Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Second, this is the only formula that might realistically appeal to two spheres that are only dissident right adjacent which are the coalition that has built around anti-Covid restriction policies – having a massive real-world impact right now
There's no necessary requirement for opponents of covid restrictions to align with the far right. Indeed, in practice, the peak of their power (disregarding countries they run already such as Sweden, Nicaragua, Belarus etc) and the closest they've come to 'Clear Them Out' was in the French Caribbean, where they did so in alignment with the far left instead.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I basically reached the same position as you but three years ago and over covid. I have become very miserly because at the back of my mind every purchase recalls that those I'm giving money to probably wanted me falsely imprisoned by lockdowns and randomly stabbed by needles, if not worse for dissenting on these ideas.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
You can take this exercise even further. Read back to the prior comment in this thread.
It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.
Now picture a subgenre of speculative fiction filled with obsessive worldbuilding, detailed demographics and alien physiology and gender roles of the type you might find in the chunkiest of doorstopper fantasy or science fiction novels. But rather, an alternative universe that can be added to any existing property or even stand on its own merit, with as many variations on the precise details of that world as there are authors. And the entire purpose of this worldbuilding is to codify interactions between people, sort them into groups, and then have them engage in insane amounts of fetish-laden sex.
It has to be written mainly by and for men, surely?
Nope. It's omegaverse.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
At least in 2013, F/F was mostly written and read by women, and its not even close.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018478/chapters/40009467
It's probably shifted since since in 2013 AO3 really was the niche site catering a lot to m/m porn whereas FFN had the broader appeal. Is there more recent equivalent data?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Why would China have worse optics for, approximately, doing the same lockdowns that many other places around the world have seen, complete with hunger and nigh-satire levels of totalitarian imagery?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Perhaps there are people who are annoyed that the BBC's lies about covid were insufficiently outrageous, but the BBC still lied in support of lockdowns and forced masking.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
How sure are you that China's approach to lockdowns are any worse than in the west? Most western countries had universal lockdowns, often long, and often multiple of them. China tended to have shorter regional lockdowns. When it comes to time spent under lockdowns, the average person in Europe likely faced a greater level of lockdown than the average person in China. Perhaps more tellingly, the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them. Both are utterly despicable, but the CCP was already regarded as illegitimate pre-2020.
The BBC is the leading purveyor of dangerous disinformation in the UK. Disinformation like "lockdowns work", "masks work" and "vaccines prevent transmission". If to any extent the BBC changed people's opinions on these topics, they would be, in part, responsible for catastrophic levels of harm to the victims of associated policies.
If twitter is going to label RT and similar as state sponsored in an attempt to counter disinformation, then they should also use such things on the disinformation-spreading BBC. I see no reason to give the 21st century Lord Haw-Haw any respect or deference on this matter.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
It just turns out
This is the wrong phrasing, since we already knew all that by February 2020. Propaganda and so-called opponents of disinformation instead propagated disinformation that it was otherwise.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
When it comes to whether lockdowns depended upon censorship and propaganda to exist is not relevant to whether we should regard organisations that were paid to put out that propaganda by states as state sponsored.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
In 2018, Markets weren't acting in a way that suggests high rates in 2023 either.
Inflation is far higher than wage growth. the root cause of high inflation is running a policy of stimulus while simultaneously outlawing economic activity with lockdowns. More money chasing fewer goods.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Skyrocketing inflation, currently at a four-decade high in Britain, is only a hiccup in the overall trend for low interest rates, rather than a permanent change to the global financial landscape, the IMF said.
Inflation projections for the UK over the last two years have been repeatedly wrong. More importantly, they've all been repeatedly wrong in the same direction: assuming inflation will come down starting with the next time interval, then approach 2%. The Bank of England seems to be in denial about the cause of inflation, and their projections seem to amount to arbitrarily assuming the future will trend towards their 2% goal regardless of any action or policy.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
This list is just regurgitated partisan op-ed, which is exactly what you'd expect from how GPT-4 works but not meaningful. If you want to look at how democracy ends, historical examples of democracy ending should be listed as the highest risk factors. For instance, why is a military coup not on this list?
