TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Which of these strikes you as "patriachal"?
Letting the man have unilateral decision on whether the woman decides to abort or to not abort is patriarchal.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
This type of post sounds good and all, but runs into issues when it comes to actual implementation. It reminds me of the abortion debate we had on the motte a few months back when people were saying stuff like "the father should have a say when it comes to decisions regarding abortion". There are two parents involved in making a kid, so this type of thing sounds good, right? Certainly the man shouldn't be excluded from the process... except it runs into the issue that abortions are a binary (yes/no) issue. You either implement a patriarchal law which gives the father functional veto over the mother's right to choose whether to abort or not, or you don't do that and the father's wishes remain completely ignorable, i.e. the status quo. There are a few sticky compromises in some cases (legal paternal surrender if the man wants to abort but the woman doesn't), while there are outright none in others (if the man wants to carry the child to term, but the mother wants to abort).
Bringing this back to Russia, the issue is that Putin seems to be entirely willing to suicide the Russian nation to chase his revanchist dreams. He keeps doubling down every chance he gets: Crimea in 2014, invading in 2022 instead of remaining with the frozen conflict, mobilizing what'll probably amount to over 1m soldiers, formally annexing large swathes of another sovereign state, bombing his own pipelines (if that was indeed Russia who planted the bomb, which it probably was) which is akin to Cortez burning his ships, etc. The US has remained remarkably restrained in the conflict so far, only giving intel/training support and equipment, and even the equipment is limited to not be too escalatory (e.g. no jets, no long-range missiles, not even Abrams tanks so far). If Biden wanted to, he could do what the US did in Syria and Libya and declare a No Fly Zone, start using NATO planes to bomb Russian targets, and have the conflict cleaned up before Christmas. But Biden doesn't need to do this, because even just lend leasing some equipment is enough to get the Russian army to disintegrate as it's doing right now. Now, wars are highly unpredictable and it's not outside of the realm of possibility that mobilization lets Russia restabilize the front, but if Russia keeps losing as it's doing then we're going to end up seeing whether Putin's nuclear threats are credible, and at that point we only have the option to acceded to Putin's demands and let him blackmail us with nukes to a major degree, or call his bluff and risk nukes going off.
In short, we're barreling towards a situation where there might not be any wiggle room to do what you're saying we should.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. Are you implying they don't think acceding to nuclear blackmail will have any major implications for proliferation? If so, they should state that explicitly and give some evidence to back their claim.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
The pro-surrender side which says the West and Ukraine need to capitulate ASAP to avert a nuclear war, really, really needs to address the problems that incentivizing nuclear blackmail this way are guaranteed to have. I've seen plenty of articles and posts like the one you listed, and none of them get into this issue despite it being extremely important and despite it being brought up as a response to basically every one of these articles. It's getting aggravating at this point. It's not like there are no responses at all, but the pro-surrender side just blissfully pretends like the issue doesn't exist and that nobody has even thought of it before.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
"Tankies" in the traditional sense barely exist any more. However, there's still plenty of generically pro-Russian Westerners. They tend to be right wing as other comments have pointed out, and they simply go through mental gymnastics of interpreting Putin's "denazification" of Ukraine as actually the complete opposite, i.e. it's it's a holy crusade against leftist elements, in particular immigration, feminism, and transgenderism. I have no idea how they resolve the cognitive dissonance between their own interpretation and Russian state narratives.
You act like the West is a monolith of support for wokism, but there's no reason a country couldn't be a conservative, Western, capitalistic democracy where the voters simply reject the excesses of the left. History and economics shows this is one of the best setups a country can have, actually.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Russia hasn't used much of its airforce because it doesn't have robust airforce capabilities, and isn't really able to conduct enough SEAD to get through Ukrainian air defenses consistently. It's used planes in occasional situations, and there are multiple confirmations of them being shot down.
At this point, Russia has used basically all of its conventional assets. Assertions that it's holding a bunch of stuff back (e.g. best units, best tanks, air force, etc) are not credible.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Let's say I responded to your post with something like this:
"Wow, it must be great to be a person who's so oblivious to human communication that they think everything needs to be stated literally, as all the insinuated insults people lob won't land! It's just a shame it also likely implies some level of autism..."
