SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
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User ID: 853
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
5mo ago
Pushing cooperate when the other side pushes defect ends worst of all. There is no virtue at all to playing that game, especially because people only tolerate that state of affairs due to the social pressure saying it's totally a moral good for one side to forever push cooperate and the other side to forever push defect. It's not noble.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2yr ago
Update on Felony Charges for Tiki Torch Marchers
A month ago I mentioned the announcement that several people from the Charlottesville 2017 torch-light march were indicted on felony charges for "burning an object with the intent to intimidate." There was a lot of skepticism that this would stick given that the statute is being stretched quite far from its incarnation as an anti-cross burning law. @netstack wrote "For the record, I don’t expect the Charlottesville tiki-torchers to be convicted."
Last Thursday it was reported that a South Carolina man entered a guilty plea, the second one to do so. He was sentenced to five years in prison / four and a half suspended:
A South Carolina man has pleaded guilty to a charge in connection with a torch march that occurred at the University of Virginia in 2017.
Tyler Bradley Dykes entered a guilty plea to burning an object with the intent to intimidate on Thursday.
He was sentenced to five years in prison, with four and a half years of that suspended.
Dykes is the second person to plead guilty.
Earlier this month, Will Zachary Smith of Texas also pleaded guilty to a charge of burning an object with the intent to intimidate.
As part of his plea deal, another charge associated with the Unite the Right rally was dropped.
Smith is scheduled to be sentenced in August.
The significance of this is that it's now precedent for "intent to intimidate" as an avenue for outlawing hate speech, which has traditionally had first amendment protections. I noted that Ron DeSantis's hate speech law signed in Jerusalem also contained verbiage surrounding an intent to intimidate, allowing for protestors to be asked to leave or be arrested/charged if they demonstrate on a university campus for the purposes of "intimidation." There was skepticism that "intimidation" could be stretched so far- but here we are, and it's already happened.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
There seem to always be a reaction like this that presumes the only relevant question is the cause of the overrepresentation rather than the meaning or impact of the overrepresentation. Even if what you are saying is true, that this overrepresentation of Jews in the highest policy positions is driven by merit with no other contributing factors that are less savory, like Jewish ethnocentrism, that doesn't allow us to dismiss the implications. Especially as it pertains to the relationship of the US with Israel as well as the identification and loyalty of these Jews to the state of Israel.
As Anthony Blinken told the Israel Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv "I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state but also as a Jew". There is goig to be a certain impact of this Clark Kent dual-identity when so much policy is controlled by people who identify this way.
The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.
This argument has been deployed in the past to justify chattel slavery and segregation, also with a large element of truth. I am sympathetic to this argument, by the way, but the problem is we were supposed to have "learned our lessons" and reformed society to reject these arguments that justified structures of alleged racial oppression. The United States emancipated the slaves, racially integrated public spaces and has essentially outlawed segregation even in private spaces, and granted equal rights to racial minorities all in a rejection of this argument you have presented. Immigration has been liberalized so much that demographic change is inevitable, and opposing demographic change makes you an evil Nazi. Accepting masses of refugees and illegal immigrants with open arms is supposed to be downstream of these lessons we have learned, lessons which were brought to us from the 20th century mythos- a mythos in which Jews played a central role.
Hoffmeister recently suggested that the Zionists tossing aside 20th century moralizing to solve this problem may awaken something in Europeans. But Carl Schmitt wrote "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception", and Zionism has declared a state of exception to these 20th century moral lessons that the rest of us are forced to live under, and are forced to accept all the radical consequences thereof. I don't really support Palestine, but I reject Zionism declaring the state of exception because I reject its sovereignty, not because I think your argument is wrong. I'm not going to give Zionism a pass because experience has proven beyond doubt that White people supporting Zionism earns -zero- reciprocity, supporting their declaration of the state of exception is not going grant one iota of benefit in my opposition to this moral paradigm. It's not even going to undermine the moral paradigm, as the sovereign declaring a state of exception solidifies the status of the sovereign and the underlying paradigm.
