@MaiqTheTrue's banner p

MaiqTheTrue

Renrijra Krin

1 follower   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC 

				
User ID: 1783


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Renrijra Krin

				
				
				

				

					1 follower  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 1783


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think we are in a civilizational crisis.  And the crisis is the seeds of the twentieth century and the hubris it represents coming home to roost. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are the exceptions to civilizational laws, that we can afford to ignore reality in all kinds of ways that only work when we’re protected by the natural fortresses created by oceans, seas and mountains, and guarded by military forces with huge technological advantages.  When we were the only ones with a strong manufacturing and innovation.  That was probably true until the end of the 1990s.


Because of those advantages, we tried to get away with all sorts of things that turn out to be really bad ideas, and lead to really bad outcomes.  We no longer push for achievement.  In the turn of the last century we absolutely celebrated great achievements.  We celebrated big business doing great things, and people who discovered important things.  We also pushed our citizens to production and industry and held education out as aspirational.  We were forthright about teaching our own culture and heritage, and unabashedly claimed Christianity as the Western religion.  We insisted on public and private morality and promoted heterosexual monogamous marriages that formed strong families and raised healthy children.  We didn’t mollycoddle those who refused to do any work, if you didn’t work, you wouldn’t expect to live on food stamps and in government housing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m pretty much here.  I don’t understand just why these people are so allergic to the idea of having to prove to representatives of the elected government that they did five productive things in a week.  Like how out of touch are they, that they don’t think they need to answer a question that most people with private sector jobs have to answer — what is it you actually do here, any why should you continue to get a paycheck from us.  Rest assured, for even the lowest employee of any private business, if they are only doing 5 things in an entire week, they would be laid off as soon as possible.  It’s an absurdly low standard.  I think in most jobs if you only did five things a day, you’d be out.  That’s all the public wants— they want everyone in the public sector to actually be held to some standard of actual productive work.  We’re paying for it, and its unreasonable that they don’t think they need to do anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still think parents in some form or another are necessary for psychiatric health.  It seems like just observationally a lot of social pathologies and mental health issues went through the roof after the widespread use of institutional daycares and preschool.  We’ve essentially been kenneling our kids for much of their waking lives, and im becoming much more convinced that, especially if it starts young, it has a lot of negative impacts on the mental health of the child as they can’t form the strong family bonds that existed for most of human history.  It’s actually a pretty odd social experiment that we did to ourselves without thinking about it.


If you think about a child in daycare maybe a good one will have 2 adults and 8-10 kids.  That child is a number.  Not the caregiver’s fault, but she’s not the kid’s parent and she can’t care as much as a parent could.  And even if she did, she has other children to worry about.  Now this starts in the USA especially in infancy maybe 8 weeks or so, depending on the leave offered to the mother (fathers rarely get leave).  And because it covers the working hours of parents, including commute, you might have a child in daycare from 8am to 6pm and be putting the baby to bed soon after.  The child gets weekends with mom and dad, and spends most of the time in institutional care.