The correct response would be "What the heck!?! We were having a sensible disagreement and now you're accusing me of having autism???"
To which I responded with "why are you offended? You're just paraphrasing my statement. I never said you specifically have autism!"
That's what I feel like is going on here.
For the record, I'm not accusing you of having autism, nor being "oblivious to human communication". That statement is used purely for demonstrative purposes.
So I guess you could technically say Alex never directly insults Scott, he just does something like what I just wrote instead. Of course he uses less crass words than what I just used, but it's still a personal attack.
Maybe the title "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." indeed wasn't supposed to say that Scott himself wounded rationalism with his article, and that it was just about the community response not aggressively pushing back. In that case, let's take a few other instances:
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What about when Alex accuses Scott of cognitive dissonance for not fully retracting his article?
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What about when Alex lists a bunch of tenets of rationalism and implies that Scott broke them because they disagree on something?
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What about when Alex accuses Scott of stopping where he did because he wants to "confirm his biases"?
Maybe some or all of those aren't meant to be inflammatory or to be personal attacks. If that's the case though, he should really, really change his writing style because to at least some people, it comes off that way.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
In earlier discussions on art AI, I expressed significant skepticism in AI generated art for two reasons:
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There was little proof that NSFW images could be done well, which was where a large part of online art commissions come from, and which indicated that there were likely some issues related to being able to get images of things you actually wanted instead of just taking whatever the AI would generate for you. Copying a human face in a portrait-style setup is one thing, but capturing bodies in various sexual positions without ending up with a cthuloid mess of dicks or at least falling hard into the uncanny valley is quite another.
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The lack of stability, i.e. that it was hard to create a character or theme, and then change little bits of it at a time, e.g. create an image of a person eating an apple, and then also being able to create an image of that same person sitting and reading a book.
The things I've seen on /hdg/ have pretty convincingly proven to me that issue #1 has been solved, or never existed in the first place. I've seen some pessimistic takes that it requires tons of time and 98% of it is garbage, but the fact that random anons on 4chan can generate the level of quality I've seen means AI art has advanced quite a bit more than I thought it had.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
But it doesn't actually say that Scott wounds rationalism
Semantics. "Scott did something, and as a result rationalism has been wounded" is functionally equivalent to this. If Alex sincerely didn't intend to say anything about Scott wounding rationalism then he should have reworded his title, but the accusational tone of the entire article leads me to believe he did want to. I'm referring to stuff like:
Sadly, the rationalist community’s biggest contribution to pandemic discourse was to assist in shutting down a promising treatment
The damage rationalists have done to pandemic discourse darkens my heart.
his essay is still there, & its impact on "independent thinkers" permanent.
If even rationalists are responding to your careful analysis and argumentation with vague notions of tone and "bad faith," it suggests to me that they don't have a rational defense of their position. Whether they are or not, they appear to be acting as if they are wounded.
This is silly. I'm taking Alex's statistical critiques of Scott's work as a given, because I don't really care that much about the efficacy of Ivermectin to look into it that deeply. There's some utility to be gleaned from correcting errors in now-irrelevant issues and seeing where they happened to prevent them in the future, which I think Scott did a decent job of doing in his response.
On the other hand, I'm very interested in how criticism should be done in a general sense. Phrasing criticism constructively and in a non-inflammatory way is just as important as making the criticism in the first place. It's one of the founding principles of this site! Optimize for light, not heat. Failing to do so makes people reflexively defensive and less likely to engage with you in the future... which is exactly what happened with Scott. He stopped responding to Alex after initially putting in the effort to do so, since he felt that every interaction ended up badly.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
And this is what Alex had to say about it to which you made no reply whatsoever: Obviously I can't be held accountable for other people's opinions in the comments. This is not a standard Scott would pass either, so the fact that it is being raised here feels like isolated demands for rigor.
Alexandros explicitly endorsed ("Liked by Alexandros Marinos") many of the disparaging comments I was talking about.
Cite a source for your claim.
I searched Google for "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!", and nothing came up.
It's the article I was responding to on Reddit, which I linked up above. The official title is "Scott Alexander corrects error: Ivermectin effective, rationalism wounded." In other words, according to Alexandros, Scott was so catastrophically negligent that he wounded Rationalism in its entirety. Combine this with the accusatory nature Alexandros' article, and it comes off like Alex wants to tarnish Scott's legitimacy beyond his Ivermectin take.