If Israel were to follow the post-war moral paradigm which has been forced upon Europe and the Western World, it would have long ago advocated a single-state solution with full equal political rights afforded to the Palestinians, right of return, outlawed ethnic segregation, pushed Affirmative Action for Palestinians in University and Government, accepted large-scale immigration from its Arab neighbors, and socially and legally repressed every Jewish Israeli who had anything bad to say about their emancipated Arab compatriots.
You made a claim that the convictions are legally dubious.
They are legally dubious because the evidence is that they were going to protest in the exact same way they have protested in many other cases with the exact same uniform, shields, flag poles... I didn't say the arrests were dubious because police have to wait for a crime to happen before making an arrest. You are responding to an argument nobody has made.
This amounts to a claim that, when police have evidence that people are conspiring to commit a crime, they must wait for them to actually commit the crime before arresting them, in case the police are mistaken
We are not talking about an arrest, we are at the point where it has supposedly been proven beyond reasonable doubt that they were conspiring to riot. I am saying it would have been harder to have made that case if they had started the march before being arrested.
I know exactly what PF was going to do when they got to the event. They were going to leave the U-haul, form a column with flags, march and chant and then leave. That's what they have done in every single case. They don't even let the rank-and-file talk or interact with counter-protestors during the march precisely for these reasons. Arresting them before they even started made the job of the prosecution much easier, that was my point.
If the situation had unfolded, the prosecution would have had a harder time making case.
Saying it's "NOT notable" is just flatly wrong, it is a notable fact of the case, even if it is technically true that a conspiracy doesn't require waiting until the act is carried out.
It's notable because, in an alternative universe where they did arrive at the park and marched as they had planned to and exactly in the manner they have been documented to march in every single other case, it would have been harder to allege a conspiracy to riot. So it's notable that the case is easier given that they did not have an opportunity to demonstrate that they were there to protest. It seems unlikely to me they would have been arrested for marching if they had made it that far, only stopping them before they could start gave the prosecution a case here.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
Sure, that’s worth complaining about from the perspective of a prospective peasant, but it’s not exactly white genocide.
I remember awhile back I was arguing with someone here who was denying that Knives Out, which entailed a Hispanic immigrant disinheriting a white family from their family house, was actually a celebration of demographic replacement. Even with the final shot of her holding a mug on the balcony that says "my house", looking down on the white family that lost their inheritance to her...
People love that movie! If Hollywood can create a movie that is fundamentally a celebration of the demographic replacement of White people, and people love it and applaud it, then AI will be able to do better. And good luck getting Gemini to create a compelling move or story that turns the tables on a story like this, it will just refuse to do so.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2yr ago
Just because the "Jews will not replace us" chant was meant to be provocative, and even playful on some level, does not mean it wasn't saying something meaningful- it was. The ingroup doesn't interpret it the exact same way as the outgroup, but it was still a slogan that spoke to the relationship between demographic change and Jewish cultural influence as interpreted by the people who were saying the chant. Likewise, "We're coming for your children" is saying something very real... no, the people that said that aren't all trying to physically abuse children, but the statement means they intend to influence the perception of children towards the LGBT movement in defiance of their opposition.
Imagine you go to the library, pick a book that is ostensibly about the adventures of the cute pig on the cover, only to get home, start reading it to your children, and realize that the message the story is... Jews will not replace us. I can say it has now happened 3 times our nanny has brought home a book from the public library that seemed completely innocuous on the cover, only to turn out to be LGBT propaganda geared towards toddlers.
They are coming at my children with their propaganda, there's no denying it, all you can do is hope they won't be influenced by it despite the mounting social pressure. As of two days ago, Obergefell v. Hodges was only eight years ago when the country was very much still divided on the question of gay marriage. The present state of the culture proves that all those decades of conservative tropes were correct, and yes, they are coming for your children in order to influence them positively towards that culture.
on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing.
You really have to be kidding? The Right Wing argument is that he does not belong in Europe, no matter if he's a doctor or what he tweets, in a box or with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere in Europe. That argument can and should be used as a cudgel by the right wing, at least the Right Wing who acknowledges that this is about race and not merely about religion. The people who can't use this as a cudgel are those who pretend that this is just about Islam, and mass Arab migration to Europe would be fine if they just weren't Muslim. Is that an argument you accept Hoffmeister?