Florida updates it's data every two weeks. Demanding daily updates for number of cases of one particular virus, indefinitely, seems like an unusual demand for rigour: Nowhere pre-2020 was this demand expected. Nor is it clear what purpose such data would serve to individuals in determining risk. Case numbers are largely a product of testing, unlike inherently delayed random sampling. And this is even if we believe that the CDC is something that is respectable enough to be worthy of being supplied data by anyone.
Ladapo's questionable statements like... Supporting informed consent, as any medical professional should? Acknowledging that there's no empirical evidence for masks?
Florida's vaccination was done on the basis of oldest first. This seems obvious enough to me as a strategy, but apparently many US states decided to vaccinate "essential workers" including people in their 20s at negligible risk first? Do you think that a strategy other than by age is more effective?
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Most prominent and influential does not necessarily mean most efficient.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
The result of learning the Holocaust only from the perspective of the victims is that we get everyone from the unvaccinated, to illegal immigrants, to <AEO claiming that their enemies are Nazis and about to put them into camps
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
Cambodia and Rwanda suggest an upper limit on how fast you can do a genocide before the act of doing genocide causes the state to cease to meaningfully function or lose the capacity to resist invasion. For Cambodia, it was 3 years 8 months to kill 25% of the population, so maybe 6.7% of the population a year, but they were able to put up meaningful resistance to Vietnamese invasion. For Rwanda, it was 8% of the population in 4 months, so 24% of the population a year, at the cost of getting their ass handed to them by Paul Kagame.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
If you regard lockdownism as a variant of fascism (I don't, but some do) then DeSantis probably qualifies as the single most prominent and influential anti-fascist on the planet.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
IMO Jones' prominence is not any sort of big mystery. Despite (or due to) opposition to lockdowns being tarred with the label of conspiracy theory, in practice to support lockdowns oft requires conspiracy theory. Especially when it comes to Florida. The outcome of DeSantis running a relatively lax policy of restrictions surrounding covid, which his opponents insisted would cause megadeath, was instead a middling outcome. The empirical results are in: lockdowns don't reduce covid deaths. But the entire political legitimacy of blue tribe now rests upon those restrictions serving to stop something that they did not, in fact, stop. So you need an explanation for Florida's middling outcome. Enter stage left, Jones, with a conspiracy theory about DeSantis covering up deaths, playing both into your biases and your need to have some way to soothe over the monstrous crimes blue-state governments did under the guise of stopping covid.
She is merely filling a gap in the market for conspiracy theories that she was best-placed to exploit.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
World hunger as an issue isn't dominated by the literal cost of paying to send people food. Live Aid found that out. Famine in the modern world is rarely caused by too little food and often caused by someone using deprivation of food to serve a political motive. The best way to estimate the cost to end world hunger is to start with the cost of invading and occupying North Korea as the minimum estimate.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians
Discussing the possibility that covid leaked from a very specific facility hosted in China: Racist
Insisting that covid happened because Chinese people eat weird shit: Not Racist, apparently?
The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions. Calling it racist is just the go-to for doing that.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
You can run and do finetuning on the GPT-2 models locally. The finetuning feature is especially useful if you want to use GPT-2 as a tool for a specific purpose, like a random prompt generator. To give some things i've used it for:
Primitive chatbot emulating a specific character by giving it a transcript of that character's conversations
Random story idea generator by feeding it story summaries
Random d&d encounter generator by giving it d&d encounters.
It also clarifies that the token system makes it a glorified markov chain bot.
Tophattingson
2yr ago
"you're banned for spreading misinformation" is downplaying things. In the real world, where mask mandates were sometimes enforced, the bailey sometimes became "of course masks work, and the police will beat the shit out of you if you disagree."
Tophattingson
2yr ago
No one's going to dedicate their life mission to getting cars for other people.
Driving instructors. Mechanics. People who manufacture cars? Heck, in a tangential way, my job ultimately involves getting cars into the hands of people to drive them. And among all those people, surely some are genuinely dedicated to what they do.
People who supported restrictions were not merely "afraid" but actively calling for mass violence to be committed against dissenters like myself. Most notably, my repeated false imprisonment. If anything I think I am often too charitable.
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