Hyperion
4d ago
India is very communalist and is divided into thousands of endogamous castes. China is one big melting pot of a population with a big focus on being a meritocratic peasant society. These lead to very different societies.
Hyperion
5d ago
The only way to defeat the Houthis is to just starve the population until so many die that support for them either falls or the whole movement crumbles.
I've thought this for a while about both the Yemen war and everything about Palestine. If aid was cut off these states would not only starve, but they would be robbed of a significant source of income from what they skim off the top of aid shipments. To say nothing of the Iranian military aid mixed into the humanitarian aid.
We did worse to the Belgians in WW1, but now we can't lift a finger to protect our own interests.
tradition reasoning sends the issue to the legislature,
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
Those words mean something to some of us...
Hyperion
5d ago
It still takes time (and time you are moving around, covering more area), so under the assumptions that believers make it might well reduce transmission risk per visit by like 10%.
The base rate of people having Covid at all is very low, this was true even during the height of the pandemic, especially if they show no symptoms. The reduction in transmission from masks is also very low, even if worn correctly(they won't be). Wearing a mask only part time reduces this further. If you multiply all these low probabilities together you get an absurdly low probability.
The whole thing was security theatre. That 10% reduction sounds like a lot until you realize the base rate is .01 and no one is actually following the protocol enough to actually reduce it by 10%, more like 1%
Hyperion
5d ago
Corporations, as creatures of the state, should be able to have their speech limited by the state, which was the law prior to CU v. FEC.
Does this apply to media corporations? Or do I have to be the sole owner of a newspaper to have speech rights and if I incorporate I give them up to the state?
Hyperion
5d ago
When people use the word dictator they use it in the modern sense, which is a bunch of military generals subverting supposedly democratic revolutions for their own personal gain and power. This is also how Julius Caesar used it in the waning days of the Roman Republic.
Cincinnatus was a great dictator, just like George Washington was a great general and president. But, we don't call Washington a dictator, because he went out of his way not to become one. A feat not replicated by the various revolutionaries that have given us the modern definition of dictator.
Wasn't that how the weaponized autists interpreted them for the masses? When one of the protagonists meets them in real life, he's immediately weirded out.
Yes and no. The spider society really does have nuclear families, a class system, constitutional monarchies and a World War and Cold War that mirror that of 20th century Britain. The physical descriptions and names are made to more mirror human culture by the autists, but fundamentally the spiders' history and social structure is like 20th century Britain in reality, that part isn't made up.
Also, although, the humans are weirded out, the spiders find humans extremely cute; because, spider children can only look in one direction like humans and spiders find the way humans stare at them while speaking, adorable.
Hyperion
11d ago
It's pretty wild, but it suffers from the fact that the aliens are just humans who happen to look like spiders. Their psychology, politics and history are identical to that of western countries in 20th century Earth. Nothing about their strange history or biology makes them any different from humans. They have nuclear families, they have constitutional monarchies, they are just Spider-Alien Britain. Hell, the competing human factions and sub-factions in the book are more alien then the aliens.
I think this is by choice since the author seems to believe in a kind of Whig view of history that liberalism is the only real way to advance and anything else is doomed to slow death or stagnation.
The Three-Body Problem did a better job of showcasing actually bizarre aliens, instead of people who look bizarre.
Hyperion
12d ago
Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.
Hyperion
16d ago
his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off.
I think this is true of the internet in general. You sometimes hear that Gamergate started it all, but really it was just the moment a certain faction of previously apolitical people realized that progressives were going to politicize the internet and everything.
Hyperion
18d ago
His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.
Hyperion
18d ago
You can get better odds on a black jack table if you want to gamble. I thought it was certain that the Democrats would dump Biden a week ago; but, he, somehow, is hanging on. That's why the bet is so even. Most of the time, if you think you've found a mark, you are the mark.
Hyperion
18d ago
I miss when our elites would just slam an axe into each other's skulls and then payed the weregild afterwards. Made things easier for the masses they ruled over.
