MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I’ve always found the “history” argument weak. The reason people protest is at least ostensibly because there’s a moral wrong being committed. Yet, the “right side of history” argument doesn’t even engage with the moral arguments. If the cause is morally right, then it is right, whether or not history goes along with it. Second, history isn’t even a line, it’s a graph it can and has changed direction multiple times. The Romans were okay with being gay, until they became Catholic. Several countries have gone from being communist to being market liberals at the same time other states have gone the other way.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I suspect what’s actually going through Abbot’s mind in the near future is his political future. He’s angling to be seen as a defiant leader something like Desantis is in Florida. I don’t think trans athletes come around often enough that there’s going to be more than one or two in all of Texas. If those few happened to go to private school, there’s no real way for the state to enforce a private school’s policy on trans athletes. If my math is right there are only 12,000 trans people in the entire state, with most being over 18. On that sense the issue would barely even be an issue unless the government were taking very strong sides on it. But it makes great press in the news cycle.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2d ago
I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3d ago
I don’t think it’s hard, I think controlling any super intelligent being whether natural or artificial is not possible. In order to control it, you have to understand it and its current and future limitations. But if AI is going to be orders of magnitude smarter than us and have a will that is somewhat free, you have a being who’s thoughts you can’t even begin to understand with desires that you cannot hope to comprehend. It’s like your dog trying to control you. Your desire to play COD makes no sense to your dog. He can’t even understand that you’re controlling what happens on the screen let alone why you want to do that. The dog can’t abstract in a way that makes your decision to do that make sense, nor can he make sense of what you’re doing. AI might not be just 2-3 times smarter and thus better at abstraction, it might eventually be 1000 times smarter. We might be ants trying to understand humans. Nothing you do besides literal eating makes sense to the ant. Yet, we humans arrogantly proclaim that we must fence in and control AI. Our rules for it will keep it from escaping.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4d ago
It’s the same logic extended one more step. Recognizing that Israel isn’t living up to those ideals or even pretending to puts Jews on the negative of DEI.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4d ago
The problem is of course that AI can take jobs faster than we can train people to do them. It’s just as adaptable as we are, maybe more so. Can an AI atttached to cooking utensils make a hamburger that’s as good as Five Guys? I think it probably could, given enough time. If it can do that I think it could probably make just about any food you wanted. I think it can also produce creative writing and movies and TV. What it takes is someone deciding to train it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4d ago
I think it actually could become a problem in that the far left and far right are in pretty strong agreement on the accusations against the Jews, that they’re manipulating narratives to their own benefit, and that they only care about themselves. The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do. There’s barely even a whisper of blame on Hamas for launching the attacks or holding hostages or the crimes committed during the attack. And when you couple that with full support of the intifada, chanting of the slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist,
Personally, I think most of the Gaza situation is on Lakud which isn’t all Israelis and has little to do with Jews who don’t support Lakud or Natanyahu.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I don’t think you can really compartmentalize to that degree with any integrity. In most governments and political parties they have openly stated platforms and they at least intend to make good on those promises. You can’t support only the good without accepting the bad. You can’t have support for a faction that kills gays and support gay rights. You can’t support the political goal without supporting the social goals because if they get their goals of defeating IDF they’ll go right back to running Gaza the way they want to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism.
I think the lack of a religious alternative makes the idea of trying to remove Christianity from western culture more or less a nonstarter. Until there’s a robust religion that comes out of Pagan thinking in a real pagan way, with an unapologetic pagan way of think (that is, a religious and philosophical movement in authentic paganism that doesn’t have its origins in either Christianity or as a reaction to Christianity), then you can really build outward from it. Judaism is its own thing and always has been, and it’s not really a LARP of a dead religion that exists only in distinction from Christianity and Islam. Jews have their own thing. My experience of paganism is that it’s a LARP that no one takes seriously, and certainly don’t behave as though they believe in Odín, Thor, Zeus, or Athena. They don’t have a sense of reverence for their deities, the sense of them as having wants that you might not like. No sense that you can’t just pick and choose.
