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
On one hand it's hard for me to be mad as the CEO and designer of the sub was also the operator and appears to have gone down with his ship. At the same time the more I read the less surprised that something went wrong. When a former employee raised concerns about the design's safety the response seems to have been "Shut up, if you won't do what we say, we'll just hire someone else who will". Accordingly, I'm tempted to read "we don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring" as we don't want to hire experienced engineers because they'll rain on your parade by questioning your brilliance and insisting on expensive things like extensive dive testing and triple redundancy on all safety-critical systems.
Sure, the basic version goes something like this...
Per the FBI's report 8 of the recovered email chains contained material that had originated outside the State Department and had been marked Top Secret at the time of sending. The origins are important because originating outside the state department means that Clinton was not the classifying authority and thus could not legally copy or distribute said material without consulting the classifying authority. IE her counterparts in the Department of Defence, Department of Energy, etc..
Of those 8, 7 contained material that had been marked Special Access, and 3 for compartmentalization. For those of us who have actually held a security clearance this here is the real galling bit. Plenty of material gets classified Secret or Top Secret while remaining effectively public to anyone with the appropriate clearance. Something that gets marked "Special Access" aka as being "Codeworded" means that this is not something that goes into the secure documents room where any schmuck with a security clearance can look at it. This is something that we seriously want to limit access to and should be considered strictly need-to-know. For the record, this is the level of access that the infamous "nuclear codes" reside at. Compartmentalization goes a step above that. Stuff that gets explicitly marked for compartmentalization is not supposed to leave it's designated compartment. It's the "Gentlemen, nothing we are about to discuss here can leave this room." type shit that shows up in political thrillers. It is the true name of our agent in the kremlin, the mathematical algorithms used to generate and authenticate the nuclear codes, and the detailed schematics of the crashed UFO in Area 51, that sort of thing. If you have Compartmentalized information that someone else needs to know you do not put it in a fucking email. You either call that person and speak to them directly on a secured line, or you put it on a piece of paper. put that paper in an appropriately marked envelope, and have an armed courier hand deliver it to the individual in question. The old "handcuffed briefcase" trope may or may not make an appearance. I've worked with Special Access and Compartmentalized information a few times over the course of my career and it's always a PITA. It's the kind of thing where you have to hand your cellphone, watch, and any other electronics you might have on your person to a security guard by the door before entering a room that is also a faraday cage before you can discuss the topic of the meeting.
Furthermore, these emails were found unencrypted on the laptop of a third party who did not have a security clearance, thus demonstrating beyond any doubt that an unauthorized disclosure did occur.
Finally, there's the apparent destruction of evidence. Clinton, or someone on her staff attempted to conceal the unauthorized disclosure by wiping the files, and any record of them being sent from the host side. We only know about these files because they were recovered from the receiving computer. This also implies that there may be other unauthorized disclosures by Clinton and her staff that were not discovered because the receiver was never found.
In contrast Trump is accused of illegally retaining classified material for which he was the classifying authority and possibly disclosing it to a 3rd party but as it stands hard evidence of that disclosure has yet to be presented, all we got is Trump saying that he would.
TLDR
There is no way for TSC/Compartmentalized material to show up on someone personal computer or email server without someone violating the espionage act.
Likewise, there is no way for it to be sent to a third party over the internet without someone violating the espionage act.
Someone trying to conceal the above implies that they had knowledge that they were acting illegally.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
The context you seem to be missing is that Alvin Bragg is effectively a cartoon charactichure of the GOP's bogeyman of the "Soros funded Prosecutor". Dude was all over the news a couple months back for charging a Bodega-owner with assault and unlawful possession of a handgun for wrestling a gun away from a would-be robber.
If any thing Im surprised that Bragg displayed the restraint he did by only charging Sgt Penny with manslaughter and not murder 2 at a bare minimum.
Nothing in this article is going to come as news to anyone who's been active in centrist and center-right-leaning media spaces for the last two years but the origin of it might.
What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted
Long story short the UK Sunday Times, the Newspaper to which the New York Times' name is an hommage, and as I gather from other british media the de facto voice of the establishment in the UK has endorsed the Lab Leak theory and I'm kind of surprised that no one's seems to be talking about.
