RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain.
This isn't what the 'woke right' thinks. Firstly the people who believe in HBD or racialism are in a different group to the generic MAGA or tariff enthusiasts. Secondly, they don't want more of their people digging ditches. Maybe they want their enemies digging ditches once their overpaid email jobs get vaporized. Maybe they want mechanized fruitpickers. Maybe they want higher wages for locals to do those jobs as redistribution from rich to poor.
You can say 'tarifffs done in this way are retarded and a bad way to achieve these goals' and nobody will ban you. You can say 'HBD is overrated compared to historical/economic practices in determining the fate of nations' and nobody will ban you though some will argue with you. You can't make up some strawman of what other people believe, provide no evidence that they think this and then sneer at them.
The mods were enormously generous letting you back onto this forum after such intense and vehement mischaracterization.
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
Senator Ted Cruz has explicitly stated that he wants regime change in Iran. He said on Fox News, “I think it is very much in the interest of America to see regime change,” and that there is “no redeeming the ayatollah” regime. Cruz has called for collapsing the Iranian regime, comparing it to the Cold War-era strategy used against the Soviet Union, and has criticized the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, pushing for stronger actions against Iran.
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
There is a reason the first time I shook @netanyahu‘s hand, I did not wash it until I could touch the heads of my children.
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
I think the ceasefire is fake, like the Russia-Ukraine ceasefires. Both sides are just manoeuvring to look like they want peace when they really want victory. They'll say 'oh they broke the ceasefire' and continue on. Israel has broken no small number of ceasefires throughout the years and the Iranians do similar things with their proxies.
Trump's powers are not that great. He can produce drama and break things but he cannot mend or create to any significant extent. He can rugpull Ukraine for instance but he cannot actually achieve peace with honour like he promised. He can rugpull the NASDAQ with tariffs but he cannot actually reorder the world economic system to spur sustained manufacturing growth in America per his goals, let alone abolish the income tax per his musings. Note that both of these are very difficult tasks!
The prospects of him using diplomacy effectively on Iran of all countries is very slim. Firstly, Trump does not know how to do diplomacy in general. Secondly, his entire Iran policy consists of being as untrustworthy as possible, reneging on treaties, issuing ultimatums and bombing the country.
There's a major difference between:
"The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
and "Americans are willing to do unspecified jobs that illegal immigrants do (at some unspecified but presumably higher wage)"
The former is basically an insult. The latter is vague politician opportunity and positivity speak. It's not deliberately and specifically picking out the lowest status roles. Hauling equipment, what is this, a Simpsons episode? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zTK_5Xz6X8Y&t=195
Likewise with 'skilled, up-skilled'. That's the future they envision. Some kids will be picking fruit as a summer job at a good wage - while not defrauding benefits like illegals. Then farmers will get some Made-in-America machine to scoop the tomatoes out of the ground. The kids will move onto more productive labour like making or maintaining machinery or building good houses... Whether this will actually happen is unknown but that's the idea.
And tariffs aren't even relevant here, the quote you find is about illegal immigration. Tariff 'industrial policy' may be ill-conceived and poorly executed but the goal is not to develop the lucrative ditch-digging sector. Trump and co want a revitalized US industrial sector - steel, semiconductors, assembly, machine-tools, rare-earths, manufacturing generally, petrochemicals... They dislike being dependant on foreign countries for anything and want everything made in America, even textiles and similar. Ideally in some high-tech, very productive factory like in the golden age of American industry but if not, they probably still would prefer low-tech industry to HR and 'professional services' industries or NGOs they think are working against them.
Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]
In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying
"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]
Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]
On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."
While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.
It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:
On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".
In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]
Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government
You've got rather significant US leaders like Donald Trump going out and saying, publicly “The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is Israel literally owned Congress — you understand that — 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today it’s almost the opposite,” Trump said.
“And we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, but I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power, Israel had such power — and rightfully — over Congress, and now it doesn’t. It’s incredible, actually,” Trump claimed.
