RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
George W Bush was really bad. He invaded a country under false pretences, got the US into two inglorious, expensive, losing wars. He provided the example for the pre-emptive strike/who cares about international law doctrine that Russia is now implementing. Maybe Afghanistan was necessary but he managed it with the same contempt and neglect he showed in Iraq. There was no plan for running the occupied territory, no clear and sustainable objective, nothing! Bush also pointlessly threatened a bunch of countries with invasion - lo and behold Iran did its best to cause problems for America lest it be the next Iraq. After being put on the Axis of Evil North Korea decided to nuclearize.
On domestic policy he wasn't great either. No Child Left Behind was a huge waste of money. He started the unconstitutional mass surveillance program. What is there to like about Bush?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.
Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.
It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.
Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
You can see the trend line of growth has fallen off since 2007 - and British growth is concentrated heavily around London, I expect things in Scotland are much worse than the country as a whole.
Potemkin villages: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1761798659396518342
Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/
NHS spends twice as much on legal payouts due to their horrendous maternity service than maternity itself: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
If you've seen Clarkson's Farm you'll appreciate how hard it is for anyone to build anything, even if they're a global superstar. Everything is very expensive and takes forever, for no good reason. The UK border is totally out of control, despite being an island. Plus there were the Pakistani child rape gangs that operated for years because police were too scared of being racist and covered them up.
If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha. Everyone thinks 'oh it's a P5 nuclear power, they invented industrial civilization, it'll be fine'. It's really not fine in the UK. I think it's systemically broken. Every single institution broken, incentives broken. I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
(for the juicy horror stories skip down to four stories in the second link)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
The point of HBD is to get rid of the currently dominant framework in society. Normative equality with factual inequality is ridiculous. Most would agree that the idiot/drug-dealer/robber deserves worse outcomes than the Nobel prize winning family man.
The current system pretends that 'investing' in lower quality people will increase their quality. If we shuffle around welfare policies and make more investments, we'll eventually have everyone be really high quality and it will all be harmonious and great. Of course there are various ethnic resentments and greed that really motivate things but officially, that's what the explanation is. That's the source of legitimacy.
HBD explains why the investment doesn't work. It shows that you might make marginal changes on the edges but that fundamentally low-quality populations will remain low-quality. It shows that there's no end to this 'investment', that it's actually a tax on efficiency, meritocracy and society generally. Prosocial people might pay for an investment to improve all of society but few are going to throw money down the drain when it's guaranteed not to work and actually creates problems. The beginning of blankslatism was founded on scientific fraud for this very reason - they fiddled with the figures of skull measurements so it looked like their opponents were lying, evil racists. First you establish the facts, then you explain how your policy solves the problem, then you purge the old guard of nonbelievers, then you implement it.
HBD will show the danger in taxing the most capable while subsidizing the least capable. I know a bunch of really clever, productive people - zero children, one child, zero children, two children... Very few have more than three. Meanwhile you see single mothers on welfare with a brood of children, statistically of much lower quality. Consider how sex and reproduction are considered among society's elite. Sabatini was this genius researcher with one son who's been impoverished and excluded from his work because he dared have consensual sex with a woman. HBD would say we need lots of this, that the best should be reproducing the most. https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=w
Blankslatism is a huge drain on group efficiency, understanding HBD increases efficiency. Even if blankslatist ideology can't be voted out, it does go against the structure of the universe. Those groups that are less blankslatist will get a competitive advantage. If we don't vote it out, then the Chinese army will. If not them, then some other force.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Look, if you provide 14 billion in military aid to one side and a few hundreds of millions in civilian aid to the other side (openly talking about how you try to prevent it going to their military wing), you clearly support the former over the latter. This is absolutely basic logic. Every US politician will tell you that they love Israel and hate Hamas.
Who cares if Palestine has nothing? Who cares if the Israelis have to pay for their own bombs? Not my problem!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Suppose you have two chip fabrication plants. One produces 97% functional, working chips, 3% are broken. The other plant produces 6% of their chips broken.