The article doesn't mention Fauci by name but his ties to EcoHealth Alliance have been well documented elsewhere, and the article does acknowledge the existence of US health officials desire to bypass US safety and reporting regulations. The article also notes that while release was likely accidental, the Chinese military and intelligence services had expressed interest in using it as a weapon and had begun working on developing an inoculation for the virus over a month before it first appeared in "the wild".
I personally don't have a whole lot to add to the article itself, but I do find myself wondering what now? I expect the US media to try and bury this. After all Fauci is their golden boy, the poster-child "trust the experts". At the same time, he his, along with the behavior of many within the media itself (looking at you Yglesias) the reason that experts are not to be trusted.
If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with? Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
In his Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post Scott posited an "uncanny valley of half measures" and I kind of feel like that's the situation a lot of cities are in now regarding a lot of issues surrounding mental health and substance abuse. A completely laissez faire approach would mean tolerating misbehavior but also tolerating the train driver telling the masturbator to get off their train if they don't want to have their skull stove in by a tanker's bar or coupling tool. A tough-on-crime approach would mean removing the masturbator from the train by having the police lock him/her up. Either of these options is arguably preferable in terms of transit ride quality to the current status quo where individuals are allowed to misbehave but are not allowed to be punished for that misbehavior.
On Inferential Distance
There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power, and more generally the how the whole Left/Right spectrum is incoherent. These complaints are often deployed in tandem with the old Bryan Caplan take about the left is defined by being anti-market and the right is defined by being anti-left. I disagree, and given how I've been accused by multiple users of "torturing the meaning of words" and "doubling down on obvious falsehoods" over the last couple months, and I feel kind of obligated to elaborate.
Entering college life as I did (as Freshman on the GI-Bill Student after 12 years as combat medic), I found it difficult to discount the degree to which certain cultural assumptions dominated the school's culture. I often found myself feeling a bit like Captain Picard in that one TNG Episode where the alien-of-the-week's individual words are readily translatable but their meaning is not. When I first read Yudkowski's post on "expecting short inferential distances" it crystalized something that I had already grasped intuitively but had been struggling to put into words. The concept of "inferential distance" subsequently became something of a bugbear of mine. In 1984 Orwell posits that the key to controlling discourse was to first control the language and I think he was on to something with that. As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion. Often times I'll find myself choosing to not bother but I can't help but notice that this amplifies the problem, "evaporative cooling" and all that.
While I recognize that language is more performative than it is prescriptive what I am endeavoring to do here is something like a rectification of names. A lot of what I am about to say is going to be a rehash of things that some of you will have already read before on Lesswrong, SSC, or on theMotte prior our departure from Reddit. But in the interests of engaging with people we disagree with I will attempt to restate my case for the record...
What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism. This tradition rose to prominance in the first century BC and spread rapidly along the mediterrainian coast ultimately conquering most of Europe and eventually spreading to the new world. One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye. There is a debate to be had about to what degree early Christianity created these conditions or was simply a reaction to them but I don't think they matter all that much. It looks to me like a chicken and egg type question as regardless of on which side you fall in the debate the two are inextricably linked. The venn diagram of cultures considered "western" and cultures "heavily influenced by Christainity" (as opposed to other faiths Abrahamic or otherwise) is practically a circle with Jesus himself quoting Homer and Aeschylus in his sermons.
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man. While this model may have fallen out of favor in acedemia over the last few decades I still believe that it holds value in that it "cleaves reality at the joints" by pointing to real differences in how diffrenet classes within the west approach questions of legal authority/legitimacy while still accurately reflecting to the original etymology, IE which side would one be expected to take in the French revolution.
Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.
I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.
Edit: Fixed link, spelling
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Inferential Distance: a Prologue
Over the few weeks I've come a across multiple posts here that have left me wondering "are we looking at the same event?" or less charitably "WTF has this commentor been smoking?", and this has gotten me thinking about something that I've been meaning to do since we made the transition to the new site, and that is to start consolidating the the things I've written under this pseudonym and that are currently spread out over a decade of time, and half a dozen different websites/forums, into something more manageable. This is not that post, but it is something of a prelude.
