JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
And to me that is the core conflict between Europe and the New World captured in a single exchange.
And a cynic might be inclined to suspect that it's all intentional, blue tribe technocrats trying to flood the field with talk about how he's descended from slave-owners (which almost nobody in Texas is going to care about) to distract from the all the LGBTQ/Furry stuff that would seem far more likely to sink his chances.
...is this unusually offensive?
In Scott's specific case, yes.
He's simultaneously pissing off his atheist friends by agreeing with Christians and annoying his earnestly religious Unsong fans by seeming dismissive of their beliefs.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
In the 1950s William F Buckley was still describing himself as a "New Deal Democrat" it wasn't until the latter half of the 60s that being anti-hippie, pro-law-and-order, and vocally Christian got him and the National Review labeled conservative.
If anything I feel like the fact that that he had to moderate his views on race and step up the law-and-order end to find wide-spread acceptance on the right kind of illustrates my point
What tends to happen is that right wing ideas about race are mostly embraced by very disagreeable people who cannot cooperate.
Assuming that you are referring to the notion that there are intrinsic differences in "quality" between racial groups and that these differences should be allowed to influence policy, I question the extent to which these ideas are meaningfully "right wing". At least in the context of American politics.
While I acknowledge that the experiences and perceptions of those coming from Europe and Asia will differ, the US right has never really made "blood and soil" or ethnic tribalism in general a core pillar of it's identity the way that say the German right has. If anything the opposite has been the case, with the US right espousing a peculiar form of "blank-slatism" exemplified by appeals to the Declaration of Independence, and the rhetoric of men like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Clarence Thomas.
In one of those ironic UNO reversal moments I actually kind of agree with Joe Biden when he says "if you are thinking about voting for Trump you aren't really black" but by the same token I would turn that around and say that if you're thinking about voting for a progressive in the year of our lord 2026 you aren't "white" either
It's like one of those Gian'Carlo Esposito memes...
"You want to discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color. I want to discriminate against people on the basis of their behavior. We are not the same."
It doesn't "prove" anything anything.
What it does is provide corroborating evidence for claims of prior knowledge/ownership of the material in question.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
This unironically.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
The traditional solution from the ye olden days of the 20th century was that when you sent a manuscript to a publisher for review, you would also mail a copy to yourself.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
The first Greenlander to qualify for a Taco Bell or Chick-fil-a franchise will set their entire family up for life.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
...
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Can you define "obsolescence"?
Depending on how things play out, Big Yud's decision to purge David Friedman and the rest of the Stanford/SCU crowd from rationalist spaces may go down as one of the greatest "self owns" in history.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
1mo ago
Is this the takeaway?
Yes, others being weak doesn't make Sheeran wrong.
Or maybe we have finally killed god enough that the sanctity of human life is being thrown to the wolves.
This is a possibility that has been on my mind a great deal of late.
I had considered posting something about the drama surrounding the Lindsey Clancy trial, but waved off as I didn't really have anything new or particular to say that wouldn't get me modded for "waging the culture war".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Trump is reTruthing Fox News clips framing AI safety as a global one world government Democrat control-seeking scheme...
How sure are we that he is wrong? The Amodeis haven't exactly been shy about their politics.
Reddit allegedly used to do the same many years ago, but removed the feature.
They did. I remember when they removed it.
The view from a quarter century later...
It's 8 o'clock on a Tuesday and I am just starting my shift. Ordinarily the TVs on display for sale would be playing a demo-loop fed from a DvD-player behind the counter but this morning they're tuned to CBS. A small crowd has gathered to watch as Tower 1 burns. I'm supposed to be answering questions, and trying to upsell people on the company's membership discount program and extended warranty plans but my heart's not in it. I watch the second plane hit live. I remember the collective gasp, and the horrified silence that followed. Then like Colonel Kurtz's diamond bullet it strikes me. This is no mistake. This is a deliberate act. An act of courage, an act of perfect crystalline Will.
100s of people dead in an instant because somebody made a choice. By the end of the day that count would be in the thousands. I would later find out that a friend of mine had lost an entire branch of their family tree in that fireball. An Aunt, an Uncle, two young cousins, and a dog all reduced to ash in the impact of United Flight 175 with Tower 2's southern face.
As the morning progresses there are rumors of other hijackings. Over a dozen planes are unaccounted for or not responding to ATC. There is rampant speculation about what target will be hit next. The President is in the air, and National Guard jets are being scrambled. The rest of my shift passes in a blur, but certain images remain seared into my brain.
Under my initial reaction of rage and helplessness something simultaneously imperceptible and momentous has shifted. It's cliche to say that 9/11 was the death of innocence for a generation but there is a truth to it. Things that had been mere abstract concepts to me when I woke up that morning, "Free Will", "Horror", "Heroism", "Good", "Evil", "Civilization", and "Civilization's Enemies", were suddenly real, immediate, and vital to me in a way that they hadn't been 24 hours previously. I can look back on my life today and say with confidence that, philosophically, the Charlie that woke up on the morning of September 12th 2001, was a fundamentally different person from the one who had gone to bed on September 10th.
In the interests of full disclosure I am tempted to turn this post into a rant about how politics and war are downstream of culture, and to wax philosophical about 9/11 as an act of theater, but I also feel like doing so would cheapen the moment, and be disrespectful to those who died 25 years ago today.
So instead I will ask, where were you on the day they wounded New York?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
The claim that Biden and Obama were both "fairly decent at constraining the flow of illegals" compared to Trump to is so patently absurd that I find it difficult to take any other arguments you might make seriously.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
It is my understanding that it is the mentally stable/less neurotic engineers are the ones who are leaving.
A good friend of mine from college did their grad work at SAIL and was one of the principal developers of DALL-E at OpenAI. And to hear them tell it, while Altman may be a sociopathic grifter, Anthropic is a cult.
I'm not talking about assembling mission briefs for human operators, I'm talking about autonomous systems, and that is emphatically not what Maven is.
Even if it were, you are ignoring the fact that the Pentagon is currently in the process of decoupling Maven from Anthropic because Anthropic is run by people too stupid naive or autistic to recognize that demanding preferential treatment while simultaneously picking fights with half the key figures in the administration was unlikely to get them what they wanted.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I get the impression that there is an element of "evaporative cooling" going on when it comes to the specific examples of OpenAI and Anthropic.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
When the smart bomb is smart enough to start having its own political opinions and strategic direction, then problems emerge.
Ironically, this is why I trust an entities like Raytheon and General Dynamics when it comes to AI "safety" more than I do Anthropic.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Like a lot of pricing issues in the US, a lot of the costs are from unnecessary regulations...
...If the problem is government, you can't argue the only solution is more government.
All the more reason to cut out the middle man and distribute the money to parents directly.
I disagree, it seems to me that people in the old world see protection as something that they are entitled to where as in the new world protection is something that is understood as always coming with a price be that monetary or in the form of constant vigilance.
More options
Context Copy link