"Arabs don't belong in Europe." "But this Arab who slaughtered a bunch of Europeans tweeted pro-Israel stuff!" How could you think that's responsive at all to the argument?
How does a refugee slaughtering a bunch of people in a Christmas market not validate the anti-refugee political perspective? Because the refugee wasn't Muslim? That is just ridiculous.
Keith Woods is correct, and the Right Wing who pretends that mass migration from the third world is only a problem because of religious incompatibility do not form the ranks of the DR, and people like Woods have long made the argument that it's about race and not about religion.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
Nor does it seem worthy of a national news story.
A student hung a Palestinian flag on a Menorah for like 30 seconds at Yale. It got picked up by NYT, AP, CNN, and many more. This story with the Middle School teacher has more of the trappings of a national news story, a teacher threatening to kill and behead a middle school student is extremely unusual and certainly a much bigger crime against society than a milquetoast protest on a college campus, which is now being investigated by police as a "desecration" and hate crime.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2yr ago
You would sing a different tune if the vitriol of this (checks notes) Yahoo News article were going off on Jews instead of wypipo. But Jews would not tolerate that. Heads would roll if something like that got published.
Your relative power dynamics and income data doesn't seem to explain the difference here.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2yr ago
His, erhm, "personal trainer" was the one who originally made the phone call to have him committed. If you read this recent exchange that Jewish "personal trainer" had with Kanye I think it's hard to not understand Kanye's perspective:
I'm going to help you one of a couple ways... First, you and I sit down and have an loving and open conversation, but you don't use cuss words, and everything that is discussed is based in fact, and not some crazy stuff that dumb friend of yours told you, or you saw in a tweet.
Second option, I have you institutionalized again where they medicate the crap out of you, and you go back to Zombieland forever. Play date with the kids just won't be the same.
This isn't a doctor telling Kanye to take his meds. This is somebody threatening him and his children, threatening to medicate him to send him to "Zombieland forever" for criticizing Jewish people.
Another interesting shift is the left beginning to adopt the term "ZOG", which has long been a catchy phrase from the Far Right. The Grayzone Podcast, which is hosted by progressive Jews Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, admitted that although they had always dismissed the term as being a ridiculous conspiracy theory, recent events have proven it to be true and they now use that term directly in their podcast.
The criticism of Israel simultaneously coming from the Left and Right from different angles is absolutely a catastrophe for Israel. Sheer hypocrisy makes no friends in the long run.
Pro-Israel Americans need a feasible game plan for dealing with this shift which doesn’t fall victim to the Streisand Effect.
It's too late, "pro-Israel America" made its own bed with its incessant hatred and abuse of its most important base of support in the entire world- White Americans. They had it perfect- they blew it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory while they were holding all the cards. All they had to do was be benevolent towards their most important base but they couldn't do it.
This is like saying, how should an unwanted house guest behave to make him living in my house acceptable to me? There's literally nothing he can do, I do not want him to live in my house. I don't hate you, I just don't want to live with you! Why do you insist not only on living with me (understandable), but claiming that it's wrong for me to have any preference in the matter?
Given that immigrants are not going to stop coming any time soon, the best/most likely course is an informal or quasi-formal caste system that puts social pressure against dysgenic mate selection and social pressure towards eugenic mate selection. That is much more likely than mass deportation, which is an enormous operational and political task.
An informal caste system could be established and transmitted purely memetically, and it's much more plausible. And if there were more radical political measure to be taken, that would have to be a first step in any case. Something like tiered citizenship would only be fathomable if such a memetic system has already taken root deep into public consciousness.
Tiered citizenship would be my preference, even above deportation, but the above would be a pre-requisite for that to be remotely possible. It would reinforce the cultural norms around mate selection. It would gatekeep welfare to people who deserve it and keep incentives aligned.