I see a lot of posts here from ostensible right wingers lamenting the progressives' omnipresence and inevitable victory, and I'm not sure what to make of them because that is not what I see, or what I hear, when I talk to the actual human beings in my life. If anything it's the opposite. The progressives are running scared. For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
Those that are familiar with me from my time on LessWrong and /r/SSC may recall that the concept of "inferential distance" has always been something of a hobby horse of mine, and I think this issue in particular illustrates why. You see. there is a lot talk here on theMotte about progressives "controlling the narrative", "twitter being the wellspring of culture", "normies doing whatever the tv tells them", that to me seems absurd, but in light of Gallup's results makes a certain amount of sense. I don't think it's any secret that this forum, as a splinter faction of the rationalist movement skews wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan, college-educated, and frankly Democrat. While I could be wrong, I would be willing to bet that there are way more fans of Cumtown here than there are fans of Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson. And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.
You expect people to believe what you see on the news because that's normal where you're from.
I expect everyone to roll their eyes at the news because that's normal where I'm from.
...and this points to the first of many fundamental disconnects.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Had started writing a commentary on Meloni’s speech myself but as this thread is here I'm just going to piggy back off of it.
Long story short I think that you and pretty much everyone amongst the dissident-left are alt-right are getting the causality backwards by accepting the default progressive framing of identity as correct. It's this framing that Meloni is explicitly rejecting. It's not that gender identity (along with the rest of the progressive stack) are for "empty people". It's that empty people latch on to those things as an identity because they don't have a strong identity of their own. An individual with a strong sense of self does not require affirmation of their identity from others, an individual with a strong sense of community doesn't care what his neighbors look like or how much the make so long as they are good neighbors. Preoccupation with gender identity, race, class, etc... are down stream of the social atomization. As you yourself note: @Stefferi's critique of Meloni's position could almost be read as making her point for her.
Meanwhile @DuplexFields talks about progressives fighting against the purity spiral, but was that really ever they case? Some of the oldest critiques against the entire post-modern and progressive movements come from Christian Apologists of the late 19th and early 20th century like Kipling, Lewis, and Chesterton. The characterization of progressivism by it's critics was that they were never interested in fighting oppression so much as weakening the structures that stood as bulwarks against it. They dismissing binary views of black and white, good and evil, truth and untruth as "simplistic", only to replace them with an even simpler view, a unitary view where there is only grey, and do as "do you will". Or as a more recent critic put it "when everyone is 'Super', no one is"
I think that Meloni's choice of closing quote makes this interpretation makes this interpretation explicit so here it is in it's proper context...
It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought “dogmatic,” for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought “dogmatic” to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. Or, again, we see nothing “dogmatic” in the inspiring, but certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless as sticks and straws. This is a great and suggestive idea, and its utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. Thus, because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts’ sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live– a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.
Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search. Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.
Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.
- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 1905
...and before anyone tries to paint this as an uncharitable weakman I must ask "what is a woman?".
The following is an adaptation/repost of something that I posted to /r/theMotte a few years back. I had intended to post it yesterday but real life intervened. It feels strange to think that it has since been 10 years.
For me, as I sit in an airport lobby writing this, it is around mid-day September 11th. In Mecca it is late evening, the Sun has gone down and in the eyes of the more conservative/orthodox clerics it is already the 12th. The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
It is poetic, and likely intended by the attack's perpetrators, that the date of September 11th is now remembered by many Americans in much the same way. The end of a perceived golden age, the day we lost our way. That said, while the the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon in 2001 have overshadowed it is the twelfth that comes to mind when I think "bloody and shameful anniversary", and that I find more personally significant.
As I mentioned in /u/mcjunker's 9/11 memory thread, September 11th 2001 is the day I "picked a side". The towers went down on a Tuesday and I was talking to a US Navy recruiter the following Monday. While my feelings about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are complicated I don't regret any of the choices I made. Solzhenitsyn said "Prosperity breeds idiots". I don't think that's right. What prosperity breeds is forgetfulness. To quote Lee Harris in the opening to Civilization and it's Enemies...
Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy.
September 11th 2012 was also a Tuesday. When the attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi began at 9:40 PM local time I would have been eating lunch, maybe knocking out a last-minute homework assignment for my 2:00 PM class. As I said above it was on 9/11 that "I chose a side" but I don't think truly grokked or appreciated what that meant before those months leading up to the 2012 Election and September 12th 2012 in particular.