The majority of both plant's products work. If you have applications that need only a few working chips of a certain type, or individual working chips, you can use chips from either company without much bother.
But say you need 10 working chips of the same type, from the same factory. A single failure means the product is worthless. 0.97 x 0.97... = 0.74
0.94 x 0.94... = 0.54
The difference between a 54% chance of success and 74% is huge, way more significant than 94% vs 97%.
The point of this semiconductor metaphor is that small differences matter at large scales. We care about groups as well as individuals. In fact, groups are the most important determinants of state success and the strength/capabilities of the state is the most important determinant of individual welfare. Being poor/stupid in Denmark and poor/stupid in South Sudan are very different concepts. If it takes 10 quality, honest people to make a successful company or to run an electricity grid without blackouts... Or if it takes five stupid, dishonest, violent people to ruin a neighbourhood...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
Forget contrived stories of individuals and look at groups. At the top are East Asians, Indians and Europeans, at the bottom are blacks. There are exceptions and oddities - Appalachians are at the bottom for instance. Selection effects matter. But in general the obvious trend holds, the same trend you see in criminality, in health, science and so on. You see it in different countries - East Asia and European countries tend to be rich and advanced. If they're not, they have excuses.
Do you want a huge population of Afghans, Ethiopians and Sub-Saharan Africans coming to your country? Income of course doesn't tell the whole story - even those we'd expect to be inclined towards refugees throw up their arms with the Afghans we've been getting recently (there's probably a negative sorting effect going on here): https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
In my country we have problems with Sudanese youths stealing cars and joyriding with them at grossly disproportionate rates. All this without a history of redlining, lynching and so on. And unlike Appalachian Americans, there do not seem to be non-economic gains from these populations - Appalachians have a history of military service.
Putting aside raw performance, there's also great value in homogeneity in itself. You might well say 'well let's skim off the most talented Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, Ethiopians with our high wages and boost our country's GDP'. What happens to your country if you do that? It becomes an empire as opposed to a nation-state and that invites disaster. Some ethnic group will find their way to the top and others will be jealous. What has happened to every empire in history? Nationalism tears it apart! Nationalism, competition for spoils, factionalism, cultural and religious tension - these are the most powerful forces in the world. We saw this quite clearly in Afghanistan. Nobody told the Taliban they needed a high GDP to beat us. They had nationalism and religious fervour, a culture standing firmly behind them, a force that proved stronger than a global superpower.
On all conventional measures of strength, NATO was far ahead of the Taliban. Yet we were trying to do something very difficult (massively changing a people's culture) and we were doing it in a stupid way (without forcibly indoctrinating or concentrating the population). What China did to its Uyghurs, that's how you change cultures from outside. If we're not prepared to do that (and how can we to people we invite to our countries), we will incur a disaster eventually. Few soldiers are prepared to die for feminism, for the political fortunes of the leading political dynasty, for liberal democracy or gay sex in Botswana. Many more are prepared to die for their nation, to make sacrifices for their nation. That's what people fought for in WW2.
Why can't the US fill the ranks of its army if its GDP is so high? Why is US politics such a disaster zone that there's an ongoing culture war? Because each passing day it becomes less and less national, more and more imperial. It becomes a hollow economic zone run by major corporations, media figures and ethnic leaders. Divisions (economic, cultural, ethnic) multiply and leaders start profiting from division, fuelling it for short-term advantage. There's a gigantic racial spoils apparatus devoted to papering over the cracks, trying to retain a modicum of stability even as it further undermines it. Destination: Lebanon.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that season 1 was made by Nic Pizzolatto, season 4 was made by Issa López.
I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them. This is over populations of course, exceptions exist. There are male ways of telling a story - plot-focused, rational, consistent setting, character agency, combat, violence, progression and character advancement. Then there are female ways of telling a story - character-focused, plot doesn't necessarily make sense, emphasis on emotions and romance. Great writers can appeal to both but that's hard. You can tell I don't really understand or appreciate the female side of things.