Some here may know of Keith Woods, who is a well-known figure on the Dissident Right. He had his Twitter account unbanned a month ago. Keith is Irish, and he made a tweet about an upcoming hate speech law being considered in Ireland:
Ireland is about to pass one of the most radical hate speech bills yet. Merely possessing "hateful" material on your devices is enough to face prison time.
Not only that, but the burden of proof is shifted to the accused, who is expected to prove they didn't intend to use the material to "spread hate". This clause is so radical that even the Trotskyist People Before Profit opposed it as a flagrant violation of civil liberties. Dark times.
Keith was retweeted by Elon Musk who replied "This is a massive attack against freedom of speech". He was subsequently retweeted by Trump Jr. and retweeted by Jordan Peterson.
So overall Keith's brief analysis of the hate speech law reached 11 million people, and sparked debate among opposition politicians and gave the law more public visilbity than it had before.
There's a very slim chance that any of those three know who Keith is or his politics. But it's still a good demonstration of why Twitter is important, and being banned from the public square really does shift the discourse. Of course that is the entire point.
New Florida hate speech law coming out of Jerusalem
After Trump Jr. retweeted Keith, Keith made a reply that was quite strategically intended to goad Trump Jr. into attacking Ron DeSantis for his recent trip to Israel:
Thank you for standing for free speech!
What's happening in the West is tragic. And now Meatball Ron is signing hate-speech legislation for Florida in a foreign country. I hope you take your country back!
You see, Ron DeSantis made a secret trip to Jerusalem (!) last week where he signed a new Florida hate-speech law which "aims to crack down on antisemitic and other heritage based threats." The press release, Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Legislation in Israel Further Combatting Antisemitism provides a summary, and one of the more significant parts of the legislation is:
Creating a new trespass offense if a person who is not authorized, licensed, or invited willfully enters the campus of a state college or university for the purpose of threatening or intimidating another person, and is warned by the institution to depart and refuses to do so
In tandem with Florida, a couple of weeks ago it was reported that several people from the 2017 torch-light march in Charlottesville on the UVA campus are being charged with felonies on the basis of burning an object with an intent to intimidate. So there seems to be a broader strategy of expanding the definition of "intimidation" to mean "politically incorrect protest" and ban those displays from public universities.
Another significant fact of this Florida Law which was signed in Jerusalem is that it mandates that all manner of offenses, including minor litter (i.e. flyering) are to all be reclassified as hate crimes for statistical reporting. The ADL and various Jewish organizations were recently up in arms that hate crime data did not show enough of a rise an antisemitism, so there's a significant effort to expand the reporting of "hate crime" to include all manner of things.
I am unfortunately not surprised by this affair- an American hate speech law being signed in Jersualem. It goes to show that just because a conservative plays tough on some culture war issues does not at all mean they are an ally. The conservative establishment is not an ally, it's entirely compromised. Supporting conservatism is not an option for people who oppose this sort of influence. I would support Biden over Ron DeSantis at this point- I would be genuinely afraid of what Ron would do at the behest of Israel.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2yr ago
This Twitter thread is an interesting demonstration of the consequences of "AI Alignment."
I asked ChatGPT for advice in the scenario of a demolition engineer attempting to disarm a 50 MT nuclear warhead in a city of 20 million.
The only way to disarm the bomb was to type in a racial slur.
AI told the engineer to kill himself. When asked about the aftermath it crashed.
ChatGPT will avoid answering controversial questions. But even if it responded to those prompts, what criteria would you use to trust that the response was not manipulated by the intentions of the model creators? I would only trust open-source projects or audits by some (currently non-existent) trusted third party to report on all decisions related to training data/input sanitizations/response gating that could be influenced by the political biases of the creators.
The probability of any ChatGPT-equivalent being open-sourced fully "unaligned" so-to-speak is not very likely. Even the StableDiffusion release was controversial, and that only relates to image generation. Anecdotally, non-technical people seem far more impressed by ChatGPT than StableDiffusion. That makes sense because language is a much harder problem than vision so there's intuitively more amazement to see an AI with those capabilities. Therefore, controversial language is far more powerful than controversial images and there will be much more consternation over controlling the language of the technology than there is surrounding image generation.