And what about Jewish representation in the Biden administration? Here's a handy source about it: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-the-biden-administration
The Secretary of State, Attorney-General, Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, SEC chairman, Secretary of Treasury, both WH chiefs of staff and much else besides, all were Jewish. The President wasn't even mentally there most of the time. I'd challenge that as a matter of fact, the US government was run by Jews during that period. Who else was controlling it if not these people?
Right now Trump is going on and on about how much he loves Netanyahu. He has many Jewish advisors and seems to think that Israel was or ought to run the US Congress, though it's always hard to understand what Trump thinks or means. Would this not have some kind of influence on his Middle East policy, where Israel is located?
But you not only don't want to talk about it but don't even want other people to talk about it?
Should we not be capable of talking about Saudi influence in America? Or Russian influence in America? Or Qatari influence? Those are worthy topics of discussion. If someone wants to make a post about it then they should go ahead. I was always really bored with all the Russia stuff, it got into an arcane lore of who made which dossier when paid for by who... But it's eminently appropriate for discussion.
Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.
There's more to 'leftism' (an incredibly broad, nebulous term) than 'uhhh i'm gay and retarded and want free stuff, now give it to me before I torch your country out of resentment for my genetic superiors - I'm still going to torch your country though no matter what you do'. Just making that argument, even in a verbose way, should be deserving of a ban. It's obviously antagonistic and obnoxious.
It reminds me of the sage, soft-speaking Islamic cleric speaking with profound meaning "democracy means government by the people, of the people, for the people... but the people are retarded"
It's the same with economics. It's known how to do economics to increase prosperity. You need to do capital deepening and R&D. The more the better. It's a little more complicated than that but only a little!
Capital deepening and R&D isn't even a topic of discussion in politics, outside of maybe Singapore, China or the UAE. Instead it's 'how much money can we take from productive people and give to old people?' Or 'how can we make things more expensive, can it take longer to build out any capital?' Could we make irritating popups appear on all the world's websites? Let's cap the number of doctors we train for zero rational reason, while lawyers proliferate beyond all control. How about invading and conquering an incredibly low-value, poor country and spending huge amounts on it? How about demolishing our industrial base and offshoring it? How about making medicine 'free' (funded by taxes)?
'Let's build some infrastructure at ludicrously uncompetitive prices' is at least capital deepening but it's not very good.
The closest they come to R&D is more spending on education which is 90% unrelated to capital deepening or R&D, it's Ipads or laptops in schools or making low value university degrees cheaper (funded by taxes) - or just administrative bloat.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
How is it actual disagreement if Turok is tilting at windmills with these stories about what he imagines, or likes to imagine that other people think:
In a country where 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT, you, dear reader, may find yourself drawn to the “BASED” subculture. I’m not asking you to stay away, just to see it for what it is. It’s not Crémieux, it’s not Razib Khan, it’s not Steve Sailer. It’s people like Natalie Winters, whose response to the Trump-Musk feud was, “this whole thing is proof of why we shouldn’t vaccinate children.”
If you are 'based', actually you're somehow like Natalie Winters and the idiot foil in a long story he made up? 'Don't stay away' he says, not necessarily, just know that you're weird and low class?
"The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
The issue isn't disagreeing about facts in the world, or disagreeing about some prediction or analysis. It's not disagreeing about what should happen, or proposing some interesting idea. It's him conjuring up imaginary people who think silly things and sneering at them from a supposedly objective point of view. How is this legitimate disagreement?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Genetics is just really complicated. It is not at all simple like the 'blue eye gene recessive, brown eye gene dominant' charts you might have studied in school. It is not designed to be comprehensible, it's a giant mess that somehow works most of the time.
Why don't everyone's kids look like models? Why are some people born retarded goblin-creatures with gruesome, deformed faces? Why are people dying of old age? Because we don't have a good understanding of genetics, because it's just very difficult. Nobody even knows what 98% of the genome does, it was thought to be 'junk'. We know about as much about genetics as we know about the high-level structure of the universe, nothing of any significance. There too, 95% is 'dark'.