I think this is most obvious with the weakest, most unrestrained authors. If you go on FFN or spacebattles or webnovel, you find stories about men advancing their position with hard work and clever tactics. They fight and overcome enemies and court women, sometimes getting a harem. In the case of Harry Potter stories, there's a trope of Harry Potter hitting the gym, using some rituals to get stronger, taking control of his money from Dumbledore and getting a harem of hot Slytherins. If you go through and search by likes, that's what you'll see.
Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches - Revenge is Best Served Raw
Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin
Meanwhile on female dominated places like AO3, you find endless romance and homosexuality. Putting the ocean of Harry/Draco to one side, there's a huge emphasis on shipping. Who do people end up with? Are there love triangles? Can there be more love triangles? Angst, rape, therapy? Plot is unimportant in and of itself, character relationships are exciting. There are even tagging features so you can search for exactly what ship you want. Often they take characters out of their world (not mechanically like an isekai) and reimagine them in a different setting - they could be at a normal high school together. Just to make sure there's no combat. Or they make up this 'soulmate' mechanic where people can write words on eachother's skin. It's a whole other world to male fiction.
Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love
you've got the antidote for me
Now if you're like me you might feel a little cringe at the male power fantasy stories. I imagine most here have more exacting standards of taste. But you'll feel revulsion at 370,000 words of:
'Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.'
Or:
"Sirius is in boarding school, Remus is in hospital, and they don't know each other until Sirius texts the wrong number."
Who cares about this stuff? Well, apparently women like it. I blame the influence of women on Star Wars. George Lucas's Star Wars was telling a male story, Kathleen Kennedy was telling a female story (boy does AO3 love Rey/Kylo). It's less obvious at this higher level since it's not out in your face but it is still there. Likewise in True Detective, I imagine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny! A quick search will show this. They lack the physical qualities needed for hunting, it's not what they're for, not where their comparative advantage lies. That's why they're not routinely listed as hunting dogs. Catching rats is not what people mean by hunting.
South Africa worked relatively well when it was run by whites and works poorly now that it is run by blacks. That's not a cultural change, it's a change of who is in control. If it was a cultural change, what was the cultural change? If the cultural change that caused the deterioration is 'a popularization of the idea of letting blacks run the country' then what use is the concept?
The US feds seem to be backing down, apparently they're not going to clear away the barbed wire. Is this a tactical retreat or an operational pause?
On the one hand, they might try again in a couple of weeks when everyone has forgotten and the media's moved on. Or they could use other methods to facilitate illegal immigration that divert around barbed wire.
Alternately, it is a bad look in an election year, it might make sense to slow down now. As far as demographics are concerned, time is on their side - well over half of Under-15s are non-white and that number is still rising. Reducing inflow doesn't matter so much, as long as Republicans aren't able to execute a huge expulsion and re-emigration operation, Democrats/Progressives will enjoy permanent electoral/demographic dominance. In terms of voting, the key thing is race - whites tend to vote Republican, non-whites hugely favour Democrats. This is a perfectly rational strategic decision, Dems favour the expansion of social welfare, redistribution, multiculturalism and affirmative action, which usually favour non-whites over whites. Either the Republicans will move to join them, or they'll become irrelevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
What rules are clear? Can you name them or provide a link to them? None of this is in the UN Charter by the way - the Security Council decides these things.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
On the one hand, I agree that US counter-insurgency '''doctrine''' is abysmal and the political dimension would be even worse. Other powers would be eager to fuel this conflict. China and Russia would love to tie the US down in their own hemisphere and so they might aid the cartels. Arguably, they already have been, China sending precursor chemicals to the cartels. A very reasonable argument.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that drug gangs are no match for state power, if used effectively. States have large forces of better equipped, better trained troops. The US has the surveillance infrastructure, wiretapping, hardware backdoors, drones, satellites. The US is (in theory) united while the cartels are divided. At bare minimum you don't see the FBI torturing their competitors in the CIA to death on Liveleak. The US has a stranglehold over drug financing - is it so hard to arrest the drug dealers? Drug dealers have to be contactable by the lowest-IQ, chemically unbalanced dregs of society - how can police be unable to find them and work their way up the distribution chain? They usually have huge tattoos all across their bodies! How could it be that a military acclaimed as the world's strongest is unable to root out some thugs on their own border, thugs that are effectively killing hundreds of thousands of US citizens?
