Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Nope, you and Caplan are both just wrong about what the "reasonable hawk" looks like. You are the ones missing a mood, namely "competing when the stakes really, really matter". Actively hemming and hawing over the acceptable costs of a desired, good outcome is retarded and maladaptive. The overwhelming majority of human beings, even highly intelligent ones, are not psychologically capable of the the level of sociopathic, rationalist autism required to attempt his "reasonable hawk" nonsense - and even one of those 0.0001% decouplers would rapidly find themselves dehumanizing the enemy because it's just wildly more efficient in terms of mental load.
Worrying about the feelings of a lethal, intractable enemy is the sort of luxury you spare for things you outclass on the same level that we outclass wolves and bears. And even then, the people who actually live in areas with wolves and bears are less sympathetic about it than urban fools.
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24d ago
A: "Why is this marathon runner sweating so much? I would expect them to not want to be sweating. Do they not realize that sweating is unpleasant?"
B: "They're sweating because they are running a marathon. The sweat is an adaptive strategy that makes them better at running marathons. If they did not sweat, they would be worse at running marathons, and probably not be able to do so at all."
A: "Isn't that what I just said?"
B: "No. It really isn't."
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25d ago
No, that's just how human psychology works. Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.
It's the same reason conservatives post Ghibli memes about crying deportees. They are no longer willing to give a shred of concern or credibility for crocodile tears of the people who caused the situation on purpose. Accusations of cruelty are met with mockery, because if you give an inch they'll let in another 50 million unvetted randos.
It's the same reason progressives never, ever, ever express any concern about the feelings and harm they may cause to their outgroup. It's the same reason no one is even bothering to try to use anything like this argument on Hamas or Iran, or their supporters in the US.
Just round the situation off to "blame goes to the aggressor" and win the damn war.
Iconochasm
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25d ago
I think part of the reason the sight was so viscerally upsetting to me is that I think early childhood is a critical time to develop core physicality. Beyond the forced feminization, the forced passivity feels more akin to foot-binding or raising a vegan cat than religious beliefs.
But I don't think the comparison is entirely invalid.
Iconochasm
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26d ago
Iconochasm
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26d ago
I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.
The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).
In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.
I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.
And yet.
I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
Iconochasm
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27d ago
Happy Solstice! Enjoy some mead-fueled rambling!
Earlier this week I was gazing into one of the endless amusing abysses of the internet when I stumbled across a post that spoke to me, all out of place. It was a brief meditation on aging and monogamy that echoed some of my own thoughts on the topic (tl;dr: a psychologically healthy man should still find beauty in the grandmother of his grandchildren), phrased and pic-related with a vibe I appreciated.
So I looked at the pseudonymous poster. They seemed to be some sort of TTRPG designer, or at least that's what their recent posts were about. A very brief perusal showed hints of extremely grognard-y concern about weapon minutia and a post talking about having bards be the representation of the gods, which were based on historical pantheons. Gave some extremely low (or even no) magic, gritty vibes, but that was a cool thought, using Bards telling stories of the Gods in the place of the more "mundane" divine power of healing and light spells. Felt like something William H. Stoddard would have put into a GURPS: Hyperborea book.
And, oh, cool, this person has an Amazon author page, let's check that and see what else they've written and-
It's Varg Vikerness.
Holy shit, I laughed my ass off. I really should have seen something like that coming. But it gave me a great excuse to remember one of my favorite memes.
And it gave me a good excuse to look up what happened in the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90's, to at least Wikipedia standards of quasi-reliability, instead of just Shit My Punk Friend Told Me Over A Blunt Twenty Years Ago. There's a bunch of overlapping articles, but start here or here.
The overall picture I see, reading between the lines a bit, looks like a classic purity spiral. Euronymous installs himself as the Prince of Norwegian Black Metal because he owns the record shop and label and talks a very extreme game about how obsessed he is with death and nihilism and being maximally evil and hating everything bright and fair. But he develops a reputation as a poseur, a guy using the aesthetic for personal gain or self-aggrandizement. Meanwhile, newcomers are taking his rhetoric to logical conclusions and start taking actual actions, like burning churches and murdering strangers.
Feeling his position is threatened, Euronymous escalates his rhetoric, confiding specific, private death threats at other members of the scene. But he does this so much, to and about so many people, that rumors get out and one of those newcomers responds and kills him first.
It's an interesting look into the psychology of a subculture. And while I do appreciate some of the music and other elements, it just reaffirms how thoroughly I find that kind to evil-maxing to just be utterly gauche. For fuck's sake, kids, even The Crow is a fundamentally hopeful film!