By this point I had already completed two enlistments where in I'd served as a rescue swimmer and combat medic, as well as the first of several shorter stints I would spend as a private military contractor for a large humanitarian NGO. I was, at this time, serving in the reserves as an instructor and range safety officer while going to college on the GI Bill. I was also the regional rep for a national-level veterans' organization and on a first name basis with my congressman. I'd gone into the Navy a pissed off 20-something looking for a fight, and come out almost a decade later still believing in the cause, but deeply pessimistic about the US in general and the current administration in particular's ability to see it through. It was clear to me that the sort of idealized liberal democracy that the administration seemed to have in mind wasn't going to work in Iraq. There just wasn't the sense of legitimacy or cultural background to support it.
It's a popular refrain that we all want the same things. To be warm and safe with full bellies and for our kids to have a better life than we did. To a degree this is true, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone wants these things. That said, different people will prioritize them differently. So even in discussing these fundamentals there is the potential for disagreement, and that is before we start talking about the best course of action to attain our fundamental wants. This is where the "disbelief in foreigners" comes in. Culture matters and it runs deep. Culture is not just about how one dresses or what they eat. It carries assumptions of language, social structures, flora, fauna, climate, and all sorts of unexamined axioms and assumptions about how the world works.
On Paper, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Rod Dhrer are much the same. They're both conservatives. They're both journalists. They're both Orthodox Catholics. They both lived in the American north-east. And they both made thier names writing about the crimes of Communism and the Soviet Union. That said Solzhenitsyn was Russian to his bones and Russians expect to get screwed. One of my favorite bits in Scott's Unsong was when Lake Baikal was revealed to be a portal to Hell and the Russian response is basically "whelp, that figures". That moment cracked me up because it really does figure. When viewed from ground level Russian history is basically a long string of things going wrong in new and revolutionary ways. When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
A sense of something akin to "the mandate of heaven" is baked into Iraqi culture the way "things go wrong" is baked into Russian culture. It's there in how they talk. "Inish Allah" literally "if God wills it", is used as a standard greeting/parting phrase, and at times almost like a punctuation mark. I'll see you again tomorrow if God wills it. Enjoy your lunch if God wills it. The train will arrive at 10:00 if God wills it. /u/HlynkaCG will share his stash of hot-sauce with us if God wills it. Emphasis on the If. Fact of the matter is that there is little in the Iraqis' history to suggest that they can trust a government to abide by it's word simply because it gave it's word. Yet we expected them to trust the government, and we expected a government comprised of Iraqis to be trustworthy. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but understandable because we were thinking like Americans. People from a country that has had 200+ years of reasonably stable government that, even when it's corrupt, tends to be corrupt in fairly banal and predictable ways.
Coming back to 2012, my position gave me something of a front row seat to Romney's presidential bid and access to some of his advisors as well as state politicians. I had previously been aware of the Gell-mann Amnesia effect but hadn't really considered the implication of it. Namely that those who are supposed to be "in the know" often aren't. Having spent time in field some level of cluelessness and/or fecklessness on the part of politicians, pundits, and State Department weenies was assumed on my part. That said, I repeatedly found myself flummoxed by the ignorance and stupidity of highly intelligent people. Some corporate big-wig trying to get a pipeline built would be going on about how lazy the local workers were because they wouldn't work through the day. Meanwhile I'm thinking lets drop you in a place with 105 degree weather and no AC and see how much you feel like working. Someone else would be talking about backing some "moderate" Islamic group or another but then their rep would be a bearded Sunni man wearing a taqiyah and a black sash without a mustache. To translate this into a more familiar cultural equivalent here is a picture of some allegedly "moderate" American Jews. I used to joke about how HQ wanted me dead but the truth was in Hanlon's Razor. Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance and/or stupidity. This may come across as me complaining. Something to the effect of "If only they had listened, disaster could have been averted". That's not my intention, if anything listening to me would have fucked things up in a completely different way. Instead remember that you are ignorant.