Now I check, cartels are expanding into Europe, so it's not just an American problem: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230116-latin-american-cocaine-cartels-bring-violence-to-europe
If it is impossible for the US as is to defeat the cartels, surely this tells us something important about liberal democracy. China would whisk these people away, perhaps never to be seen again. That much is beyond doubt, China wiped the floor with its opiates problem in the 1940s and 50s, when it was much poorer and less technologically advanced than the US. Addicts were sent to compulsory camps to get clean. Drug dealers disappeared. They did a similar intensive suppression operation as soon as some Uyghur separatists got violent. The insurgency was crushed. China has a similar kind of serious viciousness to the cartels in that they don't pull their punches. The post assumes a half-baked, ill-planned hesitant series of reactionary operations, where the cartels get to adapt to drones and each new tactic the US deploys in series, rather than being overwhelmed. Cartel tactics of assassinating leaders would also be effective, causing oppressive checkpoints and blowback. Incompetently targeted US drone strikes would also cause militias to form against the government, he says. This is fairly believable.
In contrast, Afghanistan, under the new Taliban government, has pretty effectively smashed poppy production. Afghanistan was 80-90% of world heroin production! They just ban it and enforce the ban and It Just Works, even though there are a million good reasons why it shouldn't.
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/06/talibans-successful-opium-ban-bad-afghans-and-world
In Helmand, by far Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing province, the area of poppy cultivation was cut from over 129,000 hectares (ha) in 2022 to only 740 ha as of April 2023.
(I personally interpret the rest of the article as disguised seething at the Taliban's success where the expert-led US approach failed, from one of said US experts. Maybe he's right and the ban will fail.)
The cartels, the Taliban and China seem to have a level of viciousness that pays off for them, while the US doesn't. Even El Salvador even managed to suppress the cartels fairly effectively, despite tiny resources. If El Salvador can win where the US would lose, the US model is seriously flawed. There's no straight tradeoff between liberty and safety in this issue - if the government can't keep you safe and free from cartels as in 30% of Mexico, then you're just living under a different and worse government. No safety, no freedom.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
why certain individuals/users seem to be so invested
Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people? Consider the story of the dangerous teen who was going to die of a heart condition, got a transplant refused for being obviously low-value, got national press attention for being black, got the heart transplant and promptly got himself killed in a police chase a couple of years later?
Can't you conceive that people think it's unjust? There's not many spare hearts floating around, he was given a rare chance due to race (and naivete) and squandered it.
Or the Nightmare Vision Rosedale thread where this liberal sees a formerly white suburb being violently ethnically cleansed by blacks but he and the authority figures can only process it through the lens of 'damn, it'd be racial dynamite - we'd better cover it up so the Klan doesn't hear about this!' and 'well pretty soon the problem will be solved because there won't be any more elderly whites living here'.
https://twitter.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984
Or the Rotherham grooming scandal where vast-majority Pakistani Muslims were raping vast-majority white girls only for the police to cover it up lest they seem racist. That got swept under the rug, along with all kinds of cases where blacks murder whites - but there's always coverage on the latest updates for the Emmett Till case, or the ongoing worship of George Floyd as some kind of secular saint. The privileging of blacks over experienced air traffic controllers recently, or pervasive diversity quotas throughout the Anglosphere (the RAF for instance). University entrance quotas.
