KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I stumbled upon some parodies of CEO Morgan from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and you lot are the only people I can share 'em with. Nobody else I know is both sufficiently unhinged and has enough appreciation for the classics:
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
If it was that easy, the ideological capture would not have gone through literally everywhere and we would not have had the great awokening. Agreeing to say no, together, is a hard collective action problem, since saying no alone is a fast path to cancellation.
Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
Cryptocurrencies marry the reliability and predictability of modern computing with your hard-earned cash. For normies especially, that means machines which mysteriously do different things from day to day, sometimes turn on with totally different user interfaces, sometimes disappear your work, fail with inscrutable error messages, and generally annoy the crap out of you at all times. It is no surprise to me that crypto is not adopted by normies unless they've lost total trust in fiat.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
Your example is a wholesale, cohesive reimagining of a setting. That's really common with Shakespeare's stuff, as opposed to WotC using a dartboard to decide what characters to swap.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
Saw this link going around Twitter/X:
https://theccf.ca/emergencies-act-use-unconstitutional/
OTTAWA: The Canadian Constitution Foundation (the “CCF”) is thrilled that Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada has accepted the CCF’s arguments that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable and violated the Charter rights to expression and security against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The government has indicated that it will appeal, so this isn't final. Regardless: what are the actual effects of such a finding? Will the government have to pay any penalty? Can people whose bank accounts were frozen sue the government? Will it cause a significant loss of political capital for Trudeau and his government? Or is it just a slap on the wrist with no real consequences?
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Then why has language had this turn towards terms like "birthing parent" and why do we have a "pregnant man" emoji? I'm not being flippant: enough people cared enough to try and change common language and/or shove a new pictograph onto everyone's touch keyboards.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
Don't forget WotC's take on the Lord of the Rings, or Amazon's take on the Wheel of Time.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Incidentally, the west currently has a lot of adolescent girls seeking double mastectomies under the mistaken impression that it will benefit them.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
I've barely seen a peep about it online
There were a few people in the non-GOP, non-Frog online Right talking about it a bit (Matthew Peterson, The American Mind), but it definitely doesn't look like it broke through into memery, so I don't think it will have a lot of enduring cultural impact. Definitely agree that it felt like a choose-your-own-enemy movie kit with some cool sequences and moments: lots of fun on the big screen but kinda hollow.
I did like Tom Cruise's "we made it for you" intro to the film, and it really did feel like it was them making something to entertain the viewers instead of sitting them down to Have A Conversation. I hope to see more of that sort of thing.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
That gets you "nobody can see my vote", but you can still be coerced into showing your vote. There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was. But you still need someone to implement it in a system which selects lowest-bid contracts, and to convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.
People need to understand a voting system to believe in it (see: 2020), and so I'd much rather a heavy clampdown on postal voting, and a return to hand-counting everywhere. Other first world nations can do this, so why can't we?
KingOfTheBailey
2mo ago
Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex?
If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.
That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.
KingOfTheBailey
2mo ago
Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
Almost certainly, in the same way that they capital-D deaf community can be prickly about things like cochlear implants.
KingOfTheBailey
3mo ago
Why should society's failure to reify the pretenses it currently has about teenagers, or parents failing to parent, ever be my fucking problem?
It seems self-evident to me that a citizen should have an interest in the direction of the society in which he lives. As part of that, a citizen should also be interested in the way future adult citizens are likely to turn out.
KingOfTheBailey
6mo ago
Go see a therapist and get your mind off of these rails: you have the kind of fixation on an idea that is actually rather common among online autists, only instead of falling into something traditional like trains or gender ideology, you've locked onto this particular idea which will end in its own unique flavor of train wreck.
Registering the prediction now: conditional on you even completing this insane quest, it's not going to make you any more attractive to women. Why? Because you've only doing it to attract women, and that inauthenticity reeks. This is why @screye bangs on about his self-delusion practice to enter female-dominated hobbies, and why men with an honest-to-God mission are attractive: because they are complete in themselves, and aren't forever seeking approval.
