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KingOfTheBailey


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 10 01:37:00 UTC

				

User ID: 1089

KingOfTheBailey


				
				
				

				
1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 10 01:37:00 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1089

As written in the ancient greentexts:

Before internet

>i want to fuck toasters

>dont be a fucking retard

>grow up

After internet

>I want to fuck a toaster

>google

>find a community with 1000+members about people wanting to fuck toasters

>fuck up your life

The problem is that the entire point of EA is to stop making decisions using base human impulses and think for a second or two about what's actually going to do the most good. Hence bednets, hence deworming, hence "I care about the suffering of shrimp", hence "annihilate all existence so there's no possibility of suffering", etc. This is a movement that via memes such as "80,000 hours", "the giving what we can pledge", and "earning to give" asks people to redirect nontrivial chunks of their lifetime earning capacity, which those people could have instead used to improve their own lives, or the lives of their families, friends and local communities.

Any redirection of the movement away from this mission is waste by its own definition. That its elites have decided to screw around with polyamory instead of doing the maximally-effective thing in the world reminds me more of a new-age religious sex cult than a movement genuinely interested in improving the world.

As we learned from the sudden banning of Dr. Seuss from every mainstream online marketplace, there won't be any integrity. These will be treated as the only versions that ever existed, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:


print 'Eat the rich'  # or some other lefty slogan

I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")

I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.

It's Skookum, that's just one of his axioms. It seems that his goal is to create a pill so black that light cannot bounce off it at all, and then force himself to swallow it. Why? I cannot tell.

The way euthanasia has broadened runs disturbingly parallel to the way trans and abortion slid down their respective slopes. Legal euthanasia was legislated on the back of activism asking that terminally-ill old people be allowed a dignified release from unbearable suffering, while they still had their ability to consent. Trans activism used sympathetic cases of deeply dysphoric individuals whose transition alleviated life-long suffering. Abortion activists spoke of desperate young rape victims needing a safe, legal, and rare option for a truly horrible situation.

And now we have young people committing suicide with government blessing, as well as Canada's health system telling a veteran "maybe you should KYS"; irreversible medications, surgeries, and everything you see on LibsOfTikTok pushed with very little care or safeguards; and up-to-birth or even partial-birth abortions. "Oh, that's just the slippery slope fallacy" no longer cuts it with me - I need to see the left make a credible commitment to a limiting principle before I even think about supporting their next cause.

There's also the "TikTok-induced Tourette's" thing. It makes me wonder how much mental illness in general could be induced by awareness-raising.

“Did you just divorce-shame me?” she demanded indignantly, as if he’d violated some well-established principle of etiquette.

We could stop doing things like that. Just stop digging.

The reply could at least be "yes, and you deserved it". Removing shame is one of the dumbest things western culture has done, IMHO.

If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with.

It's worse than that. "SJW's can't code" is a dead meme from 2014 or so. The existence of the Rust community proves that there's now a technical community of true believers, not just entryists writing Codes of Conduct.

I hoped for that in 2016, but nobody seemed interested in reflection then. Six years of TDS later, do you have a reason to believe that this time will be any better?

In case it helps, here's my experience as an online rightish guy who's become interested in Catholicism, though I don't go around posting le epic Deus Vult memes. Would I feel the truth of it? No, and I worry about that sometimes. Currently, I consider conservative Christianity good, in that it binds families together, brings people together across generations, and have definitely noticed that the Christians I know lead better lives, etc. But I don't know if I can (or will ever) consider it true, which is a source of concern and some despair to me, because if I can't get to that, then I feel like I'm damaging their group by being there. As for the wilder stuff like sedevacantism, I was lucky enough that the group I found seems to have its head screwed on. I spoke to one of the lay Brothers about the Church leadership, and he said that they respect and obey the Pope while disagreeing with him, pray for him a lot to help him make better decisions, hold out hope that things will change, and believe they get the Popes they deserve.