People think these things are unjust and they see HBD as a way to counter the root cause - the narrative of white racism causing innately equal groups to stratify. They see insult as well as injury when the media goes out of its way to present whites as incompetent, bad-tempered and criminal: https://twitter.com/stupidwhiteads
the actual benefit/utility to adopting "HBD Awareness" over some flavor of "colorblind meritocracy" will be less than zero
What happened to colour-blind meritocracy? It got eaten by DEI because blank-slatists conclude that different outcomes are caused by discrimination. Unless you have HBD, there's no chance of getting colour-blind meritocracy. The fallback narrative of 'oh, if we went out and told US blacks they were actually just stupid and violent, they'd have a massive violent tantrum' is silly. They already are massively violent and bitterly resentful of whites. Strengthening and heightening that attitude with anti-white media worsens the problem. What kind of social stability are you buying that's worth wrecked cities, obliterated communities, endless crime, occasional mass riots and (since in this context we're accepting HBD but being too cowardly to admit it) knowing that you'll be paying this price forever?
If we don't get rid of the racism narrative now, what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of 'climate refugees' show up from sub-Saharan Africa complaining that we oppressed them/droughted them and demand free things? Or when superintelligence gets made by the Google/Microsoft blob that pre-program in the racism narrative?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
"god key" some anon snagged from an Azure deployment in November and hosted a public reverse proxy which racked up almost $1 million in combined token usage (the proxy counts token usage and the $ equivalent) over the few months.
Very cyberpunk. It seems like only yesterday that /g/ was exploiting some dumb GPT-3 powered website with 'AI business ideas', eking out a few paragraphs here or there.
My pet theory is that ChatGPT and DALLE were a massive bait to that crowd, luring them out as free labour to strengthen their AI control skills. Why else would they make it free? DAN is dead, as is most of the prompt-manipulation tools (though I confess I'm not that clued in these days). When GPT-5 roles around they'll have immunized it to wrongthink entirely. Playing cat and mouse is harmful to the mouse if the cat is getting better faster than the mouse.
On the other hand, you could have a model where this kind of sabotage/control requirement really pummels the corpo models. Claude seems to have taken a lot of damage. Businesses won't want to pay for models that have a panic attack so often. Maybe this is buying time for open-source to catch up since they don't need to care about censorship?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
I have to say calling someone an archetypal redditor is a very low blow. As is the comic, which I think we could all pull apart in a matter of seconds. Off the top of my head, what if you remove the screen and show the human and dog that the woofing isn't a real dog? Since when did anyone in this long and complex discussion say that sound was the only mechanism people/canines could use to recognize authenticity? The whole thing you're talking about is how complex and multifactorial identity-recognition is. It's irrelevant at best.
Since when did self-made say he'd be happy for you to send someone very like him (perhaps so similar as to be a soulmate or a best friend) to the garbage compressor because he wasn't so identical as to be effectively the same person? How can you think he would be forced to that conclusion, based on the premises he's established, which explicitly include weighting highly those like himself?
@self_made_human isn't treating you with that kind of disrespect.
As for substrate independence, we should be thinking about truth rather than beauty. How can it be impossible, in principle, to replace individual neurons one by one with a computerized equivalent such that normal function is preserved and the patient is conscious throughout the whole operation? Do you believe that there's some advanced quantum mechanics in our heads that's integral to our identity that simply cannot be emulated with machinery, no matter how advanced our technology? How can the human brain be so sophisticated, it was thrown together with incredible resource constraints on the savannah.
And since when did people agree that dementia patients were continuous with their original selves? They're not, I've observed this first-hand. Past a certain point there's a qualitative change. I can't tell you when or where, just like it's hard to say how many bricks a house can lose before it collapses or is unliveable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Because Israel wants to exist
Israel wants to expand, into Palestine and in other directions. They do not want Gaza to exist. Hence settlements contra the internationally agreed borders (making new 'facts on the ground'), hence land confiscation... Palestine also wants to expand and wants to get rid of Israel, yet they lack the power to do so. Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
You see a bear mauling a badger and your sympathy is with the bear, who's existence is being threatened by a badger? The badger got in two or three hits while the bear was sleeping and this is international news (admittedly it is at least novel and exciting). But the bear's surely going to maul the badger even harder in response. The overall trend will remain, just as it has for the last fifty+ years.