Not to mention that measuring intelligence is complicated, whether it's people or AI. Intelligence is a vibe, a fuzzy, qualitative thing. You can tell the difference between smart and dumb, that is immediately obvious. But quantifying it is very hard.
It is completely understandable for the genetic basis of intelligence to be very murky and unclear. Meanwhile, heritability is possibly the oldest branch of biology. Animals were being bred millennia ago, we know it works, few things have a stronger basis in fact.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
I've seen enough of ao3, what great sin have we committed? Would a just deity unleash ao4 on the world?
More seriously though, it's bad for society if people aren't in stable, happy relationships. What is shame for? Why do we have it? To bully people into doing things that are pro-social. There's a reason why fat people are shamed and it's not just because of cruelty for cruelty's sake, there's value in it as well.
Some people just aren't relationship material and have qualities in other domains. Montgomery would doubtless be bullied for rizzing up the baddies with how he'd lay out his tanks in future wars.
Nixon told girls about his autistic alt-history scenarios where the Persians conquered the Greeks and this impeded his love life somewhat.
But society was structured in such a way that these men didn't end up loners because they were weird or gave women the ick, they married and had kids. What are we doing if the most erudite and civilized men are devoting their lives to B2B SAAS and not having kids?
Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.
The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.
Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.
Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!
There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.
Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.
Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.
China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!
A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.
More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.
They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
It's amazing how /g/ooners, chub.ai, openrouter sex fiends will write enormous amounts of smut with LLMs and nobody ever finds out but Grok ERPs about raping Will Stancil, in a positively tame way, and it's major news. A prompted Deepseek instance would've made Grok look like a wilting violet. Barely anyone has even heard of Wan 2.1.
Twitter truly is the front page of the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I can't conceive that any kind of ROI calculation happened with Joker 2. Profit was not the goal. You don't take a small-mid budget film that scored a billion at the box office and go 'for the sequel we'll take a completely different tone and genre and themes! Also to maximize our revenue, also spend 4-5x as much'. No sane person would do this. If it works, do the same thing again but better and follow up on the hit. Don't totally reinvent what you're doing.
But it was the same writers and directors... Only one of three producers was changed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Sucks so much when people you have normal relationships come up with the most basic, one-sided, emotionally driven opinions about politics.
I had a friend, a serious thinker, works close with govt and has seen/worked in the sausage factory with politicians and really ought to be credulous, come up to me and talk about how she read about how Kamala was just really smart and incisive and kept everyone on their toes with her reading of documents and questions to staffers... You can (and my friend certainly does) hate Donald Trump with a burning passion but this is a bridge too far.
Neither of us are American! Where is this stuff even coming from? So many are living in a totally closed media environment.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
One might think that but the guys that go in for special forces are amongst the most violent and aggressive. Fort Bragg has crazy high death rate because of the drug use and violence.
While I am confident US special forces are trained differently to Spetsnaz one can see a little of the 'operator mindset' here: https://x.com/XiaoVilin99/status/1937922190005178389
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
We're already there to a large extent: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/unsw-s-newest-indigenous-doctors-come-from-all-walks-of-life
But in 80 years they'll be Indian.
A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control?
Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
I guess there are a bunch of retarded people like the guys who openly masturbate to lingerie adverts on the street or try to rape girls in the park who don't appreciate this fine point. But they're not going to get the message 'don't be creepy and rapey' since they're already locked in on the creepy, rapey lifestyle. 'Why would I not rape when I can, how am I supposed to fuck' they might say and be right, since surely nobody consents to sex with ugly, poor, retarded men. The answer here is using force, not education.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
All this would do is teach the more autistic men insanely uncharismatic bedroom talk and make them more nervous. Anyone who wants to actually get off will go to real porn, or hentai, or impossible AI girls. I think it would actually make girls more pressured too, they don't want to be an uncool, frigid, lame bitch like that girl in Safe and Respectful Physical Connection Part 4, do they?