I may have joked that my superiors wanted me dead, but there was also an understanding. It was right there on page 13 of my service jacket. I had formally volunteered for hazardous duty in exchange for additional pay. The numerology was not lost on me, and I suspect it was intentional. I would be asked to do something stupid and dangerous and I would do it, in return my Chain of Command would have my back. This is something that I feel like a lot of Americans, especially those who haven't been in the military or haven't worked a specifically dangerous job don't really grasp. There are two key elements to a functional hierarchy. The shit rolling down hill, and the fire climbing up it. Yes the guys at the bottom get shit on, so it goes. The Task forced commander tells a captain that observation post X needs item Y. That captain tells a lieutenant to make it so. That lieutenant talks to his Platoon Sgt and eventually the shit comes to a rest at the bottom of the hill when some Corporal tells some PFC "Hey, Abe I need I need you and Garcia to hump this heavy-ass box up the hill to OP X-ray". This aspect is well known as most people have some experience with being at the bottom of the pecking order if only from childhood. What gets less attention is the fire. If a PFC has a problem his team leader has a problem. If the team leader can't solve with it the resources he has on hand, his platoon/detachment leader has a problem, and so on up the chain till the fire reaches the appropriate level and the officer responsible drops a new load of shit.
To be continued...
edit: fixed broken link.
As I've tried to explain in some of your earlier 2020 election threads I feel like you are either misrepresenting or fundamentally misunderstanding the nature opposition's objections.
Elections are by their nature a contested environment not just between the individual candidates, but as Tom Scott touches upon in this video on electronic voting, between the candidates, their respective voters, and those administering the election. You seem to be approaching this issue as though it were a criminal trial where the election must be presumed legitimate unless proved otherwise in a court of law, but that's not how this works. You need to understand that the purpose of an election isnot to produce a "true" or "accurate" result. It is to produce a clear result that the candidates (and thier voters) can accept as legitimate, including the ones who lost. This is why we use paper ballots with documented chains of custody, this is why we have laws requiring that the counting be witnessed by representative of each candidate/party. Defendants may be constitutionally entitled to a presumption of innocence, but there's nothing in the constitution about presuming that election officials are impartial or even competent for that matter. As such I would suggest that in the event that the above safeguards are broken/removed or other irregularities appear (and I don't think you can deny that there were irregularities) it is only fair, dare I say it rational, to ask "what gives?". Likewise the more stridently partisans of the winning candidate insist that "there's nothing to see here" while simultaneously denying access to recourse, the more reasonable it becomes for the losing candidates and their voters to suspect foul play.
The simple thing that after 4 years of this conversation you still don't seem to grasp is that you aren't going to convince anyone the election was legitimate by arguing the niggling technical details of individual cases and motions. You need to actually address the elephant in the room.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.
A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
The long version might require a bit of background to explain.
I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.
As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.
The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Reading this following the earlier thread about environmentalists gluing themselves to streets something occurs to me. The civil rights movement is the quintessential example of a successful protest movement, but for all the talk about how "disruption is essential to a successful protest" I think something that is lost on a lot of modern protestors is that the Freedom Riders Et Al were rarely disruptive in themselves. Sitting down at a lunch counter and ordering a burger is not disruptive, it's what the lunch counter it is there for, it was the responses of others that was disruptive. Simply put, if you're a dude pouring a milkshake on some chick's head for ordering a burger you're the asshole, and public perception reflected that.
I considered making this an "inferential distance" post but it's more an idle thought that occurred to me and a bit too big of a question to go in the small questions thread.
That being, Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?
Without going into details, I had to have a sit-down with one of my subordinates this week about how he had dropped the ball on his portion of a larger project. The kid is clearly smart and clearly trying but he's also "a kid" fresh out of school and working his first proper "grown-up" job. The fact that he's clearly trying is why I felt the need to ask him "what the hell happened?" and the answer he gave me was essentially that he didn't want to tell me that he didn't understand the assignment because he didn't want me to think he was stupid.
This reminded me of some of the conversations that have happened here on theMotte regarding GPT's knowledge and/or lack thereof. A line of thinking I've seen come up multiple times here is something to the effect of; As a GPT user I don’t ever want it to say "I don’t know". this strikes me as obviously stupid and ultimately dangerous. The people using GPT doesn't want to be told "sorry there are no cases that match your criteria" they want a list of cases that match their criteria and the more I think about it the more I come to believe that this sort of thinking is the root of so many modern pathologies.