But it's also interesting to square that nihilism with how Varg presents himself now, as a committed family man espousing a more positive vision of simple living and racialism (for which he was subjected to a Vampetaço).
And as an added bonus to this whole rabbithole, I got confirmation that Kulak is aware of his theme song, which I admit had been bothering me for a bit. You know I don't usually hold with the Abominable Intelligence, but this Imperium Hymn stuff - it's not bad.
Hell, let's be honest. Black Templar's Prayer is a fucking banger, and it's been dominating my gym-time listening for months. I'd shed blood to have Sabaton or Powerwolf fix the soulless bits and cover it.
Finally, hi Chris! Hope you're doing well.
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1mo ago
Illegal immigrants are generally not eligible for welfare
No, they totally are, at least in many blue states. Medicaid is often open to illegal immigrants and many of them qualify because they don't report their taxes. I don't want to self-dox, but I literally see people who can't speak English interacting with state welfare systems on a daily basis.
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1mo ago
The first two are solid adventure fantasy. Starting in 3 and really picking up in 4, it delves into this horrible amateur philosophy that just guts the life out of the entire world and concept.
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1mo ago
The connections to Walz are incredibly tenuous, that he was reappointed six years ago to a large bipartisan workforce advisory board (one of 130 total state boards, advisory councils, task forces, etc) with this including volunteer small business owner representatives from around the state where most of the nominations came from basically just rubber stamping local council choices.
That is super weak, but FWIW, I'm also seeing claims that his wife was an intern for Walz at one point.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
I'll admit there is a certain appealing poetry to ending the immigration debate by offering Democrats a compromise that is front-loaded to what MAGA wants, and then ruthlessly stiffing them on the back end.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Yes, the happy chemicals after picking up the heavy things or covering a long distance makes me happy. The heavy things also have numbers on them, and if you keep doing it, you can watch the numbers go up.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Shame we'll never know because Trump backed off
We can't really say that based on this. Total number of hotel and farmworkers in the US is around 4 million. Even if they're all illegals, there's 20+ million illegals in the US, and some estimates put the number much higher. "Target that group last" is very different from just giving up altogether.
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1mo ago
If food spending goes up by $300 per year, the media will have an amazingly hypocritical freakout about it. But if, at the same time, rents drop by 10%, ER wait times go down, and many common areas feel less crowded by people who don't share a common culture or language, I think the American people would be quite happy with the outcome.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
I live near a popular tourist area, and we get flooded with Eastern European's on guest worker visas every summer. The jobs are in hospitality, which isn't that much more productive than farm work, if it is at all.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
I straight up don't believe you. Many are friendly enough (to the limited extent they can be, without a common language), but an illustrative experience was spending fifteen minutes trying to use translation software to explain to a woman the difference between a square and a rectangle while she just looked at me sadly and said "no comprendo..." Then she asked me to help her commit welfare fraud.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Ok. Let me know when you get the political support to even begin tackling that goal. Remember, one party will actively lie and cheat the system to get welfare spending to illegals, so make sure to take that into account in your planning.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
And when those foreigners are heavily subsidized by tapping into the American welfare systems? When they start voting to pick your pocket, and turn America into Mexico?
Tell you what, let's do 20 million deportations, and we'll save the million or two doing farmwork for last. And on the way, we'll see what effects that had on entitlement spending.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Yes, there are plenty of people who have no contact with illegal immigrants and suffer from a virulent Typical Mind Fallacy.
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1mo ago
You do get that there's already people doing this down-the-tech-tree work, right? If you're this upset at the thought of some college kid or NEET picking fruit instead of playing video games, why do you want to import massive amounts of low functioning foreigners?
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1mo ago
Huh. Now I need to track that other guy down and see if they had a similar pattern of flags or something.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Consider the possibility that your personal range of options doesn't perfectly generalize to the entire population.
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1mo ago
Worth noting that "all the coworkers are illegal immigrants" is a major disincentive to taking a particular job. Even aside from status stuff, just being able to shoot the shit in a common language vs being the only gringo is a big deal.
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1mo ago
Just casually stalk the subreddit. That'll expose you to some discussion points to start up, and people love nothing more than a chance to tell you why you're wrong - especially if you spin yourself as a foreigner who is willing to take the wisdom of the locals.
Bezos' Addendum to Goodhart's Law: If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of your data, you are probably measuring the data wrong.
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