rating. They're less about the random killing of underlings and more cannibalism, heartplugs, futanari, and general body-horror. Pity we couldn't go full Drukhari Gladiator/Event Horizon in this bitch.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Do you question genotyping methods and usage of GWAS linear regression to study associations between phenotype and genotype?
I question the motives of both the researchers researching it and the posters posting it, and wonder if they would have published or be posting if they had gotten a result other than the one they set out to find. I know that post is intended as satire but is it really?
The rest is one of those Giancarlo Esposito memes: You didn't ask what a dingflarb is, we are not the same.
It's not "inability", so much as a conscious rejection of all that "critical theory" and "death of the author" nonsense, and no I don't believe that it's "just the belief" I believe that it's the thin end of a wedge.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist?
I think it's possible, but to the extent that such people exist I do not believe that they are posting about HBD, or complaining about "blank slatists" on theMotte.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
Are they really my allies though? or are they just my enemy's enemies?
Your schtick boils down to "I don't see how someone lowering test requirements to disastrous result is supposed to prove that tests measure anything important"
No my schtick is literally "I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that certain individuals want to draw from them." because we're not talking about IQ or SAT scores in isolation here. We're talking about lowering the requirements for the combat arms across the board, spatial, cognitive, physical, training, the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
That the results of this policy change were pretty-much what any competent planner would have predicted does not make them "disastrous" it makes them appear intentional, which in turn throws the more "charitable" interpretation of McNamara's policies preferred by the most vocal advocates of HBD awareness into serious doubt.
The observation that fielding substandard troops results in outsized friendly casualties is not revelatory, just look at the ongoing SNAFU that is the Russian Armed Forces.
Likewise, the observation that fielding substandard troops results in outsized friendly casualties, is not evidence that group differences in IQ (to the degree that they exist) are of greater signifiance than individual variance or other cultural factors. Nor is it evidence that such differences (to the degree that they exist) are a sound foundation for social policy.
In short, the facts as presented by yourself @aardvark2, TPO, Et Al are both incomplete and do not support the sweeping conclusions that you seem to be drawing from them.
As for the last bit...
And I've been getting away with it because you consistently make such dogshit arguments
...you get away with it because the Mods let you get away with it.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
I'm not sure how any proponent could get upset by disagreement.
...and yet here we are.
As for the alleged "sloppiness" I'm not sure what you're referring to, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the old RA Heinlein bit about "witness mindset" Q: What color is that house? A: this side of the house is blue.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
No you didn't.
I think I did, see; the ability to recognize, retain, and reason from/act upon changing information states.
School vouchers address a problem at a much lower level than necessary.
It's interesting to read this sentiment in light of comments like @ArjinFerman's below about politics not being about philosophy because it seems to lay bare one of the major philosophical differences between the median Republican and the median poster here.
Namely that there even being such a thing as a "lower level than necessary" betrays a very Rousseauean top-down brand of thinking that is largely non-existant in the mainstream American right. The obvious question from a Hobbesian/Burkean bottom-up perspective being "shouldn't we endeavor to solve all problems at the lowest possible level at all times?"
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Things Brandon will do to avoid finishing a project number 69: Run for Congress.
I think a more accurate summation would be something along the lines of...
1: Those who argue that racial differences (on average) outweigh individual differences are effectively arguing for racial identitarianism.
2: racial identitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with a colorblind meritocracy
3: Ergo those who argue that racial differences outweigh individual differences are lying when they claim to support a colorblind meritocracy
I hope you can see the problem there
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
The charitable reading of this statement is that you're skeptical IQ tests perfectly measure what you consider intelligence.
I feel like the charitable reading of the statement is the plain reading of the statement. I also feel that I already gave a clear definition of what I think "intelligence" means.
I Think that the reason you're grimacing and is that I am questioning beliefs that you hold dear.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Did we ever figure out whether BAP was actually gay or not?
...
BAP again, and in general this is not the vibe I get from my interactions and observations.
It's funny, I was about to go on a whole rant that would have probably gotten me banned and you probably saved my ass.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
As I keep telling @aardvark2, I'm not dodging the question, I'm questioning the entire framework upon which the question rests. Is dingblat freater than fnord? Yes or no?
I feel like "Macnamara's Folly" is something that has been litigated and relitigated to hell and back, but upon review it hasn't really been touched since we move to the new site. So you know what @ArmedTooHeavily, you're a fair cop.
To rehash the arguments that I used to get into with TPO, Gwern, and others back in the day; I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that bay area rationalists in general and certain "dark enlightenment" thinkers in particular want to draw from them.
