Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
I really like Nebulous, but since its launch I've had time to join an actual multiplayer match exactly once.
Shame the AI is a dunce.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I was once taught that ethics were morals in action.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
You're not helping either. Communities are a communal effort.
But you do have a point, and I hope smarter mottizens than me have considered it: Where will new users come from in the future?
There are many jobs that are uniquely harmful for the ones performing them, and this is usually compensated for in some way. By higher pay or greater satisfaction or social praise, for examples. I don't see why prostitution requires special regulation.
Or are you implying that whores are always effectively slaves?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
They absolutely will. Maybe not if you ban sugar entirely.
Not sure if it's a precise fit to the topic, but I have a bit of an obsession with the emotion of gratitude, I think.
Any object made with care or given as a heartfelt gift is sacred, and must be treasured. If it becomes necessary to dispose of it, then some form of ceremony to commemorate it is in order. If it is possible to keep it around, then kept it shall be as a reminder of the positive relations associated with it.
I have boxes full of happy memories, and go through them about once a decade each.
Many of my EDC items and clothes are worn and torn, but for as long as they still fulfill their function I continue to use them because being able to physically take good thoughts with me outweighs the inconvenience of any broken zipper, scratched screen or tattered lining.
Every night before going to bed I stand at the window, look out into the sky and wish well to anyone who ever did me a good turn.
It may all be immaterial to impractical, but it feels very right.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Sounds too good for 2A to be true. Where's the hook? Sloppy methodology maybe? Cherrypicked data? It's all perfect but will be ignored by policyshapers?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
IIRC Francis Drake complained of the "effeminate age" he inhabited, and also IIRC there are similar complaints from Roman authors.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I can only second this. Getting into martial arts was the single best thing I ever did for myself, and dropping out for the time being due to various reasons is probably the single biggest negative factor dragging down my overall wellbeing.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
The only real solution I can see working is developing those nations to the point that they don't want to come here anymore;
Are you sure that doing so is actually easier, more practical and/or more sustainable than building a figurative wall and deporting anyone who makes it across? Or do you just much prefer helping migrants and foreign countries and consider any negative externalities for your own countrymen unimportant in comparison?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
For lack of a better word, always this: less culture war, please. We're all humans, not moral monsters, let's not cheer the people trying to stoke partisan division for political gain. You and I aren't so different and largely want the same things, yet in some perverse reversal, we spend 80% of our time arguing about the 20% of things we disagree on rather than finding solidarity in the 80% of things we do agree on.
It's a noble sentiment. Sadly both sides are pushing hard to force their view of the 20% on the other, and the side that stops pushing will quickly see more and more such 20% slices being force-fed to them.
It's a culture war, not a culture friendly disagreement. Not fighting a war that already started isn't peace but defeat.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Yeah, we really got what we deserved there, and that's it for Germany. Shame we won't live long enough to see whether Al-Almanya will also practise such a culture of welcoming.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Why would wealth be the only indicator of a place's ability to deal with illegals?
Maybe not the only, but it's surely quite sufficient, especially given such small quantities of migrants.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I know very little on the particulars of the American-Mexican border and its security, but I was so far under the transatlantic impression that border security and deportations were done half-heartedly at the most.
Assuming that begging in front of a fast food restaurant isn't just a novel form of slumming, IMO this doesn't quite illustrate to what a degree those people are no longer even capable of choosing or valueing anything. That far down, it may seem psychologically unfeasible to climb up towards anything, no matter how modest. The body is degraded, the mind along with it, and they're probably all out of social contacts as well. With no resources to invest, no energy to spend, no faculties intact, nothing to offer to the market and nobody to rely on, what can you actually hope to accomplish? I think it's valid to observe that those people are no longer capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But there's a bit of a leap required to come to the conclusion that you must throw money at them.
And here I see utilitarians taking the easy way out. Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"? In my cyncical view, most utilitarians are simply humanitarians with a coat of rational paint, with many of their premises and conclusions going unexamined and only the the details getting the lightest touch of utilitarian calculus. Who questions the metrics of pain and pleasure as proxies for disutility and utility? Who quantifies them? Utilitarianism may as well just be a ritual of rationality, an act put on in order to feel better about indulging one's altruistic impulses. I'm sure I'm wrong about this and effective altruism is actually fully reasoned-out and I just don't get it, after all the people who do it are smarter than me, but I'm getting the same vibes from the so-called utilitarians that I get from those who want to help the starving poor the world over without having ever heard of utilons.
Still Moby Dick.
Moby Dick usually shows up in literary genealogy between Homer's Iliad and McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Sometimes Williams' Butcher's Crossing makes a blip between MD and BM, but I feel it's a lesser beast, a modest Duodecim porpoise between these grandiose Folio whales.