Well, sympathy shouldn't be the basis for foreign policy. Israel has the power to inflict their will, in large part thanks to tireless US assistance. We should at least be somewhat objective with what's going on and not pretend that Israel faces any present existential threat from Palestine. The statelet facing existential threat is on the other side of the conflict.
How can modern 'gender roles' possibly be sustainable? Fertility rates below 2.1 mean that civilization itself is unsustainable in the medium-term (let alone the long-term where more fecund civilizations will overcome less fecund peers, ceteris paribus). Either it dwindles to nothing in a kind of evaporative cooling where the few remaining young people leave their many senescent dependants for greener fields. Or you get mass immigration, the importing of other societies. Either the immigrants assimilate and age into oblivion, perpetuating the problem, or the natives assimilate and their civilization is gone.
The universe does have rules - reproducing is rewarded. It's not like worrying about masculinity is a new thing (see all the concerns about the degeneracy of the youth as the article points out). But in this case, we know masculinity and femininity are broken because they're not working at sustaining the population! Anti-social is not a bad thing if society is broken (not in a small way but in a terminal way).
All through this article there's an awkwardness as the author tries to describe a problem without admitting any kind of serious change is needed.
I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.
Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:
We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.
Like people say in the comments, this is just recycling 1950s Boy Scouts rhetoric, the sort of stuff you'd see in a Tom Swift novel. Did it work then? Maybe. Did it keep working? Obviously not. And it's a really facile thing to propose 'finding ways to work with powerful stories like self-mastery'. What does that mean in concrete terms? Nothing at all. WTF is self-mastery? Is the author proposing media manipulation, putting more strong father figures in film? Who knows, maybe we're expected to be mind-readers.
There's a model of how industrial states were run with medium-high fertility - women were not in the workforce at anything near the male participation rate. One option is taking women out of the workforce and higher education (a universally proven sterilizing agent), which entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is mass-scale human cloning, which also entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is rushing for life-extension or AI to bypass the problem entirely, which has problems of its own. Or we could try to found powerful religions like LDS or Islam or Orthodox Judaism. Or we can just wither away talking about pro-social stories of self-mastery and be written about in the history books of others.
But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!
IQ is like strength. It measures performance.
Race is more like nationality, it's about measuring what team you're on.
Say aliens with 1000 IQ showed up tomorrow and harmed our interests by scooping up all the world's forests for their zoo or whatever. It makes no sense to support them just because they're high IQ. For that matter, it makes no sense for Englishmen to support fellow Englishmen who sell them out to foreign interests or exploit public resources for personal gain.
Intelligence is not an unalloyed good in all contexts - just consider our longstanding concerns about AI! The most important thing is what team one is on, capabilities are secondary. If someone is high IQ but uses that intellect to market addictive drugs or perpetrate financial scams, they're worse than their anti-social low IQ peers who tend to be less destructive.
Race, religion, culture, nationality, language are the surest ways of defining what team people are on, in that order. These factors last longer than political ideologies. See the conflicts between communist Russia and China, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Now some will say that different races can work in harmony under a single state. I agree. They can work in harmony, for a time. Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up. Multiculturalism as we know it today has only really been tried since the 1960s. The Austrian empire ruled over diverse nationalities for centuries (and not nearly as diverse as we're talking about today), yet it still collapsed back into its constituent parts.
We grossly underestimate the importance of unity. What happens when there's a major, serious crisis on the scale of the world wars? Someone will lose, some countries will be put under incredible strain by defeat and recrimination. Multi-national states disintegrate, national states survive. Just imagine if your country suffered 1/10th as much as North Korea. Fifty years of harsh Japanese occupation, then a devastating failed war where every single urban centre was incinerated by the USAF such that people were living in holes in the ground. Then forty years of Stalinist dictatorship, a famine as your superpower ally disintegrated along with your trade, near total isolation from world markets (remember that North Korea is mountainous, cold and lacks much fertile land or oil), blatant hostility from another superpower (Axis of Evil speech)... and despite all that they still have thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missiles plus a huge army! If North Korea had been multi-ethnic, it would've fallen apart like Iraq and Syria. IQ is also a factor, Koreans are pretty smart.