Robert MacNamara is an interesting and controversial character in that with the exception of some Civil War Confederate Generals he's probably one of, if not the, US historical figure with the largest split in emotional valence between tribes. The blue-tribe professional and academic classes seem to regard him as this brilliant visionary who used his education and intelligence to optimize all the things, bring balance to the Force foreign policy, and rationality to the military industrial complex. Meanwhile on the other side, the name of the man who lost Vietnam is a by-word for why technocratic rule by experts is a bad idea. While less so today there was a time not all that long ago where the surest way to start a fight in a VFW or American Legion bar was to praise Robert MacNamara.
Going off on a tangent, the US military has always been a bit unusual in that even when it was a largely conscript force it remained oddly picky (compared to other nations) about who it brought in, heavily favoring the quality of its troops over the quantity. While less obvious today we can see evidence of this this in media of the 1910s 20s 30s and 40s where ostensibly fit characters are labeled "4F" and in modern echoes of the same such as Captain America. Point being that despite the popular conception of the ranks of "dumb grunts" being filled by little more than dumb grunts with few or no alternatives, this has not historically been case.
Coming back to MacNamara, McNamara was/is practically the posterchild for rational technocratic decision making, it's a big part of why he's so popular amongst a certain set, but it also made him kind of an idiot and an all-around terrible person. MacNamara being the very rational liberal and high IQ person that he was felt that the US military was leaving a lot of money on the table by not lowering it's recruitment standards. After all dumb grunts are just dumb grunts and what good are infantry really except as cannon fodder? Why shouldn't we as rational technocratic authoritarians lower the acceptance standards, skimp on the training, and throw bodies at the problem until it goes away?
The reasons not to just throw bodies at the problem are probably an effort post on their own this is the basic argument being made, and I don't see how Macnamara displaying a callous disregard for both military tradition and human life is supposed to prove that "niggers r dum" unless the specific tradition being disregarded is the one about equality before God.
As @Botond173 observes up thread I think that a user must be particularly stupid and/or naive to believe that "the experiment" was anything of the sort and that getting a bunch of non rationalist technocrat individuals killed wasn't the goal from the start
In the mean time @somedude is by thier own admission an account created for the specific purpose of picking a fight with me and @aardvark2 seems to be in the same boat in the sense that I don't think I've ever seen him engage in a discussion that wasn't about HBD.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
That's just a semantics question over what "bad" means.
Yes, and at the same time it also illustrates the fundamental problem with utilitarianism, namely that it is the ethical framework that makes it easiest to excuse one's own negative behavior.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms.
A major component of FC's point is that while they may not be synonyms they are of a kind.
I recognize that to a Marxist Revolutionary the subtle nuances that differentiate Stalinism from Trotskyism will feel critically important, and that Stalinists will be offended by being lumped in with the Trots and vice versa. But to someone who is opposed to Marxism in general these are distinctions without a difference.
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
You said that "There was no manipulation/lowering of actual test scores based on race" but "no manipulation" because it was caught early and NFL officials were actively prevented from following through on their intentions carries vastly different implications from "no manipulation" because there was never an attempt to manipulate the scores in the first place.
The strategic equivocation between those two cases as well as between anonymized average group scores, and individual scores, is a good chunk of what I found so "illuminating".
As for the rest, my reply is basically "what @FCfromSSC said." As I've argued in previous threads, the fact that Sunni Fundamentalists and Shia Fundamentalists often come into violent conflict with each other does not invalidate "Islamic Fundamentalism" as a meaningful category or descriptor.
From where I'm sitting it seems patently obvious that the battle between the woke/intersectional left and the dissident/identitarian right is chiefly a intra-tribal conflict between different subgroups of "secular progressive-leaning academics who mostly live in coastal cities and vote Democrat" and this along with the fact that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of meaningful differences between the beliefs and policy preferences of the intersectional left and identitarian right is why I view them as being "of a kind".
Edit: Yes I'm linking that Ryan Long video again.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1mo ago
Again, I am not "dodging" anything, I am questioning the entire framework upon which the question rests.
A plot can be made to demonstrate anything. To demonstrate, if I were showed you a plot showing that the ratio of squantches to dingflarbs amongst the black population is less than one, and appended a bunch of Jewish sounding names to the end so you could tell that it had come from a serious academic source would you agree?
As I recall it was Kevin Henry (Steelers), Clarence Vaughn (Redskins), and LaDainian Tomlinson (Chargers) who were taking point, but now I wonder if I'm experiencing the Mandela effect because searching for their names and the case on google and Wikipedia is turning up nothing.
The question was why do you think it is immoral?
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