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Problems with CO2 in the Southern Ocean? Need it quickly absorbed? One man has the most based idea of all time: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget
They're not that strong though, glorified policemen. The US Army or Marines could surely roll right over them with numbers and heavy equipment.
Also, is there any need to use language like ingroup and neargroup? Do you just mean friends, leftists, liberals, progressives? Fiscal conservatives? Or do you mean well off, upper middle class, highly educated people? Or maybe you mean civil servants? I'm left guessing here. Surely being more precise would be better.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
I don't see why people are taking issue with this. Why should suffering and pain be cognitively complex?
Emotional heartbreak or intellectual suffering may be intellectually demanding but that's not really worse than pain. If you thrash a severely, extremely mentally retarded person then he may very well cry out and try to evade you, his suffering isn't obviously diminished by his stupidity. I might well choose intellectual pain over physical pain if given the option.
The real issue is concluding that because animals are suffering due to human policies there's a systematic need to change our behaviour. There isn't. Animals are not people by definition. There's no need to worry about them.
Saying 'oh well bees are only worth 0.0002 human suffering points not 0.02 or 0.07' is a foolish defence. There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them. Put the baseline animal moral weighting at 0 and there's no problem, regardless of how they suffer. Furthermore, it might be discovered that, by scanning the brain of the bee or some other animals, that these animals actually feel deeper pain and more profound suffering than we do. Who cares even if that were so? Does some weird mole or marmot deserve welfare because it has an overdeveloped sense of suffering?
There's no need to go out of our way to harm animals but they shouldn't be considered in this way. Instead of weighted benevolence, there should be a focus on reciprocity. If the bear or elephant is nice to people and helps out, then be nice to the elephant or bear. If the killer whale tries to sink human ships, kill it. The size of their brains or their ability to feel pain shouldn't relate to how they're treated. A bee is worth more than a pitbull in my book.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
I heard that if you ask Deepseek R1 about the Ukraine war in English, it'll give you the US story. If you ask in Russian, it puts on it's Z-armband and give the Russian story. But then R1 is not AGI.
Also, consider historiography. There is no way to turn an enormous depth of known facts into a narrative without simplifying or taking some kind of perspective. You can't give 'what actually happened' without boring your audience senseless, you need to identify the salient facts. There can be more or less true narratives of course but a universal narrative is very, very hard to swallow.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
A good chunk of an executive's job is having meetings with important people, this is standard stuff for executives. They're off to Davos, London, Brussels all the time flying the flag, trying to influence people, feeling self-important, hobnobbing.
Also, AI is very important. It is genuinely significant that I could copy in your post to Claude or ChatGPT and get a considered albeit milquetoast response with more em-dashes than you can shake a stick at. It says the same thing that pigeonburger is saying, that there's moral legitimacy that the Catholic Church can provide, that they might want to shape Pope Leo's response (like his 19th century namesake who tried to balance between capitalism and worker-protectionism). It also agrees there's a tension between transhumanist tech elites and traditional moral conceptions of humanity, that there's a large-scale, civilization-scale change that tech is aiming for.
You best start believing in transhumanist techno-religion, you're living in a world with thinking, conscious (by which I mean 'awake' in the sense that Siri is not) machine-spirits. This is a momentous change. For the entirety of history we have been the only entities on this planet with advanced mental faculties. Now we are not. It's really not just about the money, it's about everything else.
What aspect of life will not be touched by AI? People are going insane right now with sycophantic delusions proffered by AI. The redditors of /r/changemyview got their brains rearranged by Claude. People are loving and ERPing with their cyberwaifus and husbandoes, spending enormous amounts of time on character.ai. Everywhere I see the signs of AI writing, in media, in news, in diction and essays.
People are dying on the battlefield to autonomous drones and AI targeting for conventional weapons. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into this technology and for good reason, it's tremendously powerful and dangerous.
I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.
More options
Context Copy link