For a bit of context my professional background since graduating college has been in signal processing. Specifically signal processing in contested environments, IE those environments where the signal you are trying to recognize, isolate, and track is actively trying to avoid being tracked, because being tracked is often a prelude to catching a missile to the face. Being able assess confidence levels and recognize when you may have lost the plot is a critical component of being good at this job as nothing can be assumed to be what it looks like. If anything, assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. Scott talks about bounded distrust and IMO gets the reality of the situation exactly backwards. It is trust, not distrust, that needs to be kept strictly bounded if you are to achieve anything close to making sense of the world. My best friend is an attorney, we drink and trade war stories from our respective professions, and from what he tells me the first thing he does after every deposition or discovery is go through every single factual claim no matter how seemingly minute or irrelevant and try to establish what can be confirmed, what can't, and what may have been strategically omitted. He just takes it as a given that witnesses are unreliable, that the opposing council wants to win, and that they may be willing to lie and cheat to do so. These are lawyers we're talking about after all, absolute shysters and moral degenerates the lot of them ;-). For better or worse this approach strikes me as obviously correct, and I think the apparent lack of this impulse amongst academics in general and rationalists in particular is why rationalists get memed as Quokka. I don't endorse 0 HP's entire position in that thread, but I do think he has correctly identified some nugget of truth.
So what does any of this have to do with the replication crisis or the War in Ukraine? Think about it. How often does an academic get applauded for publish a negative result? The simple fact that in a post-modern setting it is far more important to publish something that is new and novel than it is to publish something that is true. Nobody gets promoted for replicating someone else experiment or publishing a negative result and thus the people inclined to do so get weeded out of the institutions. By the same token, I've seen a similar trend in intel reports out of Russia. To put it bluntly their organic ISR and BDA is apparently terrible bordering on non-existent and a good portion of this seems to stem from an issue that the US was dealing with back in the early 2010s IE soldiers getting punished for reporting true information. Just as the US State Department didn't want to be told how precarious the situation with ISIL was, the Russian MOD doesn't want to hear that a given Battalion is anything other than at full strength and advancing. Ukrainian commanders will do things like confiscate their men's cell phones and put them all in a box in an empty field. When Russian bombers get dispatched to blow up that empty field and last thing anyone in the chain of command wants to believe is that they just wasted a bunch of expensive ordnance. They want to believe that 500 cell-phone signals going dark equates to 500 Ukrainian soldiers killed. It's an understandable desire, but the thing about contested environments is that the other guy also gets to vote.
In short, something that I think a lot of people here (most notably Scott, Caplan, Debeor, Sailer, Yud, and a lot of other rationalist "thought leaders") have forgotten is that appeals to authority, scientific consensus, and the "sense making apparatus" are all ultimately hollow. It is the combative elements of science that keep it honest and producing useful knowledge.
If it were just called western or American culture it would at least be something people could reason about.
Problem is that more accurate naming might undermine the activists' goal of sowing racial grievences/division that can than be used to justify more activism.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
I know I'm not exactly unbiased when it comes to this topic but I'm quibble with your characterization of the Clinton situation a bit.
The incident that kicked the whole mess off was that TSC/SCI material from outside the State Department was found in possession of a Clinton staffers' spouse. The material being marked for compartmentalization and having come from outside the state department is important because it means that Clinton was not the classifying authority and thus there was no way for it to end up where it did without multiple clear-cut violations of USC 18-1924. The fact that the tracking numbers had been whited out, further suggested knowledge and intent.
Granted, this was bad but likely would have been ignored if hadn't happened within the wider context of the Bengahzi hearings, and Clinton's response had been anything other than trying dismiss any and all criticism of her performance as sexism.
Meanwhile I continue to be bemused by liberals' apparent inability/unwillingness to believe that publicly insulting your core customers might be bad for business.
As others and I keep pointing out. The issue was never Mulvaney per se, it was what came next. If InBev had released some boiler-plate statement about "People being free to be whatever they want because 'Murica" or simply kept their corporate yaps shut, I think the controversy would've blown over in a week and Bud Light would still be comfortably in the top slot instead of having to fight it out with Modelo.