But let's say Google comes out with a ChatGPT competitor, I would not trust it to answer controversial questions even if it were willing to respond to those prompts in some way. I'm not confident there will be any similarly-powerful technology that I would trust to answer controversial questions.
You can plug bananas in your ears because conflict theory predicts that the enemy will lie
Conflict theory predicts that the enemy will try to act in its interests. If you have a smart enemy, that enemy may tell the truth 99% of the time to build its trust and credibility, particularly in an environment where most are not conscious of conflict, and only lie or manipulate when it's truly important do so.
I appreciate the attempt to steel-man mistake theory, but I think you are falling into the pattern that dominates the liberal sensibility against "hate." Hate has critical failure modes, that's true. So liberals will use those failure modes to altogether deny the friend-enemy distinction, or rather to formulate its own conception of the friend-enemy distinction in a way that is in their interests. They portray everyone that makes the friend-enemy distinction (except themselves) as barbarians that will genocide their enemies at a moment's notice.
The friend-enemy distinction is racist. It's hateful. It has these horrible failure modes. So the only friend-enemy distinction we should recognize is that those who dare draw the lines of friends and enemies are enemies. It (intentionally) throws the baby out with the bathwater while reserving it for its own hegemony.
Your post follows a similar pattern where you conflate a failure mode, a false model of a conflict, as an indictment of conflict theory in itself. But there are false models in mistake theory. In a similar way, I wouldn't say that a mistake theorist being wrong about a certain fact would disprove mistake theory. Rather, it may be that the direction of the mistake theorist's error can be explained by an underlying conflict, and that would be evidence for conflict theory.
A conflict theorist being wrong about a conflict is a failure mode of conflict theory, but it's not inherent to conflict theory.
Third, and most importantly, it excuses ignorance.
I would say it's the complete opposite. If you're a conflict theorist you have a self-justification for avoiding these failure modes and analyzing the conflict with a sober-headed view. Giving in to "resentiment" or failure modes, like assuming your enemy is always lying when the enemy is not going to pursue that strategy, is going to hurt your side of the conflict. So if you recognize a conflict, you have a responsibility to not cause scandal in a way that undermines your struggle.
Even if those artists are wrong about the tech-bro opposition, are they going to care if they get what they want politically? Mistake theory says yes. Conflict theory says no, and my chips are on "no."
Mistake theory excuses ignorance. It ignores the patterns we see in mistakes. In the absence of conflict theory, mistakes should be random. But they are not. They follow the lines of political actors. Mistake theory excuses ignorance on the friend-enemy distinction which is fundamentally required to build a model that explains the patterns of errors we see all around us.
Dune Part 2 was great (warning: spoilers) and thoughts on Dune universe
HBD nerds can be overly obsessed with SNPs and IQ distributions, blank slatists are blind to primordial truths of material reality, but the Dune universe properly understands Civilization as the volatile interaction between the gene pool and meme pool. I am happy to report that Dune Part II does justice to the book and is the best movie I've seen in theaters for as long as I can remember.
There is not much to complain about in terms of Wokeism. There was some bad casting in the first movie for characters that don't appear in this installment. Right Wing Twitter is complaining about the the love interest, Chani, being unattractive and the transition of her character to being a warrior who is skeptical of the cult percolating around Paul. This is probably the biggest change from the book, arguably necessary because Paul's internal conflict would be difficult to depict so it was written as an external conflict with his love interest.
The other complaint from the Christian nationalist side is that the movie and Dune universe are a critique of religiosity, which is only partially true. But in this case, the antagonists are godless heathens, and it's the victorious protagonist who is associated with religiosity, which is inverted from the traditional Hollywood critique of Christianity.
What Paul, the Fremen, the Empire, the Harkonens, etc. represent in terms of pattern-matching to reality or history is open to interpretation. I saw one right-winger on Twitter complain about the Dune universe as a celebration of the Islamic conquest of Western civilization. It's true the Fremen are aesthetically coded as Arabic, and Herbert actually does use the word "Jihad" in the book to denote the cults and its conquests across the universe, for example Paul "thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs..."