And I think that matters because like it or not, the best innovation the Abrahamics have is that their texts are canon and inspired and thus it gives a bulwark against it being twisted into whatever form the elites want. The Torah, the Bible and the Quran are explicit in what they say, and thus cannot be easily interpreted to not mean what the text says it means. Islam can never allow pork. It’s in the book, and the book is from God and not changing for the whims of the rest of the world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
6d ago
I think it’s a reasonable framework for ideological thinking. A “slave” ideology would be one that places value on passively accepting fate, on not being assertive or demanding of other groups. A master ideology would do the opposite and be demanding and assertive and less concerned with helping others.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
8d ago
I think this is the correct answer. It’s a power move plain and simple. The powers that be want to be able to shut down things they don’t like and are forming “relationships” with the people running the choke points. If a site can’t process payments, it can’t survive long. And if ISPs refuse to direct traffic to them, again they can’t survive. But because it’s not the government, and nobody gets arrested, it’s not technically censorship so there’s nothing wrong with it.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government. If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. And it would work. If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job. Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.
I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
10d ago
First of all, the person who makes a positive claim is the one obliged to provide evidence. This is simply elementary logic. Negatives cannot be proven, so it’s not on me to prove that no conspiracy happened, it’s on you to provide some evidence that there is a conspiracy.
Second “it’s obvious” isn’t evidence. If it’s obvious, proving it should be easy.
Third, I don’t accept YouTube as a source. Find me a newspaper or other print source so I can check on the facts presented.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
My understanding is that he can’t serve more than two consecutive terms. Since Theresa gap, he gets two more.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I think that Nate Silver’s approach is correct, though like you, I don’t think his math is right. Probability modeling is just simply more accurate than gut feelings. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And this is something the left especially has missed quite often. In fact they missed out on putting a liberal on the bench because RBG didn’t retire with a Dem majority.
And if the polling data is showing that Biden loses in 2024, you’re talking about minimum 2029 before we could replace a justice with a liberal judge. If Trum does really good, he might win in 2028 thus making the next replacement window at 2033. That puts her at near 80.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I think the big and frankly unmentioned part of the phenomenon is that we in the WEIRD west have long been accustomed to defining ourselves and choosing our lifestyles and interests accordingly. If you’d been born in almost any other era and any other set of countries, your life would have been largely predetermined before you could walk or talk. There were exceptions, but for the majority, what you were was handed to you, and in some cases still is. You practice your ancestral religion, you worked at whatever it was your parents and grandparents did. Your ability to go to school was determined by social class. Your roles and expectations were largely defined fairly rigidly full of expectations for the roles you were born into. Religious rules. Gender roles. Job roles.
Fast forward to today and we really don’t have any of those things. You can become anything you darn well please. The son of a welder can become an artist, or a doctor, or an actor. You can freely choose your religion or lack thereof. You can dress any way you like. You can take on or abandon social roles with little regard for what other people think. Gender is really the final frontier of this process. It’s the only reality of yourself you don’t get to decide on. Everything else, religion, job, hobbies, clothing styles, education, etc. can all be bent to the whim of the individual. So why wouldn’t gender be something a culture like ours would try to negate with medical science? Why wouldn’t a society that treats every other identity as if they’re fashion accessories not try to make gender and sex into yet another consumer choice?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
True, but then again, we expanded NATO eastward to a difficult to defend border after it told Russia it had no intention of doing so. Even if Poland wanted in, it’s hard to ignore that having NATO troops and military equipment on the border of Russia is at least somewhat provocative. And given that it’s all of Eastern Europe and soon Ukraine as well, Russia is going to be basically surrounded. It’s about equivalent to Russia forming an alliance with Mexico and Canada. I can’t imagine a universe in which the USA would not view that as a threat.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
14d ago
He annexed Donbas and considers them a part of Russia, which makes any attempt to retake them an attack on Russia proper.
The other thing that I think is dismissed too lightly is that him losing the war is likely to be fatal to him. Russia has a history of killing or deposing rulers who lose wars. If the only way to win in Ukraine is to use nukes then he’s likely to at least think about it.
I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.
Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.
1). It’s cheap. If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising. This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment. If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.
2). It at least looks organic. People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them. Ad blockers are common. Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it. But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.
3). You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests. If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs. I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.
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