Does it appear that you can read the mind of Alex better than the rest of us? A far more plausible theory, if I were to engage in the same rhetoric, is that this community has a handful of members who hold Scott Alexander to be their darling, leader, or authority and thereby get upset if anyone fairly and squarely criticizes his opinions with valid points that cannot be refuted rationally.
If you're implying I'm a blind Scott fanboy then I categorically reject your assertion. Scott's just a smart guy who approaches a variety of topics from a rationalist perspective. Nothing more, nothing less. He's certainly capable of making mistakes, and the fact that he hosts a list of them is part of what makes him unique. He benefits from critiques like everyone else.
The issue with Alex he mixes good criticism, i.e. "here's where your analysis is wrong, and here's the stats to back it up", with bad criticism, i.e. "rationalism wounded" and other such nonsense attempting to draw meta-level conclusions on Scott's credibility from limited object-level events.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I've said it before back on Reddit, and I'll say it again here: This guy seems to have a solid point to make about the efficacy of Ivermectin, but he keeps sullying it with personal attacks against Scott Alexander. He very clearly has an axe to grind against Scott, which is why he uses hyperbolic titles like "Scott Alexander wounds Rationalism!!!". His work has a great amount of light, but he adds a bunch of unnecessary heat either out of resentment towards Scott, in an attempt to clickbait, or both.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Doing a lot of personal research and writing articles about a topic you're interested in is great! But obsessing about a particular author simply because they're the ones making the argument, isn't. In fact, it's pretty much anti-rationalist to attack the author instead of the argument. Spamming posts with hyperbolic clickbait headlines like "Scott Alexander has WOUNDED Rationalism with his Ivermectin article!!!" does little to improve Alexandros' actual argument.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I'd wager most of it is simply from the decline of monogamy. In the West, both men and women are regressing to their biological sexual imperatives where men want to have sex with lots of women and women want to clinch commitment from a high-value man. This creates an adversarial relationship with many people left out in the cold: low-value men are rejected by most women outright, high-value men have a huge abundance and can treat women like sentient fleshlights, and women in general target the top quintile of men who treat them as disposable goods, or else they have to brave the lower quintiles full of "creeps". The best soothing balm for the battle of the sexes is simply being in a healthy long-term relationship, as it's hard to have a war when all the soldiers are fraternizing with the enemy. But the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships.
There are other more minor factors, e.g. the Internet has let people delve into their niche interests harder than ever, which has led to men and women dividing from each other more. I, for example, spend much of my free time playing grand strategy games and discussing culture war + philosophy with strangers in a rationalist framework. Women probably make up <5% in any of these areas, and as such I barely have any meaningful interactions with women since I graduated college. I didn't make a conscious effort to weed women out of my life or anything, I just focused on the things I was most interested in. I do interact with women a bit at work, but modern white collar environments are completely sterile so that hardly counts for much. In any case, two groups dividing from each other doesn't do wonders for understanding between them.
There's also the impact of third wave feminism implicitly branding most men as latent rape machines and red-pill/incel communities treating women like drones, which also doesn't help.
But yeah, it's mostly declining monogamy.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
The stock market prices in expectations, so if a company misses its earnings prediction then its price declines relative to the profitability that market participants presumed the company had. It doesn't crash to zero. A stock price that declines for a week is not a death sentence. Furthermore, blue chip stocks (the ones that have grown very large and bought out many competitors) are not expected to grow exponentially ad infinitum; people buy blue chip stocks for steady rates of return, typically either from dividends or stock buybacks. So no, this "companies expect infinite growth in a non-infinite universe" argument really doesn't hold up.
That said, there are arguments to be made that many companies have time-horizons that are too short. Everybody wants to get rich quick, which has led to stuff like companies underfunding R&D budgets and taking on massive amounts of debt in order to finance stock buybacks.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency. Hearing people strawman capitalism as "it requires infinite growth", then equating it to a cancer cell, is one of those braindead arguments on par with "if you don't like gun control, why don't you just move to Somalia???"
Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again?