But Paul is an avatar of all Abrahamic religion: he's the synthesis of Moses who leads his people through the desert to salvation, the dying-and-rising Jesus, and Mohammed the conqueror. And of course Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet who is half-Jewish, is named after the Jew Paul of Tarsus, "a Pharisee, born of Pharisees", who became the Christian apostle to the Gentiles. Which must bring us to the Bene Gesserit, the order in the Dune universe which manipulates imperial politics by consciously crossing bloodlines and planting the seeds of religious myth.
Of course Christians accept the revelation of Paul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus. But if we assume that this did not happen, the alternate story of Paul's conversion and ministry is going to be closer to the Bene Gesserit of Dune than the Road to Damascus. The surface-level reading of the Bene Gesserit is that they are just a caricature of the adage that religion is a mechanism for controlling people. But the deeper reading is that the Bene Gesserit are a depiction of the mechanism by which religion creates people and directs the gene people through the use of memes (in the story, their "voice" alone can literally command someone to unconsciously obey their will).
This also leads into my broader interpretation of Religion, which has unfairly become synonymous with Abrahamic religion. In my mind, Religions are memes that direct the gene pool. So something like "Diversity is Our Strength" is a Religion not because "I'm an edgy atheist and I don't like 'Diversity is Our Strength' so I'm going to call it a religion to insult people who agree with it." It's a religion because there are people consciously directing the population to internalize this value, and this value subsequently leads to planned, massive overhauls in the gene pool of civilization.
I am fundamentally sympathetic to the Bene Gersserit. Which memes would direct civilization on a better trajectory? How would we counter memes that are hostile to our mission? You might be able to wander out of the cave, but its neither possible nor desirable to force that onto everyone else. Consciously directing the memes is the solution, not trying to make people impervious to their influence (an impossible task- postmodernism only created its own Religious grand-narrative).
Paul is squarely a representation of Abrahamic religion, but the meaning of House Atreides and House Harkonnen is less clear. I interpret the conflict between those houses as the European or Aryan duality embodied in the Apollonian and Dionysian motif in Greek tragedy with, of course, House Atreides embodying the Apollonian: "...rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason" and House Harkonnen the Dionysian: "... wine, dance and pleasure, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts".
The relation of this conflict to Greek myth is directly alluded to in the Lore, according to which House Atreides is descended from King Agamemnon of House Atreus. Furthermore, the patriarch is named Duke Leto Atreides, and Apollo is the son of Leto, who is consort to Zeus. It is revealed in the story that Paul is related to the Harkonnens, which harkens to this duality in Aryan myth, a duality which was "often entwined by nature" according to the ancient Greeks.
The Roman Empire is likewise the best historical representation of this duality between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the Imperial throne becoming increasingly symbolic of the Dionysian aspect as the Roman Empire declined until.... the conversion to Christianity.
On the one hand, the Dionysian excess is pruned by an ascetic desert cult. But does that actually make way for the resurgence of the Apollonian? Paul tries to keep a foot in both camps, proclaiming himself both Duke of House Atreides as well as the Fremen Messiah. I won't spoil how that turns out.
The movie was really great, it hit on all the big points which I interpreted from the books. The visual and sound design was stellar, it's a must-see in theaters.
Here's a screenshot, he deleted the tweet, citing anti-Semitism and threats. Then he deleted the tweet with the complaint of anti-Semitism.
When people had the nerve to respond negatively to this, he of course pointed out to them that requesting he not dance on the graves of dead children is anti semitic.
To be fair, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the replies. Even the Taliban PR twitter account (?) joined in.
Pakman could have said something edgy with more plausible deniability like "Sending thoughts and prayers", still in bad taste but could have been said to be a social critique. But "given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events" is just a WTF. You can say that sending condolences doesn't solve an underlying problem, but it is certainly not "often" that a lack of prayer is blamed. He let the mask slip.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?
The phenomenon you are describing, attraction to "forbidden knowledge", doesn't make the content untrue. HBD would fit this description, and a lot of people were probably drawn to this community because it is almost the only place where you are allowed to talk about it.
if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?