Homer sings, muse, of glory and tragedy in war, in which great heroes kill each other almost without pause throughout the entire story. Homer is sad about them having to die and about what a gruesome affair war is, but he doesn't shy away from describing it in loving detail and it's clear that these men are having the time of their life. It's the only lyrical item out of the four, and obviously also the one that isn't originally in any language I speak.
Moby Dick tells us a story about killing whales for fun and profit and how if you let madness get in the way of that because you can't get over a workplace accident, everybody dies. It's full of awesome prose about the majesty of the world and of labor and of manful courage, and even more full of Melville just shooting the shit and joking about whatever the hell he thinks amusing. The man just cannot shut up, but it works because he's really good at writing. He has some moral qualms about violence, but ultimately that's secondary to what fun one can have with it.
Butcher's Crossing fits in in terms of plot and themes, and it's not a bad book, but it just does much less, less impressively and less beautifully. Hunters accompanied by city kid kill tons of buffalo and go insane in the process, also the buffalo trade dies. The book depicts the killing trade as almost entirely deplorable and debasing, and in my view this one-sided engagement with its subject matter is one thing that makes it a lesser work than the others.
Blood Meridian is another story about violent men going to their doom, but more so than the others it continually highlights the violence that is the entire substance and order of the universe. I'll cut myself short before I write another essay on it.
So, back to Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a bit odd compared to the others here because of the light-hearted chatter Melville keeps up. It feels a little like he can't help himself but insert every joke he feels he can get away with Ishmael making. And yet it floats. It's still a serious book full of serious stuff. It's also the one that most clearly illustrates, or is best known for illustrating, one theme that shows up in all these works: Excessive violence dooms. The Pequod is stove and sunk because Ahab changes its mission from commerce to vengeance. The Glanton Gang rises in war and falls and dies in banditry. Achilles is elevated to great honor when he fights and gets Patroklos killed when he stays in his tent in order to take vengeance on Agamemnon. Butcher's Crossing never has much good to say about hunting, but one might imagine that its issue is specifically with hunting Buffalo en masse and that its the scale of the killing that drives the hunters insane.
I've also been reading Latro, by Gene Wolfe. Fun.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Force everyone to work from home, to only interact via text chat, forbid the sharing of pictures, names or any other personal data.
If someone can discern your race purely from the work you hand in, then consider racism impossible to be rid of.
Not really shocked or saddened. Scott may put his rationalist persona in the foreground, but in the end he's a human like any other - unreasonable to the extreme in any area he's not actively dedicated to reasoning his way through. And people usually avoid reasoning out anything if the process would be painful to them, which I guess it would be for someone who is likely circumcised himself and has a strong cultural attachment to the practice.
This doesn't really change anything. I'd never circumcise my child, advise anyone to do it or even condone it...but it's one of those little atrocities that people commit daily that's also just not significant enough to not tolerate. As long as they only do it to their own children I can live with it, and hope that they get a ton of value out of it. Any pro-circumcision propaganda is detestable though. Since Scott doesn't seem to be doing that - correct me if I'm wrong here, as if that weren't the whole purpose of the Motte - I'd say consider the man on those merits of his that are actually relevant to our interests.
My prediction: Those rightwing governments will fail in many ways, like all governments do, but unlike others each mistake of theirs will be shouted from the rooftops and all their members will have their failings highlighted in minute detail by the media, until either these governments collapse under the stress or the voters learn to vote correctly next time.
This surge of rightwing election successes is a backlash to recent issues of immigration, covid hysteria and the usual culture war topics getting more attention - it will wane as the rightwing governments are discredited, but the aforementioned issues will continue unabated.
The EU will win this one thanks to having most media on their side.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I meant not to imply that they were pro-EU but that the larger part are opposed to the rightwing governments and are helped by networking and signal boosting via their allies in other countries.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
Fair enough, you may easily know it better than I.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
I'd say yes with a high degree of confidence.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
1yr ago
My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.
It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.
Germans hate individualism with a passion. Blame it on protestant puritanism, or prussian uniformity, or whatever animation the nazis ran on, but each German thinks he knows exactly how things need to be in the world, and any aberration must be expunged with a vengeance. The right way to brew beer, the right way to build a machine, the right way to drive a car, the right way to engineer a society, the right way to respond to a novel virus, the right way to speak German. I'm fully prepared to believe that all of the current progressive mania is based on whatever the Frankfurt School did, because this modern big-government, small-individual ideology is exactly something Germans could come up with.
Maybe Hungary doesn't have the same hardon for collectivism?
I played some rimworld, but each colony of mine just ended when raids got to >100 pawns in size and the frame rate dropped to 1.
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