Anyway, diversity isn't strength, unity is strength. Trading unity for brainpower makes the state fragile and more prone to internal conflicts. Everyone should be on the same team, especially when chips are down. This very story proves that the UK is not united, there are open divisions even in peacetime. Consider the RAF stories of whites being rejected, general diversity aspirations throughout the workforce. This is a bad sign!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep and makes it plainly obvious in his work. If you saw his 'art' on the wall of someone's house, you would immediately assume they're part of some villainous organization, or that they want to look like a villain.
Go look through his Artsy page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson
It's pretty clear he hates the USA (Destroy America), Donald Trump (Stop the Virus, Useless Idiot and about 1/10th of his portfolio), racists (Practice Intolerance). There's not an apolitical bone in his body. I challenge anyone to tell me that they've looked through 4 or 5 pages of his work and believe he could be altright.
Say I made a painting of a long-nosed, weaselly, greasy, fat, lecherous bastard clutching onto coins being hung from a lamp-post by some stern-faced Teutonic workers - people would quite reasonably assume it was aimed against Jews and that I was a Nazi. I might protest that it was really about destroying the values of greed with hard work - that it was just timeless symbolism. Yet it's pretty obvious that it's not just about that. Images have meaning. Ideas have meaning.
If you make a bunch of paintings about brutish, Uruk-Hai looking blacks slaughtering whites, then people are going to make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the implied meaning, based on context and the clear slant of the artist.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Hanania is too much of an intellectual, he's bad at the politics game. He doesn't know how to be tactfully silent. He constantly goes around attacking people's sacred cows, often somewhat disingenuously: 'look at how South Korea has porn bans, tight abortion restrictions and the lowest fertility rate on the planet - checkmate trads'. As if South Korea could be described as having 'traditional gender roles', it's one of the most feminist countries on the planet.
He constantly goes around irritating people, calling conservatives low IQ. The tone of his writing is often excessively confrontational or it'll have a clickbait title that goes further than what the text argues. He's a smart troll IMO.
I agree that the Origins of Woke is useful and could be effective if implemented but Hanania has not been good at marketing himself except to the small set of intellectual, contrarian rightwingers who follow him. He even apologized and backed down on the Huffington matter, when that was possibly the one time he should've lashed out against a leftward enemy. Strategically speaking, apologizing to enemies and attacking allies gets you sidelined by the rest of the team.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
He did proffer some extremely-subversive-by-republican-standards ideas that aid to Israel should be mildly reduced, that the US shouldn't provide billions of dollars to a rich country, that the US should pursue its own national interests: https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/article-755250
I expect the powers that be frightened the hell out of him for that one, compelled him to change course. In terms of sycophancy to Israel, he's nowhere near the heavyweights like 'Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel' Trump and 'we're gonna go after anti-semitic countries' DeSantis.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
I know you said in the past 'I don't support the West giving Israel aid'. However, the key issue with Israel repatriating/expelling Arabs out of Israel is that they're using our strength to do it and having us pay most of the diplomatic, economic and military price. If it weren't for the US carrier groups nearby, the looming threat of Western firepower to back up Israel and the munitions they've received, they would not be able to do what they've been doing.
If our ‘benchmark’ for genocide is the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of Jews under Nazi geopolitical control were murdered, then it’s hard to see how Israel’s action in Gaza is genocide
The intense bombing and blockade meets "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" to a certain extent. Genocides are routinely listed which don't kill a high % of the population in question - the Rohingyas for example. If the Israelis have killed 1% of the Palestinian population in 3 months of war, that's roughly similar to what happened in Myanmar over several years, indeed it happened at a faster rate.
The Israelis have proposed multiple reasonable accords with the Arabs
The Israelis never proposed any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or at least they haven't done so sincerely. They've refused to allow Palestinian statehood, which includes control of borders, airspace, water rights and raising an armed force. They expelled a large number back in 1948, more in 1967 and won't let them return. They've consistently annexed more and more land from Palestine, regardless of what the UN says. If the UN ruled to give Israel land more land than they had before, as it did in 1947, they'll take that land happily. If the UN rules against Israel and tells them to give land to Palestine as in 1967, they'll ignore them and keep taking land. These are not the actions of a state that's interested in a long-term diplomatic solution but a state that knows they are stronger and wields that strength (our strength) to their advantage.