Hyperion
18d ago
What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?
Hyperion
20d ago
I think it might be more a long the lines of communists declaring social democrat parties social fascists. It's hard to place DeBoer, he just seems to lash out at everyone and seems like a rather awful person to be around, even when he isn't going through a manic episode.
Hyperion
24d ago
Impeachment is a political question, not a legal question. That is why it's handled by congress. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this. Congress is so sole authority that decides questions of impeachment. No judge can overrule them.
Hyperion
1mo ago
The guy you are arguing with is a literal Nazi who wants to convince moderate 'race realists' that they are really Nazis too. It's why he plays these weird definitional games that mirror those of progressive activists.
Hyperion
1mo ago
Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way.
No he said being cuckolded as in literally raising someone else's child as your own would be worse. That's worlds apart from an affair that leads to no children.
Hyperion
1mo ago
One thing I like about fantasy and science fiction and so forth is its utility as a lens upon our own world: it lets us consider what things would be like if something we believe is true were different.
A lot of people are unable to consume media in this way. If a piece of media says something is true in this fictional hypothetical that wildly diverges from out world, they are trying to say it is also true in our world. So, Starship Troopers a story about a united humanity fighting against literal bugs is really promoting racism and white supremacy in our world, despite it's protagonist being Filipino.
It's similar to people who argue against the hypothetical in thought experiments. They seem to believe worlds in which their current politics fail just can't exist and anyone who would think up such a world only does so to push evil beliefs in the here and now.
Hyperion
1mo ago
It's precisely because they benefited they can be enough of a fixture in the culture to make a fuss. The kids who got adopted can use the education and stability they got from it to make a fuss about how it robbed them of their culture. While those who got to experience the culture first hand probably just died of alcohol poisoning or are trying to forget they ever grew up on the rez.
Hyperion
1mo ago
Japanese tourists don't count as tourists obviously, tourist just means gaijin. For the rest they get excluded. I doubt a Japanese-American could get past a real Japanese person, even at a glance(ignoring that racially pure Japanese-Americans are almost non-existent).
Hyperion
1mo ago
The Nazi racial theories were more grounded in reality than what passes today.
You are eliding the fact that the Nazis thought that Balts and Slavs weren't really Aryan, despite them being more CWC by ancestry than any German. Also that they were pale, blond, blue eyed people, when they were overwhelmingly far more swarthy. Nazi racial theories made no sense and they used them to justify killing millions of people most of which were fellow Aryans.
This is a common tactic of yours, to elide the terrible parts of Nazi ideology and equivocate it with the worst ultranationalist sentiments of other peoples.
Hyperion
1mo ago
But the Corded Ware culture, the common ancestor to all European peoples and languages, did originate from that part of Europe.
That's not true. The Greeks and Albanians are from late-Yamnaya/Catacomb culture people, the Basque still exist and there are Uralic and Turkish people as well.
Not to mention how much of the ancestry of these groups isn't from the Yamnaya or Corded-Ware culture people. Or how much of a mongrel race these Indo-Europeans groups were in the first place.
You just pick and choose what facts you want to fit your narrative.
Hyperion
1mo ago
I'm not saying the current models do original meaningful reasoning. If they could the whole world would be turned upside down and we wouldn't be debating if they could.
I think GPT-20 will be able to do that kind of thing in 50 years, either because all we need is scaling; or, because, we will make some new advance in the underlying architecture.
My point is more that high schoolers don't do meaningful original reasoning either. Monkey see, Monkey do. Most human innovation is just random search that is copied by others.
The fact that this machine is dumb isn't surprising, almost all things are dumb, and most humans are. That it can do anything at all is an innovation that puts all the rest to shame.
It's like being mad the first organism that evolved a proto-neuron or proto-central nervous system can't add 2+2 correctly.
It's called hyperbole. Everyone knows what those words literally mean, which is why using them figuratively creates emphasis. It's not a lack of verbal skills, in fact it takes verbal skills to be able to encode and decode the hyperbole.
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