Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
7mo ago
MMT does not fit with the other two, because it was explicitly arguing against the economic consensus, and the economic consensus ended up being correct.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
Tophattingson
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
This depends massively on where in the world you are. In the UK, most of our beef is domestic, and most of our domestic production is fed via grass forage. Now, I suppose you could consider pastures to be industrially farmed grass, but I don't think that's what most people would think of it as. Humans cannot extract meaningful nutrition from eating the grass instead.
So, two years on, how are things going for the galaxy’s least heteronormative entry in the franchise after a BILLION dollar marketing campaign?
We’ll let the Bookscan figures speak for themselves:
If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)
Tophattingson
11mo ago
I'd be missing the financial resources to make any meaningful contribution.
Regardless overthrowing the north korean regime is a sort of inevitable end-point of effective altruism even with a strong anti-coup bias. You eradicate malaria, you cure world hunger, you're living in a megastructure in the outer solar system... And the slave-masses of the country-sized concentration camp that is North Korea continue to scratch the dirt for a meagre near-starvation diet.
What is the net gain in QALY from switching the population of North Korea to living under the known next best alternative of South Korea. How much does each QALY then cost? Is dropping automatic weapons on North Korea the new malaria nets?
Tophattingson
11mo ago
I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.
Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.
And this is where I differ. I regard my failure to remove Xi and similar figures from power to be a vague source of guilt, only dulled by the fact that it's not even remotely possible for me to do so. If there was a way for me to meaningfully contribute towards a cause with that goal in mind, it is likely I would do so, but what few possible avenues exist to doing that seem to have exceptionally dubious connections with that end goal. E.G Liberty in North Korea exists but their actions are so tangential to the actual goal in their title that I don't know how they intend to link the two. Free Joseon? How would I even help them? It's not like crowdfunding hits on Kim Jong Un is a thing.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
On the contrary, the guy on the paycheck is doing it for personal gain. The alternative is to not run the diesel engines and not get the paycheck.
Tophattingson
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
Verwaltungsübertretung ("administrative transgression"), which is the category that parking violations, speeding, littering and being a public nuisance are in.
Does it fall under criminal or civil law? In other countries, that category falls under criminal law. It seems that in Austria, these administrative offences can lead to imprisonment if you repeat them (inherent to being unvaccinated) or refuse to pay them.
It also includes failure for male citizens of a certain age to be mustered for mandatory service
This doesn't make Austria's vaccine mandates sound any better. Unsurprisingly, I also strongly object to military slavery.
This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.
If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021. Rather, they are more akin to a mugging, and that's a slightly greyer area when it comes to whether lethal force is appropriate for self defence.
Regardless, medical coercion is a gross violation of ethics. Even in the absence of vaccine mandates themselves, lockdownist regimes violated medical ethics in how they offered the vaccines. They advertised that restrictions would go away without vaccines, hence created the implicit threat of more restrictions in the case of refusal.
My judgement on this comes from the UKDH reference guide to consent for examination or treatment, which says:
To be valid, consent must be given voluntarily and freely, without pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person either to accept or refuse treatment. Such pressure can come from partners or family members, as well as health or care practitioners. Practitioners should be alert to this possibility and where appropriate should arrange to see the person on their own in order to establish that the decision is truly their own.
[...]
When people are seen and treated in environments where involuntary detention may be an issue, such as prisons and mental hospitals, there is a potential for treatment offers to be perceived coercively, whether or not this is the case. Coercion invalidates consent, and care must be taken to ensure that the person makes decisions freely. Coercion should be distinguished from providing the person with appropriate reassurance concerning their treatment, or pointing out the potential benefits of treatment for the person’s health. However, threats such as withdrawal of any privileges, loss of remission of sentence for refusing consent or using such matters to induce consent may well invalidate the consent given, and are not acceptable.
On this basis, the existence of vaccine mandates clearly poses a risk for violating informed consent, as it introduces duress in several ways. Firstly, it means pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person to accept treatment from government, employers, retail services etc. Secondly, it also means threats of the withdrawal of privileges in an environment with involuntary detention. See how specific the language here is, how closely and specifically it applies to the circumstances of vaccine mandates in countries that carried out lockdowns, despite the age of the document long predating covid. That should hint that these recommendations are not simply some backporting or recency bias for the sake of winning an argument, but instead represent best practice as it was already understood.
Even political leaders broadcasting claims that vaccines are a route out of lockdowns, or that unless X% of the population are vaccinated that restrictions will continue, introduces duress. However, this is more of a footnote, as regimes that carried out the false imprisonment of the entire population are already instantly rendered illegitimate by doing so.
Personally, I found the whole process so fucking disgusting that I refused to take the vaccines purely on the basis of that. I don't care if they're the best or the worst vaccines in the world. The rubicon is crossed, and the relevant institution is no longer trustworthy. For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule... The very thought sickens me. The fact that a large proportion of my fellow countrymen, as if somehow I can regard them in such friendly terms any more, agreed with these mandates sickens me even more.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Vaccinations are a proxy for race, it was legal to segregate by vaccine status, businesses did so, and they mainly got away with it.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
12/20.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It's quite likely we'll get some actual information on it from one of the relevant legal cases at some point.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Many claims that something is a conspiracy theory imply the equal and opposite claim that someone's conspiring to spread a conspiracy theory.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
I don't see how woke meaningfully threatens that equilibrium. More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials. Cheap blue collar labour from mass immigration. To the extent that they have a position on the issue, they seem to not mind firing up the money printers and not doing anything to counter it with interest rates, so cheap borrowing and rising asset prices.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Claiming that the Khmer Rouge were radicalized by and against the US does not square with their actual behaviour, which was omnicide primarily directed at Cambodians but generally against everyone.
At least with Hamas you can point to them being interested mostly in killing an external opponent they have a grievance against, rather than everyone especially themselves.
As for South Korea, who were invaded and almost destroyed by the North, why did they not then become radicalized in the same way? North Korea's radicalization clearly predates the Korean War because it's visible in them starting the war in the first place.
To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
Yes, this is my main criticism of lockdowns from the perspective of health, and why I was deeply skeptical of them from day 1. There's no possible way for anything but short lockdowns that inexplicably eradicate covid forever to be a net QALY gain. You don't even need to look at long-term second and third order effects to determine that. Just the immediete acute loss in QALY from being put under lockdown restrictions already does more damage than covid could possibly do.
As for how big the effect on quality of life is, EQ-5D-5L puts a moderate reduction in ability to do usual activities (work, study, school, all sorts of things lockdowns prohibit) as a 12% reduction in quality of life. Severe as a 22% reduction. Severe + slight anxiety or depression as a 28% reduction. Severe in both is a 47% reduction. So the actual answer for lockdown's median effect on QALY probably is somewhere between 10% and 50%. This is a question that absolutely could be answered by chucking some money into getting a randomly sampled survey done.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
As much as simple ignorance would be a comforting explanation, prior to lockdowns, experts in public health were perfectly happy to use QALY thinking for decisionmaking. They only abandoned such cost/benefit analysis specifically when doing lockdowns, which suggests more ideological or malicious intentions.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
Medical ethicists continue talking because doctors and hospitals listen.
The events of the past few years would suggest otherwise.
Agreed. But it at least lets us skip any debates about determinism. It has already been demonstrated wrong. The absence of determinism isn't actually useful for identifying free will, however.
More options
Context Copy link