Going further to deprive future children of any parental bonding at all would likely make that situation much worse.  I suspect that it would create sociopathic behaviors in most children in that situation.  How does a child learn to care about others if they never received the same care themselves?  Could they feel the pain and suffering they cause another human being?  If they could, would they care?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The dirty thoughts (that they are women even with male genitalia) lead to harm.  It normalized men being allowed in intimate spaces reserved for women like bathrooms and changing rooms.  It’s decimating women’s sports as women are no longer good enough to compete at high levels of sports leagues if men are allowed to declare themselves women.  These harm women. Men in women’s sports basically closes off a major source of scholarships for women, particularly minority women, and to the degree that they need those scholarships to make college affordable, they’re now shut out.  And men being allowed in women’s changing rooms and restrooms enables rape.  A man looking to rape women can hang about women’s changing rooms for as long as he likes, so long as he claims to be female.  The only point at which women might object is if he actually tries to rape them.  At which point, it’s too late.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s plausible, assuming that you’re talking about physical objects.  It gets a bit strange to talk about buying and selling in America when the product is a game that lives on a server in Maldives or something.  I’m not even sure how VAT work on drop shipping outfits or things sold to Americans just outside American territory (I.e ships in international waters don’t have to deal with sales taxes).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the principle of ethnic national sovereignty is a bad idea.  My questions would generally be “are people living there better off under whatever government happens to rule them?” And “Is the rest of the world more stable under the regime in question.”  In such a light, assuming that Brazil could bring stability, rule of law, and resources for the reconstruction of Haiti, Haiti would be much better off under the  Brazilian regime than as an independent state.  Ukraine as well seems much better off split off from Crimea and Donbas but not at war, or in an alternative not offered, under a Russian puppet state but able to govern all of its territory.  There are plenty of other cases proving this out.  The Palestinians who accepted Israeli and gained citizenship are worlds better off than the ones who keep banging their heads against the IDF in hopes of an independent sovereign state.  Add in for most of these failed states the loss of international stability as the people flood other countries to flee instability, criminal pirates or gangs trafficking drugs into other countries or simply rob shipping lanes.  Is that really better than the bad old days of colonialism where these states that are basket cases full of drugs were modernized and crime was dealt with?  If Haiti were French, is that terrible?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have.  Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.”  The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.”  Theres no leverage to push back with.  You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking.  The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code.  It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.”  Truth loses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s still a map territory error, and I think that the salutes are aimed at ironically reclaiming the most common sneer aimed at every conservative leader since probably Reagan.  Every last one of them, no matter what they actually did was gasp a Nazi.  Both Bushes were, Romney was, Trump is.  And this wasn’t based on anything they actually believed and did.  It was just governing as a conservative makes you a Nazi.  It’s hardly surprising that after nearly 50 years of “opposing democrats makes you a Nazi”, people do the Nazi thing ironically and say “fine, if not being a democrat makes us Nazis, we might as well throw up the salute.”


I keep going back to one question to answer the “are they actually Nazis “ question.  Forget the aesthetics, forgot the words, forget the tweets, what actual policies are happening that are fascist?  The best sterlman I have of them going Nazi is the mass deportations.  Other than that, I can’t put anything they’re doing in that “literally Hitler* box.


It’s not surprising.  We’ve been turning Nazis into cartoon villains since the 1960s.  Nobody knows, outside the holocaust, anything they actually believed or did.  In modern America, it’s just a sneer term meant to get people to stop supporting those+labeled with the sneer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Te AI is in Bahamas, it’s making decisions for a business in the USA.  Who gets the tax money?


As for the AI have nots starving, this is how history has tended to work for most of human history.  When a worker has no useful skills he gets laid off permanently, and either subsists on a dole or goes hungry.  The Industrial Revolution was also a time of great poverty with thousands reduced to living in tiny tenement housing.  The Victorian Era had people living underground as it was illegal to be homeless.


What’s unprecedented here is the sheer scale of the problem.  There’s no reason to think that a government can permanently and sustainably put three quarters of the population on welfare and still function.  Nor do I find it plausible that millions of people with no prospects of useful employment are going to thrive.  We have historical examples of people in that situation, and none of them have produced Utopian societies.  Indian reservations are impoverished shit holes compared to the surrounding communities.  So are ghettos.  Rome created a huge underclass full of dysfunctional families with her dole.  Turning all of America into a giant reservation where everyone lives on the dole is not going to create a flourishing society that creates hippy art.  It’s going to create. Poverty and corruption and dysfunction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
UBI I think has too many problems to work.


First of all, it’s dependent on getting the money in the first place, and it’s probably pretty trivial to renounce citizenship and bugger off to a tax haven today, and given that “owning AI” doesn’t require you to be in the country at all, there’s nothing tying the guy who owns the company to the country the AI is in.