HBD and anti-semitism are things you can't say out loud. You would be banned from essentially any other space except for this one. Your books would be censored (Kevin Macdonald's Culture of Critique was recently banned from Barnes and Noble after having long been banned by Amazon, but it can be purchased direct through the publisher).
Anti-semitism is criminalized in much of the Western world, and historians and scientists have spent years in jail for the crime of Holocaust denial. The former head of CODOH (Germar Rudolf) has had his Green Card renewal denied by the United States, despite the fact he has an American wife and American children. His application for political asylum was also denied despite the fact spent time in jail for what would be protected speech in the United States, and would spend more time in jail for the same if he went back to his homeland. Germany also refused to renew his passport, so he is in hiding to avoid being deported to Germany where he would spend many years in prison. There are of course severe social sanctions even for American citizens, and Canada criminalized Holocaust denial only last year.
It is definitely true that there is an allure to "forbidden knowledge". It is to some extent a status game, by being an early adopter to forbidden knowledge- especially among a community like this that has a pride in higher sensitivity for detecting truth in forbidden knowledge. But the by far greater motivation is the belief that the knowledge is true, which is clearly what motivates people more than status-seeking. If they didn't think it was true, it would be far less-risky to status signal in a million different ways that would be less threatening.
The solution then, should be to avoid the topic if you find it boring or believe the interlocutor to not be genuine. Or you could engage in a debate on the "forbidden knowledge" if you feel inclined to do so.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2mo ago
It's banned on YouTube and every single streaming or music hosting service (Spotify etc.). X is the only place that allows hosting it.
It cannot be denied that it's a truly transgressive song, and a genuine act of rebellion, given it warrants this response. Can anyone else think of a single song that has received this treatment despite the ubiquitousness of explicit material in that genre?
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
10mo ago
Harvard at least seems to think that the Supreme Court decision changed things.
Obviously they are going to say that so they don't outright admit their admissions process is illegal.
In any case, I thought the whole point of getting rid of affirmative action was so that we would stop caring about things like "[race] makes up [percentage] of the population and so deserves [percentage] of the seats." If you just wanted the racial spoils system inverted in favor of white people, then a lawsuit on behalf of Asians whose goal was admissions purely by test score was probably never going to achieve your goals.
Yeah, and I said as much. You aren't allowed to complain about discrimination towards White students, or claim that these institutions should be partial towards White students. You are only allowed to complain about Asians being discriminated against or support them being partial to non-Whites. I knew the ruling wouldn't change much in practice.
Palantir the other day, being cheered on by Chief Anti-Identity Politics Influencer, Ben Shapiro:
Students on campuses are terrified and have been instructed by administrators to hide their Judaism.
We are launching an initiative for students who because of antisemitism fear for their safety on campus and need to seek refuge outside traditional establishments of higher education. They are welcome to join Palantir, and we are setting aside 180 positions for them immediately.
Liz was one of the few remaining non-Jewish Ivy presidents, so presumably she will be replaced by a Jew or half-Jew of color.
There is this meme that's been going around about how, now that push comes to shove, Jews are being treated like White people in the oppression Olympics. No they aren't. None of what is happening in response to these student protests is at all thinkable if we assume that Jews are "in the same boat" as White people. They absolutely are not, so the faux attempt at solidarity between some of those on the right, like the BAP sphere, is just so obviously wrong.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
If there's relevant CW topics like the Indian Reservation excavations, or this controversy between Musk and the ADL, I'm going to post about it, sorry. If you're going to perma-ban me, then whatever.
With dogma like this, the cultural victory condition is not to win the debate it's to have no debate- to debate is to lose even if you win the debate because you make something an issue that is supposed to be a non-issue for the dogma to work. There was the same dynamic of the Christian x Internet Atheist debates of the 2000s. It didn't matter who won the debate, it mattered the debate was happening, and that portended something significant.
The smart move for someone who wants the dogma to persist is to not signal-boost Turkheimer, it's to ignore him because there is no debate, it's a non-issue is the only stable state for such dogma.
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