Templexious
Stuck in time
User ID: 2308
Templexious
4mo ago
This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
Templexious
5mo ago
To whence shall we roll back the clock?
We joke about the glory years, the years when Things Were Better, which just so happen to coincide with people's younger years. You get me to say what years I would like to roll back the clock to and live, I would probably say somewhere around the 90s-late 00s. I am an outlier, as far as I know. Virtually no one I know would like to roll back the clock to spitting distance from two thousand and fucking-eight.
Back when the most lefty thing on the internet was a girl telling people that she didn't appreciate being propositioned for sex on an elevator. Pre-tiktok, the era of old forums. The iphone still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. The era when Google and Microsoft weren't the undisputed emperors of your lives.
Actually, forget that. We all know there's nowhere to roll back to, we can only roll forward, embracing the aesthetics of what we imagined the past to be. I, for one, am glad that I am not eternally inundated with "WOW DAE PARENTS ARE BOOORIIINNG????" ads. You can pull my 70-lb tub of legos accumulated over more than twenty years out of my cold, dead hands, NSA. And it's probably true that in the next 30-40 years that democracy and republicanism-as-we-know it will no longer exist.
No seriously, whence come the true techno-king? Who are the contenders for the first immortal god-king of humanity. I joke in the phrasing, but it is not exactly an incorrect joke now, is it? It is very probable that we will have the first actual trillionaire human in the next thirty years. The first effectively-emperors of mankind.
The only reason companies don't do governance of humans is that they're shit at it, actually, and Democracy is surprisingly efficient over long timescales. But assume for the sake of thought experiment, that the singularity happens, and we have our first crowned god-emperor of humanity thanks to the creation of AGI. Who are our contenders?
Personally, I should expect them to:
- Be in AI or AGI development already or in the next 2-3 years
- Be incredibly wealthy already
- Likely be from a company currently valued at least in the tens of millions of dollars
As such, pick your top 5 most likely individuals to become humanity's first true techno-kings, and why. Do you have any you think are sleepers?
I'll hold back my top-fivers for a couple days or so.
Templexious
7mo ago
his stupid war.
Just double-checking here, but you do know that Putin did, in fact, invade Ukraine, correct?
Templexious
7mo ago
It has been interesting to see the inversion of blame posts like this attempt.
Like the theory that the ADL is funding neo-nazis. Why would they do anything like that? It's an insane proposition if they were actually being paid by the ADL. And it has zero upsides. If the ADL had a whistleblower moment it would entirely dismantle their whole organization.
I do have my own conspiracies regarding jewry, but "the ADL is actively stoking anti-semitism" is an incoherent proposition. Toss eggs at me later if there's leaks that show they were wiring money or writing checks funding neo nazi demonstrators, but you'll need to forgive me for being a bit skeptical at this overexplanatory theory that's cropped up the last few months.
Templexious
2mo ago
In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.
Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.
Templexious
5mo ago
SJ-ers will continue to exist so long as there are those from oppressed groups who become intellectuals and want to teach their stories.
Will they lose, long-term? Perhaps if they don't openly side with the State of Israel.
An Ascending Elite would probably be the best bet if the main parties would want the US to be/stay independent. There's still an absurd amount of untapped nationalist fervor, and R's gains with minorities showed that most people are still not willing to hop on Popper's wild ride. (That could, perhaps, stem from the terrible messaging of the Hillary 2016 campaign being wildly self-defeating)
Long-term, Christianity is a losing proposition, I agree there, but they only need to hold off long enough for their policies to get in place. Since most Christians are older, own land, have kids, the amount of relative power they have over the country versus the new-age atheists is insane. As such, appealing to older, "family values" and general christian sensibilities makes intuitive sense.
Templexious
7mo ago
That's exactly the line of reasoning and theories I'm rejecting until evidence comes forward.
For the record, I'm not denying that zionism, even jewish supremacist ideologies exist and are propagated without half the measure of scrutiny or being allowed to talk about it.
[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]
This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.
In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.
The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.
If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.
To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.
Templexious
10mo ago
The variety of topics discussed tends to be pretty slim, it will be nice to enforce some variety by reducing the number of single-issue comments.
Templexious
5mo ago
Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.