But even from the secular pit I've dug myself into, there's been some interesting moments. Sitting and contemplating the quiet and stillness before Mass has been beautiful, and while I can't say I've felt presence there, it's been wonderful to enjoy the absence of outside noise and chatter. It's also been interesting to have spent a lot of time reading about and working on psychological integration and then have another parishioner just casually mention that "sin divides man from God, but it also divides man from himself". Duh! No wonder we're all such messes!

Is there a conclusion, some big lesson to learn? I don't know. But maybe it's an interesting data point for how the culture war projects down to the periphery such as Hungary.

If you take @KulakRevolt's most recent article seriously, the correct social immune response to a foreign meme is to react immediately to shut it down. Better that it's done with repainting and national colors than a can of petrol.

deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners

There's a "Zero to One" sort of effect here, though: once you have a legal mechanism in place to effect something like this, expanding the program looks like a small tweak to an accepted policy instead of a radical shift.

On anything vaguely controversial, it is really worth reading the talk page and checking the edit history. This is one of the best and least-used things about Wikipedia: you can inspect the sausage as it's being made.

Peterson of all people said it very well. There are actually four heads of government power: Judicial, Legislative, Executive, and Symbolic. In America, the last two are assigned to the POTUS, which causes a bunch of problems, but in England it keeps celebrity nonsense stuff safely contained and away from the formal power (and causes a different set of problems instead).

The suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the plans outlined in in the TIME Magazine article show that the blob doesn't need to stuff ballots or change totals; they have (had?) enough power over the inputs to the voting system that such crass measures were unnecessary.

At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs?

Not surprising to me, given the coincidence of autism spectrum disorders with (at least) MtF transgenderism. This makes it easier to deep-dive on things worth blogging about, and possibly makes blogging easier also. After you consider the terminally-online environment, the fact that there seems to be at least some kind of memetic propagation of trans identities (e.g., "cracking someone's egg"), the high base M:F ratio in tech, and the long history of visible transpeople in tech compared to other fields, it seems pretty likely to me that there will be enough men transitioning to easily outnumber the women in this sphere.

This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.

I'm completely unsurprised, because progressives generally believe TWAW. In addition, a male transitioning is a two-point swing towards the goal (currently stated at 50:50, but I expect those goalposts to move); a woman joining and becoming publicly visible in the same way is only a one-point swing.

I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche.

IMHO, the fact that they're CS interests at all makes them niche. You might have "mainstream" interests within the niche, but that just means they're not niche² interests. Consider the stereotype of a C++ programmer vs. a web designer. Pretty much all technical women I know ended up favoring webbish stuff, because it's an environment where you can make cool-looking stuff happen right away and evolve it interactively.

When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women.

This seems like a correct inference, assuming you're a disfavored individual in a space with heavy affirmative action.

It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that ...

I could have said this, word for word, re: Islam during my Internet Atheist years. And the fact that this epistemic rigor was not observed by the people I argued with really opened a lot of cracks in my old, blue-tribe worldview. (Charlie Hebdo and the reactions to it opened those cracks into fissures, and from there it's been rabbit holes all the way down.)

I don't really have a point here, but I found the historical resonance startling.

I'm just a horrified atheist in the style of @Tophattingson, but I believe the religious traditions' answer to that is "God". God has a plan for you, and you don't get to duck out of that plan just because you're feeling wretched. Or if you prefer sci-fi, I remember being moved by Col. Graff's line in Ender's Game: "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

Well, I buy into it, but then again, I would.

That's the thing, isn't it? When the author equates Briseis with (waves hands) everything: the economy, housing unaffordability (including BlackRock namedrop), the degeneration of The American Woman, the lack of respect from all of society including the command hierarchy, it'll either resonate with a reader as a summary of all the wrongs that have happened lately, or be an unconvincing gish-gallop of vibes. It's not clear to me how much traction articles like this one will gain outside of the online twitter right. Is there any way to know?

I wonder if doing a synchronized launch Oppen Barbie Style was an attempt to repeat the Animal Crossing/Doom Eternal launch date crossover stuff, where two extremely different properties had simultaneous and successful launches.

Ursula's character is also deliberately modeled on a drag queen and very interested in corrupting young Ariel. I am surprised that I haven't seen anti-groomer culture warriors run with this.

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.