TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Is it though? His base will never leave him so long as he dunks on the libs, no matter how much he scams them.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
It sounds like we agree on almost everything here, we just use different language.
The only bit I'd raise an objection to is the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" excuse being a good reason for much of anything.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Biden had already been pestering the Israelis to GTFO, with Bibi hoping Trump would come to the rescue and give him a free hand. Trump signaling "no" ends those hopes.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
They were only "diplomatic victories" in an Israeli sense, not an American one. Israel got a ton of stuff it wanted while the US increased its presence and exposure in the region for negligible gain.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The Fascist-Feminist synthesis that the majority of normies implicitly agree with is that men viewing explicit material is metaphysically damaging in some way, and thus it must be curtailed as much as possible. There's a bunch of laws that obliquely touch on these aspects (often relating the "production of child porn"), as well as a ton of potential PR damage. That's why webhosts, credit card processors, sites like Patreon, etc. have always been weirdly prudish about any explicit material. We should expect the same thing to happen to image generators. It'll probably reach a similar steady-state eventually, with explicit stuff existing on the periphery while facing periodic crackdowns.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.
Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?
I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:
"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I don't see why Newsom would be impacted that much by the fires. Most people understand state governors aren't absolute dictators that are responsible for everything that goes wrong. I checked here and he's still one of the most likely candidates for the D nomination in 2028. There's not a lot of history so I can't see if it's moved much recently, but I doubt it has.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
When ancient humans encountered something like lightning, they probably thought the same thing about mundane phenomena. "We have no explanation for this sudden bolt of energy... so it must be Zeus!" We know they were obviously wrong now. We know what lightning is, after science has advanced sufficiently to explain it.
The metaphysics questions you asked are mostly like that, to the extent they're falsifiable at all. The only correct answer is to say "we don't have enough information right now to know". You're not a truth-seeker if you just default to "it must be proof of God" when you encounter any difficult question.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
There's a whole lot of voldemorting there. Claiming you can't say woke since it "doesn't mean anything" or is "just a boogeyman at this point".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
hearing about HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of white girls raped
I was curious about where you got this number, but from what I read downthread it seems like you just pulled it out of nowhere by assuming the problem was just as prevalent everywhere else. It's akin to a BLM protestor assuming millions of unarmed black men were shot due to a few high-profile incidents, then doing some napkin math to justify their preconceptions.
you are faggots, cucks and race traitors who value you failed cuck discussion norms far more that the truth. Failed discussion norms taught to you by failed jews like Yudkowsky and Alexander who openly admit their ritualized cuckoldry and sexual depravity
Hatred alone is the truth, the light, and the way.
This is so over-the-top that even a 13 year old 4chan edgelord would find it cringey.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Agree with all of these.
I've always had a difficult time squaring points #1 and #2 together though. Why do societies that produce so many more geniuses per capita have such difficult times pushing the innovation frontier relative to the West? Is it just their conservative/conformist culture that squelches much of their talent? Are the measured IQ differences illusory from the tests, as Asians are more likely to study harder?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Color me skeptical. Sounds like just another marginal improvement at most. The problem with these metrics is that model makers increasingly seem to be "teaching to the test".
The vibes haven't really shifted since chatGPT 4.0 nearly 2 years ago now.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Why does this indicate Trump will be different this time? Musk and Ramaswamy signal boosted a shorter bill, which proves they have influence, which means DOGE could be more than a publicity stunt, maybe? I'm not really getting the connection.
The number of pages of legislation seems like a very poor barometer of government judiciousness.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
-Okay, but how are physician salaries trending, are you making more than you used to?
Doctors have been getting year after year real wage cuts for 20-30 years. Everyone else’s (in healthcare) salaries have been going up. Percentage of healthcare spending on physician salaries is going down. So, if you really want us to get paid less just wait. Our salary shrinks every year and the portion of the pie we are taking shrinks too.
Alex Tabarrok wrote an article in 2019 that showed this is simply incorrect. Real physician wages tripled over the past several decades, and are doing far better in terms of wage growth than many other professions. Maybe he's doing something weird with the numbers here, but you didn't post any numbers, just an assertion.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The debate over what terminology to call the woke right reminds me a lot of the controversy around what to call the woke left. This article, if you reverse all the partisan valences from left to right, would be highly pertinent.
But any stable term the woke right would accept would almost immediately become tainted with negative connotations, and would thereby become "uncool". Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.
Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".
Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.
Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.
This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.
It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.
I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.
Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!
In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions
You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.
On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1yr ago
You galactically overestimate the effect the CIA, or any spy agency for that matter, can ever have. Spy agencies can only nudge, or, at most, provide a spark when there's a highly flammable situation.
Saying the US overthrew the president of Ukraine is like saying the Russian FSB elected Trump in 2016.
Nice book review.
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it: the Fascist-Feminist Synthesis holds that women have no agency in such a situation, and that they must be protected from their own decision to offer themselves to beastly men.
But why does the center go along with this still? Residual Puritanism might explain some part, but I doubt it's the whole answer.
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