JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
Trump also sees his relationship with the American electorate as an adversarial negotiation.
Is it not?
Part of his whole thing is that all negotiations are adversarial. And that there is no such thing as a "friend" or an "enemy" at the negotiation table, only competing interests.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
29d ago
Are you happy now with all the choices that you've made?
Are there times in your life when you know you should have stayed?
Have you ever compromised and then realized that the price was too much to pay?
Winners and losers...
Which one will you be today?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
29d ago
Dave's first rule of comedy was that if you have to explain the joke, the joke is not funny.
Trump wrote an entire book about how when entering a negotiation you should always open with what you see as your maximalist demands and then adjust based on how your counterpart responds.
Yet people such as yourself insist on acting like a man doing exactly what he told you that he was going to do is somehow out of character.
I don't remember where I originally heard this, it might have been my theater teacher in high school, or it might have been an interview with some big name comedian, but it is something that has stuck with me since I was a teenager...
Humor is by it's nature transgressive, it is about violating norms. The purpose of "the punchline" is to make it clear that you are fully aware of the transgression and "making fun" of those norms not just shitting on them like an asshole.
"To every man upon this earth
death will come soon or late.
And how can a man die better
than facing fearful odds
for the ashes of his fathers
and the temples of his gods?"
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Sometimes if you catch the demons among their group, you'll find they even admit to it.
First Time?
From The Washington Post; Harry Reid lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. He’s still not sorry.
There is a popular narrative about how the Young Earth Creationist and MAGA movements are stupid, illiterate, and utterly incapable of attracting "elite human capital".
If what you are saying is true, that narrative would appear to be false.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction.
I think you're on to something. A whole bunch of the thoughts I've been thinking about posts from the last couple weeks about the ongoing Lindsey Clancy drama, AI doomerism, European Diplomats, the Cornel 7, and Spiderman: Brand New Day, all seem to be converging on a similar conclusion and I really want to explore in an effort post but it's already late and I really ought to call it a night.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
What if "ragebait" and "effectiveness" are proportional? What if there is no way to be "effective" with out inciting rage? Would you urge us to be maximally ineffective out of courtesy?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Are we winning yet?
Yes, we are.
The root cause of the whole Christa Pike situation (which for the record is really fucked up) stems from the fact that the people in charge are stupid. IMO the correct response to such demonstrable incompetence is to do a Scott Evil and to do it as publicly as possible, which is what is happening.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Then clearly Salazar Slytherin was a better man than any of the people in the house he founded.
I think that one of the major points of conflict in the first quarter of the 21st century is the discrepancy between credentials/purity and ambition/competence.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
To me this reads as projection/wishful thinking, the current administration doesn't appear to be any more tyrannical or "Russophilic" than the Obama administration was.
J.D. Vance in Hufflepuff uniform
Comically unflattering image aside, I feel like Vance, Kushner, Hegseth, Issacman, and a bunch of others in the MAGA coalition would actually embrace this characterization.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Seizing the means of production and redistributing them to render the need for state coercion unnecessary.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Truly blinded by the beauty of thier weapons.
While I may have issues with Scott as a person I do feel compelled to defend him as both a writer and a thinker.
Regarding Scott as a writer; Unsong is vastly superior to HPMOR both as a work of fiction and as vessel for evangelizing rationalist ideals. Yes, I know it's popular but nobody who isn't already a rationalist takes EY or his self-insert fan-wank seriously. Meanwhile The Witching Hour is easily one of my favorite science fiction shorts of all time and I think that if it had been published in Omni or Amazing Stories back in the day, instead of being posted on some guy's blog in 2013, we would be talking about it as a classic of the genre in the same vein as The Last Question or Burning Chrome.
Regarding Scott as a thinker; to my knowledge he has originated 2 (possibly 3) ideas that have since been adopted into the wider western lexicon, even in spaces populated entirely by Scott's "dark matter people" who have never heard of rationalism or EA you'll find "Moloch" being used as a personification of societal ills and "The Toxoplasma of Rage" cited as a reason why Story X isn't getting more attention. I've also seen multiple priests and theologians with zero ties to this community cite Scott's "An answer to Job" when discussing free will and the question of evil. Not many thinkers who are alive today can claim that level of cultural penetration.
Regarding the rest, I think that the big thing that made LW 1.0 and the weekly discussion threads/link round-ups on SlateStarCodex.com special was that they were spaces where genuine cross tribal communication could occur, but eventually the owners of those spaces decided that they did not want to serve that role, and something valuable was lost.
I find myself thinking about this when ever I see comments about how woke "owns the discourse" or "won the internet" because they didn't, what they did was win here, and because that channel of cross tribal communication was cut there are a lot of people who simply don't realize that.
If we're doing political compass memes I think Caplan sits squarely in the far corner of the lib-left quadrant.
I get the impression that "He would be happy to get rid of the welfare state" only in so far as he's a radical libertarian who wants to do away with the idea of "the state" entirely.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
The original thread appears lost to time, if it still exists I have failed to find it, but QNTM got into it with EY over his so-called "containment experiments" where he effectively accused EY of being a fraud and "not a real AI researcher", a few days later he ate a ban for some unrelated bullshit where he got a accused of hate-speech against vegans or something.
I can not prove that EY was looking for a pretext to get rid of people who did not share his views, but that was the impression that I came away with.
Aside from Friedman himself, Baaj, Barnaby, QNTM, and Paniookah are the names that immediately come to mind.
Basically there was a whole circle of people who'd been around the Bay Area rationalist community since the Livejournal days that either got banned or were quietly pushed out during that EA transition period.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
I alluded to this in a prior post but then deleted my subsequent reply and turned it into a DM because I felt that I might have been overstepping certain boundaries by naming names.
That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.
That said, if I were to compile a list of people EY banned from LessWrong for being "moral mutants" that list would include David Friedman, Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens. JD Vance, Sam Hughes, Jared Issacman, at least two co-authors of Attention Is All You Need, and a sitting member of the US Senate armed services committee.
Point being that if EY's goal was to gain influence he may very well have done the opposite by pissing off people of real influence and authority to curry favor with characters like Aella and Ozzy.
This is especially egregious when viewed in the context of CFAR's relationship with SBF and the Zizians, IE there is an impression amongst those observing from the outside that speaking out against men in women's sports will get you canceled in rationalist spaces but outright commissions of murder and fraud will not.
As i said in the previous thread he is simultaneously pissing off his rationalist friends by seeming to agree with the Christians and annoying his earnestly religious Unsong fans (both Christian and Jewish) by coming across as both aggressive and dismissive.
They wouldn't be complaining if they didn't see people laughing.
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