KingOfTheBailey
10mo ago
One model I've seen activists use is the spectrum of allies: classify people/organizations into "active ally", "passive ally", "neutral", "passive opposition", "active opposition". Other presentations I've seen on this also advise activists to try and move target groups only one step at a time.
Most people who object to the LGBTification of everything have been cowed into "neutral", or at best "passive opposition", but serious right-wing culture warriors (e.g., Rufo) have been able to bring back some "active allies" on the right. OP's friend's company seems to have been moved from the left's "active ally" to "passive ally", at least in its public-facing stance in the US. The spectrum of allies model does not distinguish between true believers and greengrocers, but I don't think that matters too much: the page also quotes that "movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting the support out from under them." If the non-grifter right wants to stop losing, I think that's a sign they are starting to make some headway.
KingOfTheBailey
11mo ago
You sound completely unhinged, and while I agree that getting off the internet will do you a lot of good (as in, getting out of your own head, getting away from the hope-crushing discourse around dating/relationships/attractiveness, etc), getting that far off the internet will probably kill you. Find something directionally similiar but maybe 1/10,000th the magnitude and do that first.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
The linked photograph doesn't do anything to dispel that notion either — the woman is shot to be functionally anonymous, an interchangeable rent-a-womb in the background. You get the feeling that as soon as she gives birth, she'd be shoved out of the picture entirely, possibly before she's fully recovered. But she's the most important part of the whole thing! None of this happens without her, and so instead I see a celebration of two men's narcissism, and have the uneasy feeling that the impending new life is going to be treated like a teacup dog or other fashionable accessory.
And there are enough examples of pairs of gay paedophiles adopting children to abuse them or rent them back out that it pattern-matches in unfortunate ways. Example 1, example 2. This is culture war red meat and Chinese Cardiologist stuff, so it's hard to draw well-founded conclusions in either direction. However, it is interesting that the couple in the second example were written up by Australia's national public broadcaster in a very flattering article on gay parenthood-by-surrogacy and "can you believe it's this hard for them to be parents"? (The author of the Quadrant article in example 2 was unaware of the wayback machine — archived ABC link.) When the "happy dads" who get the fawning news article turn out to be child abusers, you can see why some people jump to conclusions.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Scott had an old LiveJournal post about this, where he likened dating to Russian spies trying to identify each other while undercover in the US. On the one-hand, Scott is a pretty neurotic and anxious person who has stared too long into the CW; on the other, it's not exactly wrong. Anyone else remember this? I couldn't find it in the best archive of squid314 that I was able to unearth.
KingOfTheBailey
1yr ago
Because they would consider it an act of submission to the patriarchy, as evidenced by neologisms like "womxn", "herstory", etc.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.
KingOfTheBailey
5mo ago
You got there, apologized, and worked hard; a sincere apology does a lot to defuse anger. I remember reading an anecdote about martial arts classes. Often, when someone is late, they get told to warm themselves up and are given some number of pushups "as punishment". But the important thing about the pushups is once they're done, they're done. The student is to let go of the shame of being late, and the instructor is to let go of any frustration towards the tardy student.
You probably feel like shit right now. While it is correct to be ashamed of getting smashed and missing work, it is not correct to blow that all out of proportion. You've apologised, and you've done your pushups. Let it go, and be on time from now on. Work hard and work well, but don't flog yourself into further slip-ups. That's better than carrying around anxiety over this.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?
KingOfTheBailey
9mo ago
expect Christianity to make your life worse
This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.
Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears.
I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)
we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone
The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.
Rotten Tomatoes turned off reviewing unreleased movies just before Captain Marvel came out, but claim that they "definitely" didn't change the site to protect Captain Marvel. Given how much fudging of everything has happened in the world since then, I wouldn't be surprised if they are now willing to make up review scores to protect favored films.
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