Some financial innovations have been good like ETFs, while others have been bad. Careful regulation is better than becoming a Luddite and trying to stop all financial advancements entirely.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Most of this is just because Russia decided to impale itself on its revanchist delusions. The US had made no serious efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and showed every sign of being content with the frozen conflict status quo in the Donbas, but then Russia tried to flip the table over but ended up hurting itself in the process.
They basically sent a fuck off to Germany, and the Germans not only are not complaining, but are applauding
Germany absolutely deserves the L here. France and Germany have always been a bit jealous of Anglo hegemony over the collective West, which is why they make periodic calls for "strategic autonomy". But instead of Germany building up its military, it instead decided to do the stupidest possible option of bankrolling an ardent enemy of the EU and becoming massively overreliant on Russian gas with barely a whisper of "what could possibly go wrong". Sensible analysts knew it could become a liability, but Germany proceeded full-speed ahead anyways, despite countless protests from a succession of US presidents and other foreign leaders.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Relationships are built on propinquity, which is just a fancy term for "general nearness". The closer you are to someone in terms of likes, interests, physical location, etc. the more likely you are to have a strong relationship with that person. Of course no two people are identical, so you can't abandon relationships just because of a few disagreements. However, the wider and more important the disagreement, the more likely it is to cause issues long-term.
I could date a person who had different political opinions than me, but the wider the disagreement, the less important politics would need to be for that person for me to consider it. If I had the prospect of dating an authoritarian wokist (which is basically the polar opposite of my views), politics would have to almost be a non-factor for them for the relationship to have good long-term chances of success. If their political views were exactly the same as mine, I'd be fine with them being obsessed with politics.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I also got a message from that guy. What a wierdo.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
The Internet has effectively outsourced tutorials for some games. Some of this is a natural progression of some games being so complex that watching a Let's Play is the most efficient way of learning. On the other hand, some of this is just lazy devs knowing fanmade wikis will document enough stuff that they think tutorials are a waste of time.
That said, I disagree on the characterization of modern gaming being a dichotomy of ruthless complexity vs braindead simplicity. There's plenty of games in the middleground. The Total War games are one example. Slay the Spire is another. Terraria is yet another, although it's certainly an offender of the "outsource the tutorial to the wiki" phenomenon.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I think today's forever games are less engaging, though, because people engage with their complexity mostly by learning "the meta" that someone else discovered by rote. The standard advice given to HOI4 newbies is to watch five hours of tutorial videos that teach you how division templates and combat calculations work. In the 90s you would dive into a game and parse it for yourself.
It's true that it's basically impossible to have secrets in video games in the age of the Internet. People claimed up and down that Sonic was a playable character in Smash Bros Melee, and the rumor persisted for years, but in these days it would never gain traction. Similarly, easter eggs for most games are thoroughly well-documented to the point where if you want to know the secrets of a major game, it's typically just a Google search away. However, this applies to playing old games in the present day as well, as their secrets are just as exposed to the Internet as the secrets of modern games are.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
Destiny 2 is anything but niche. According to this MMO population website, it's within the top 10 most played MMOs (currently number 7 at time of writing).
EU4 is more niche but is still fairly well-known. It's typically within the top 50 most-played games on Steam.
Both of these points are sidetracks though, because OP's post wasn't comparing the CoD of today to the CoD equivalent of the 90s. Why would you? If you want in-depth games with complex mechanics, then you should be looking for those specifically, and modern gaming has way, WAY better options in that regard than the 90s or 2000s.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
4yr ago
I really notice that when playing older games from the "golden age" of PC gaming in the late 90s to mid 2000s; they are often more mechanically complex and have much more complex plots than modern titles, simply because that is something players appreciated at the time and appreciate less now.
What games are you playing these days? I've noticed the polar opposite, that games are getting far more complex and intricate today. I can't name a single game released >20 years ago that reaches the complexity of modern EU4, and even mainstream games like Destiny 2 have way more build variety and moving parts than shooters back in the 90s or early 2000s.
The Schelling point on nukes so far is that they can be used as a defensive deterrent, but they can't be used for offensive actions. Allowing Russia to use them for its offensive actions in Ukraine is what everyone is worried about. Nothing else about ethics (e.g. US supporting Israel or Saudi Arabia) matters compared to whether Russia gets to break the nuclear norm in Ukraine.
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