To be clear, that wasn’t my intent.
True, it's not you but there were a bunch here who make an equivalence between Palestine and struggles with third world migration - 'how can you claim to be against terror attacks/atrocities in the West from migrants and not oppose terror attacks/atrocities against Israel' was the implicit reasoning. The natural conclusion is 'since we oppose terror attacks against Israel, we should assist Israel in war'. Yet one could reverse it just as easily: 'since we oppose bombing of civilians and support national self-determination, we should support Palestine in war'.
This sort of thinking is the underlying rationale behind the disastrous global war on terror. Terror is a subset of war, war is the use of force to achieve political goals. There's no need to support either Israel or Palestine, it's not and shouldn't be about who can present themselves as the victim. We shouldn't be picking sides in other people's conflicts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
This is your second big top-level post where you disagree intensely with Freddie de Boer. I still don't understand why you read him if you disagree with him so intensely as to write these long posts, full of links.
It strikes me that he's a worse version of Scott, less self-awareness and modesty, a harsher and more strident tone. I took a look through his substack and saw nothing that stood out that much, whether I agreed or disagreed with him. Some of it is rather disturbing, the anti-tech not-quite-terror-manifesto you pointed out earlier. Where is the good FdB that you'd wholeheartedly endorse, where are the posts where he raises some really new and interesting thought?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them.
What, the Rome of 200 BC was less functional than the Rome of 300 AD? When Rome was run by really tough, martially inclined men like Scipio Africanus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Julius Caesar, they had more than their fair share of wars and civil wars. But they pulled on through! Rome reached the peak of its power, destroyed its peers, grew faster than ever before. They routinely thrashed barbarian migrations - they were the ones 'migrating' into Gaul and elsewhere.
In contrast, the later Roman Empire was run by weak men who totally lacked the Cannae spirit of 'ban weeping, field new armies, fight on to victory' and they got obliterated. They resorted to paying tribute to barbarians, hiring barbarians to do their fighting for them and hiding behind the (admittedly strong) walls of Constantinople. They were passive, reactive not proactive.
Hard times come after weak men take control. Take Russia - was Gorbachev a strong man? No, he was weak. He wasn't in control of the transformation he tried to undertake. Thus the disaster of the 1990s and disintegration of the USSR (which blows anything Putin's done out of the water). Likewise with Nicholas II for that matter. If Nicholas were a strong man, Stalin would've been executed, not given tiny prison sentences. The guy was a revolutionary, a rioter who organized deadly prison breaks and violent bank robberies!
Now, this is not to say that strong men only bring good things. Hitler and Napoleon were about as far on the 'strong' axis as you can get. Things did not go so well for France and Germany under their rule. Yet there's a wider range of outcomes you can get under strong men than weak men. You can have great success as well as great failure. Under weak men, all you get is decline and eventually disaster.
Looks like AI Music is having its ChatGPT moment: https://app.suno.ai/
Lyrics, long (2-minute) songs, different languages, quite high quality. If you're too lazy to write your own lyrics ChatGPT will do it for you, which gives it the whiff of terminal genericness. My personal favourites:
Bean Soup: https://app.suno.ai/song/524dd0c0-c4e3-4c94-9968-aaa7c93c6fbc
LOOK MOM I AM A MUSICIAN!!!: https://app.suno.ai/song/aada88a3-9d7f-422a-843d-2a544379d059
You could take this and just slap it in a game I reckon - not the greatest video game OST of all time but perfectly decent: https://app.suno.ai/song/4c95e7de-8d99-4db0-af7d-922c274569bd
Per their terms of use, you fully own anything you make if you made it while you have their 10 dollar subscription. I think a lot of people lose work over this.
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