Second, keeping the UBI within reasonable limits is impossible.  There will be millions of voters with hands out to collect UBI, and maybe 100 people paying for it.  When the chance comes to vote on benefits and taxing the owners to pay, the only vote that keeps the politician in power is “raise the payout!”  Eventually this becomes unsustainable as you tax 95% of the income of tge three people doing anything productive to pay the millions who aren’t.


Third, a population controlled by dependence on government handouts to survive is not free.  You can get people to do anything you want if the alternative is “lol no money for you”.  And this will be 99% of the population.  That’s not something to get into lightly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or they’d be quitting and running.  Of course they’re not doing that either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You could create something like that, tge hard part is spreading it.  The reason that Covid was a hard nut to crack as far as stopping the spread was that it was pretty mild for most people.  In fact if it had come out in the 1970s before we had the ability to track it and ID it and before we had the internet for remote work and online shopping, it would have probably gone unnoticed except that it was a “bad flu year” and there’d be a lot of elderly dead people.  People would have felt fine to go to work or hang around other people so it’s easy to spread. But a virus that kills you doesn’t spread as much because dying people aren’t inclined to go to work, school or shop at Walmart.  People get the death virus, feel like crap, go to the doctor get admitted to the hospital and die there.  No one outside of that household gets it because once you have it you’re too sick to go anywhere.  AIDS is an exception but only because the incubation phase is so long — you can have and spread AIDS for years before getting sick.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I guess the point of my conjecture is that understanding is required for intelligence.  And one way to get after intelligence is putting an agent in a situation where it has no previous experience or models to work from and expect it to solve problems.


Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that.  Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer.  But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt.  It cannot answer the new questions because it specifically doesn’t understand any of tge old questions nor can it understand the new ones.  And likewise if the questions in English are not understood it would be impossible to get the agent to understand Japanese because it’s unable to derive meanings from words, it’s just stringing them together in ways that it’s training tells it are pleasing to users.


It’s also a pretty good test for human understanding of a given subject.  If I can get you to attempt to use the information you have in a novel situation and you can do so, you understand it.  If you can only regurgitate things you have been told in exactly the ways you have been told to do it, you probably don’t.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think watching the democrats, it’s fairly clear that they don’t really believe the stuff they’re telling the public.  If they believe that this is the prelude to a coup, or tge destruction of these institutions as a permanent thing, or that Trump is setting up a fascist system, they’d absolutely be doing those kinds of things.  They’d absolutely filibuster in congress so no congressional actions would be possible.  What they’re actually doing is … nothing.  And the mismatch is pretty obvious.  Especially when you compare the actions of people in the know (administrative people and Congress) with the people outside the system who believe the rhetoric they used.


It’s certainly possible that they’re wrong and we actually are poised on the brink of a fascist dictatorship.  But when the people in the know are acting like it’s all fine, I can’t take the idea seriously.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ve never understood how the Turing test measured anything useful.  The test doesn’t even require that the AI agent understand anything about its world or even the questions being asked of it.  It just has to do well enough to convince a human that it can do so.  That’s the entire point of the Chinese room rejoinder— an agent might well be clever enough to fool a person into thinking it understands just by giving reasonable no answers to questions posed.


The real test, to me, is more of a practical thing — can I drop the AI in a novel situation and expect it to figure out how to solve the problems.  Can I take a bot trained entirely on being an English chatbot and expect it to learn Japanese just by interacting with Japanese users?  Can I take a chatbot like that and expect it to learn to solve physics equations?  That seems a much better test because intelligent agents are capable of learning new things.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s just quite simply reality.  No state on Earth is going to allow a country on its border to make an alliance with a foreign country that it find hostile.  We invaded Cuba because of missiles on our border, and Cuba is separated from the USA by the Gulf of Mexico and was and is a much weaker state.  Had it been Canada or Mexico gone full communist and been importing weapons and getting trained by the USSR, it would be considered an act of war.