What they did instead was have their head of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, go on national TV to talk about how they didn't want the brand to be associated with frat-boys and truckers anymore. Turns out the frat-boys and truckers were listening.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
Is Trump actually always innocent?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that he's always innocent, but I don't think he's anymore "guilty" than any other wealthy Manhattan real-estate developer. For all the talk of him being incompetent and undisciplined, I think that if he were actually dirty his opponents' would have found something more solid to nail him on.
Why do you think Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children if there was no fixation on race?
Catholicism.
ACB is a wealthy catholic woman and Haiti is a majority catholic country with a surplus of catholic orphans in catholic orphanages in [current year] where US child services tend to frown upon faith-based adoption in general and that of Trad-Caths in particular.
It goes a good bit further than enforcement appearing to be selective, it is demonstrably selective. Simple fact of the matter now that we have the Indictment, we can compare it to the Comey report from 2016 and what becomes readily apparent is that Clinton was allowed off the hook for what were substantially more egregious violations than anything Trump has been accused of. It's a pity pushshift is currently down as I'd like to link the thread where I did a detailed breakdown of the report when it was first released and compared Clinton's case to Petraeus' but six years is a lot of posts to scroll through.
In any case, I see this as the equivalent of Faucci declaring Racism "a public health crisis" so that he could endorse BLM protests while continuing to condemn anti-lockdown protests as super-spreader events.
It lays bare the lie that they are not acting politically.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
It's also why the black bloc folks don't operate outside cities where the local government isn't already firmly on thier side.
I suspect that one of the reasons January 6th seemed to have progressives so shaken, was that they didn't think a protest could happen in territory that they controlled.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
1yr ago
But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants.
Sheltering the women and children of your ally while the men fight your hated enemy is the least one can do as a good ally.
Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?
From what I've gathered from my Polish acquaintances and co-workers* the answer is pretty straight forward, they don't see themselves as "Eastern", they see themselves as "Western" a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on). More pointedly Poland got royally fucked over by a Russian German alliance in World-War one, and again in World War Two. Accordingly their towards both Russia and Germany today is essentially one of "Never Again". From the Polish perspective joining NATO defangs the German threat while pissing off their ancient rivals/enemies, the Muskovites, as far as they're concerned it's all win. Sure the duplicitous Germans and and effete Belgians can whinge about immigration policy but what are they actually gonna do, Poland is part of the Schengen Zone baby and they've been pulling the DeSantis trick of sending unwanted immigrants to the hometowns of politicians who promote immigration for years now.
As for the Ukraine war in particular, Kiev has long been an ally of Krakow and Moscow has long been a rival/enemy. Pieprzic Rossia, Slava Ukraini.
* Note most of those acquaintances and co-workers are in the Polish military/defense industry which probably colors things a bit.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
What's with that?
As a general rule, Republicans do not share the Democrats' fixation on race essentialism.
HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
To be clear that post is from October of 2022 so only one year old. And I stand-by pretty much everything I said there. (ETA: furthermore I feel like I won that bet)
What I see when I look at my balance sheet (which I happen to have open at the moment because it's the 1st of the month and I'm paying bills) is the simple fact that my family's cost of living has gone up by over 24% in the last 18 months or so, (mostly driven by the price of food, gas, and utilities), and I have not seen a commensurate increase in income.
I've also observed similar trends on the professional side as when I review component prices and lead times from vendors, they're often double what they were back at the beginning of 2021, and while we're getting plenty of orders our ability to fulfill those orders in a timely manner has not kept up. Which means there's almost certainly some other middle management type somewhere complaining about my prices and lead times.
It's easy for some rando on the internet or Democratic party operative in the media/academia, to make up some numbers that say that the economy is doing gang-busters.
It's a lot harder for me to ignore what's right in front me.
The more you insist that any claims to the contrary are "just partisan emotional expression" on the part of spoil-sport Republicans, the more I think back to Margin Call, the first two acts of the Big Short, and the fact that our "experts" as a class have already demonstrated a willingness to lie if they think it will help the Democrats in an election year.
Im on my way to a barbecue right now so dont have time to add much in the way of commentary but a federal has just hand down an injunction barring the white house from working with social media organizations to censor specific content. A rulling that the Washington Post describes as dangerous and violating long standing norms. Happy Fourth of July all ;-)
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