Templexious
6mo ago
Have you documented the cause for your swap anywhere?
Templexious
11mo ago
No, we didn't.
You can't tell a mass of people who have watched their prices skyrocket and housing prices and rental prices skyrocket and also that many are having a harder time finding jobs for the equivalent pay that "things are fine".
It's been constantly debated whether or not economic indicators are direct abstractions over reality, and to tell people who are feeling down that "things are fine, actually" is akin to mass gaslighting. When talking to a group of people who are used to constantly being lied to and therefore eternally skeptical of establishment that their beliefs and understanding of reality are wrong or incorrect, this is especially egregioius.
Now, you mention that there's no way of bringing about an equivalent to election-loss shock to show the flaws in polls, and then argue about the use of other economic data to make a point. While a useful metric, the establishment groups will use whatever metrics they want to say things are "fine, actually" so long as they have enough donations and electoral support that they don't get voted out each election. I've never, for example, seen major party leaders ever cede a point and change their policies or messaging until after it lost them an election.
As such, economic data debates are only as useful if the establishment is willing to listen and hear out and change their views accordingly.
Templexious
7mo ago
To your first question: you can generally tell when a judge is pretty sick of one party or another when you read their rulings. If they feel like the other parties aren't taking the process seriously or taking advantage of the system, their tone will reflect that.
It is not uncommon for judges to joke or use incredible amounts of sarcasm in the court room. The supreme court can get fairly notorious about roasting and escalationary language in their rulings. Whether or not it's justified in the Trump cases, I'm not sure, and haven't been paying much attention, however considering the incentives at play it wouldn't be a surprise.
Templexious
8mo ago
I appreciate putting the upvotes at the bottom of posts.
Minor suggestion:
Extend the upvote count delay to 2-3 days, or make it require more effort to see them. (Like clicking on a spoiler box) I don't care for the dynamics that having votes visible by default engenders.
Templexious
1yr ago
The amount of sex people are having does seem to be reducing, culturally.
I don't know that "say no to school" is a great answer, but "Say no to grueling schools that eat up all of your day" does seem like a good start. I'd start by advocating against cars, and then by advocating for shorter school days for highschool and middleschool kids. I'd propose a 6-hour highschool-day as well as for laws and policies that make car ownership more difficult. Perhaps this is the true path to a decopunk future?
Forcing kids out of schools and then forcing them out of cars is forcing them to meet others.
Templexious
11mo ago
Trump could bring up and rehash all of his 2015-2016 talking points all over again, and it would carry him right back into office.
The main issue that would stop this are his stances on Russia and the Ukraine. Many of the population still remembers the cold war and the fact that Russia was America's #1 threat, and if democrats played their cards right, could use his stance there to put his campaign under ground.
Templexious
1yr ago
That definition of "Far Right" is strict, and it's difficult to extract value from it. If you loosen your definition of it ever-so-slightly and you start getting christian nationalists/christian technocrats/crypto statists and evangelicals, the path to "Far Right" takeover becomes much clearer.
There's a lead time before the full effects of a new technology or tool has effects on the culture, and that's what has happened. The effects of social isolation of both the single family home + sexualization of the vehicle has finally hit. Internet and mobile phones were the last nail in that coffin.
That said, socially, it will be more likely that we will get a 15-minute walkable city, 6 hour schoolday, and reduce the total number of car owners, than to get rid of mobile phones.
Templexious
7mo ago
Yes, but at the end of the day, they cannot simply tell the SS administration they do not need the money to be paid out to them.
Ideally the taxes would outweigh the costs, and it's only a small footnote, however it is indicative, I think, of the structural inefficiency.
We've had some excellent responses, and most everyone seems to have gravitated toward a similar definition!
At 24 hrs from the time of my post or so depending on how buys I am, I'll post a more full examination of my comment and from where I picked up my definition. Obviously, I had far more time to think about my answer before I made this comment.
My Definition:
Templexious
8mo ago
Yes. Shame should not be the only tool to assisting in reducing fatness.
We have a myriad of options other than shaming, let's use them all.
Templexious
9mo ago
If you assume that our sugar addiction is a palatibility problem and not a physical one, certainly.
With the onset and effectiveness of semaglutide, it's becoming clear that it is a physical problem.
oh it's this guy again
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