Ukraine is the same thing for Russia.  It sucks for the post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe, but because they exist next to Russia, they’re not entirely free to do anything they want.  If they get too friendly with the West, they’re getting the same thing.  And on the other hand, Europe, Mexico, Canada, and South America are in our sphere of influence and we don’t allow them to get too far off reservation.  We’re powerful enough to do so mostly by sanctions and soft power, but the longevity of a regime in our sphere of influence that openly sides with our enemies isn’t that long.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, that’s the propaganda.  No country on Earth is so virtuous and only acting in the defense of others.


We’ve been mostly a benign empire, but make no mistake, we are an empire in the same sense as most other empires.  Most of the “removal of dictators” and “support for democracy” have been in defense of our global hegemony.  In fact, the biggest predictor of us removing a dictator is not what they do to their own people, or how they treat their neighbors.  The invasions come when a dictator goes against our hegemony.  Duerte can be as brutal as he likes, we don’t care because he’s a Western aligned dictator.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t think that means they didn’t get Western support though.  Obama did support Euromaidan.  And while I don’t think they instigated the events, I think they helped the people organizing the movement both morally and materially.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m not uncritical of the Russian version of the story.  Both versions are likely at least somewhat true in the sense that while the Revolution seems to have been organic, it was helped along by the West.  But to my mind, you really can’t engage with the war and the causes or likely outcomes unless you can explain what all sides actually believe is going on and why they’re making the decisions they’re making.  The most important part of the Russian version of the color revolution story is that this is what Russia believes about the color revolution.


If I want to understand Vietnam and the American war in Vietnam, im going to have to know what Americans thought they were fighting for and what they believed was going on.  Does that make Domino Theory true?  No.  But refusing to engage with that theory just means I don’t understand it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It depends on how you see the recent history of Ukraine.


First of all, Ukraine (with generous help from the West) had a color revolution in 2014.  This was eventually to lead to Zelensky taking power in Ukraine.  This leads to Ukraine becoming much more friendly to the West, and petitioning and working toward membership in the EU and protection from NATO.  That’s a big shift from Ukraine as before it had a Russian friendly government and was aligned to Russian interests.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s simply reattaching the steeering wheel.  These agencies don’t even listen to the elected government, they’re mostly tasked with keeping the neo-liberal machine going.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The counterpoint is that humans have closely observed animals for millennia and therefore have created stories, myths and practices around their observations of animals in nature.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think some of it is familiarity.  Anime has been available in America since the 1990s for most people, so there’s a bit of exposure to Japanese idiom simply from watching those shows.  This makes it somewhat easier both for translators who have had enough source material translated to know how best to approach the language and translate it into English, but because the audience itself is used to Japanese stories, they can pick up enough of the subtext to follow even if they aren’t directly translated.  Everyone has seen the 10000 year old child, the demons and demon slayers, the school stories, and so Theres a common thematic vocabulary between Japanese and American fans that doesn’t exist for other countries.  If I were to take an Israeli language cartoon and translate it, you don’t know the context and even a good translation would suffer because things the authors expect people to just get are not known in America.


Chinese culture isn’t well known.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Stop resting the legitimacy of government decisions on the backs of the peasants.  When there was a monarchy, people didn’t try to convince the peasants, they tried to convince the king.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But the thing is that you can only actually get there by manufacturing consent.  The only way to get from a very divided situation of a 2% swing on a major issue like trans, and especially trans kids is to do exactly what was done (and had been done previously to normalize gayness and before that integration) take control of the education and mass media systems and pump the culture with pro trans content.  Which is why kids are getting easy-read books in their schools so that five year olds can be taught tge wonders of grown men pretending to be women.  And then when they turn on the TV every citizen will be given hours of such propaganda and every show must have a token gay, trans or bisexual character.


If people were honestly coming to the conclusion that such things were good, fine. But that’s not how most of this stuff happens.  Most of the ideas that we have consensus on are not coming about from people in their own homes and communities wrestling with the issue and spontaneously deciding to go along.  It’s people being subjected to propaganda, then eventually accepting that they have to go along because they don’t want to be seen as the bigot.  And eventually they are made to understand that HR will be+displeased if they say such crimethink out loud.