… what does that say about the state of the war?
Well per Sun Tzu or whoever it was, the first casualty of war is always the truth. Anyone who doesn’t keep their ear close to the ground on the propaganda on both sides is at high risk for concealing themselves in their own bubble. My own personal digest every other day or week has been HistoryLegends who’s actually dedicated some videos specifically to debunking the western propaganda narrative, and Defense Politics Asia who looks at things directly from an operational perspective. I know what I’m going to get from the BBC or CNN and I know what I’m going to get from RT, so I seldom bother with those from the get go.
That said, whether you agree with Russia or Ukraine is beside the point. I’d much rather want to be on the Russian side of the front line than the Ukrainian one.
Tretiak
9d ago
Oh yeah. People do that. But if I ask you if you start hearing voices in your head one day are you going to go to an exorcist or a neurologist, I’m pretty confident about what kind of answer I’m going to hear.
Tretiak
9d ago
I don’t know if I’m being asked to defend DEI policies here or what, because I most emphatically do not, and I’m all for dismantling them. Nor do I see the relevance of your comparison to bullets. What’s in there that’s supposed to be significant about race somehow? Do people identify with phenotypic familiarity? Obviously. The science of Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) has received substantial support since its development. Does that mean there’s some ‘gene’ out there that predisposes one group to create civilizations that other groups lack? Highly doubt it except in only the most extreme and fringe examples.
Tretiak
10d ago
Look, people can privately fantasize over their weird racial utopia or idealistic society whatever have you, but it’s not going to happen without a radical (and radically violent) civilizational upheaval of modern day civil society. And nobody wants that. I hate living in a radically progressive society, but I recognize to some extent that’s the cost paid for all the other benefits that get provided to me. Society isn’t going back to some purified white ethnostate out in the American northwest somewhere. It’s just not going to happen. I could go back and live with distant relatives I still have some connection to in Scandinavia but I wouldn’t because it’s too foreign to me, even though I’m genetically indistinguishable from them. I actually ‘feel’ much more connected to my friends who are Hispanic, white, black and Asian than I would with other whites who can’t speak English or speak it with an unintelligible accent.
What are people like Nick supposed to say on this “racial biology” point? “Race” is a biologically fuzzy concept. Even population geneticists behind closed doors have admitted that you can talk about biology at the level of the gene itself without commitment to now outdated and pseudoscientific categories like comparing Nordics and Teutons and Alpines and Slavs, etc. Most genetic traits today are polygenic (i.e. single genes don’t code directly for most traits, multiple different genes contribute some proportion) and some are in fact omnigenic (at the genetic periphery, and genes only contribute very small, indirect effect sizes to a trait). What is this racial significance supposedly sitting there in the corner that nobody is talking about?
Tretiak
10d ago
But the recycling of villains into friends did occur multiple times (see also the Ferenghi) and you have a pretty reasonable take on how that was done more broadly.
The implication here being that Ferengi were modeled after Jews and they work in industries of vice? Bad joke/observation aside, the culture that early Trek embodied was if you want to call it the right kind of progressivism at least for the day, if not in an objective sense. I don’t think anyone here would disagree with that.
Not all religions have a commitment to the supernatural in this sense. Theravada Buddhism has always remained a classic “atheistic religion.” You can split hairs further if you want to just call it a moral philosophy, worldview, philosophy of life, etc., but as a religion it’s still suitable.
Morality is still the major game religions play, and only because we’re never going to recover the original trappings of a pious life, circa, say 300 B.C. The demoniac theory of possession is gone for all time and has been taken over by neuroscience.
Religion today is full of items we no longer pick off the shelf of our holy books. We walk with what is relevant or want to be true in the present day and then claim that’s what the religion is and has always been.
At the time the democratic supermajority was pronounced it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to somewhat nod your head and think the case they were making had a logic foundation to it. I remember sort of nodding my head slightly but still not abandoning the general pendulum effect politics has. I was never in doubt that their hubris was going to cause them to eventually eat shit after sniffing each other’s ass so much.
Two things the democrats missed. One was a fairly well known fact people didn’t attach significant weight to that they should have, namely that minority immigrants are some of the most staunch supports of pulling up the ladder after themselves once they’ve made it, and many of them are often highly racist against other demographic minorities or subcultures in their original country. These are not people who are going to be sympathetic to your liberal idealistic wishlist. On that point the ball is in the Republican’s court with their responsibility not to fumble the advantage they have.
The second point was the less well known but later empirically adduced Cultural Backlash thesis by Norris and Inglehart. The nativist reaction to systemic cultural, demographic and social changes greatly empowered a political hiccup like Trump to gather as much appeal as he did. A lot of people initially were in denial that this was ever a factor because they see America as a post-racial, post-identity country when it isn’t. We faire a lot better and are more progressive than Europe is historically, but just because these issues are taboo in society doesn’t make them go away in the minds of most people. You see it embodied in debates between people like Mearsheimer and Pinker. I think Mearsheimer is completely right and Pinker always struck me as the quintessential Shitlib Intellectual.
Tretiak
11d ago
… the optimal move is to rally around a unifying platform or candidate who can both rally the base and bring in independent/non-aligned voters. Typically this involves sweeping major differences in ideology, policy, and values under the rug for the sake of winning the next election. Strange bedfellows and all that...
The unstated irony in all of this, funny enough, is when all the major parties talk of unity and coming together to defeat the other side, you’re still mandated to follow rank and file under their banner. “Everyone has to be united under my way of thinking. I’m not budging for anyone else!” Nick Fuentes can make the same argument. Is the Republican Party going to move in his direction? That was always the clearest admission to me of the gatekeeping of the party duopoly.
Tretiak
11d ago
I wonder what odd juxtapositions exist in places like Nevada where prostitution is legal and the age of consent is 16. Like if you’re a teacher at a public high school and some kid there is employed at the Mustang Ranch, is it legal to go and fuck your students? That always seemed disgusting as fuck to me.
Tretiak
11d ago
The only reason I suppose someone would still look to Trump is only for picking up where he left off, and extricating whatever’s valuable from his political playbook from the standpoint of an outsider who bulldozed his way into the presidency.
This is my take as well. Every time I hear someone bring up Trump in reference to Epstein it just makes me roll my eyes and yawn. I want to say to them, “Yeah. Trump’s a pedophile and a pervert.” And then move on from that and watch the weather report.
Unless there’s truly something damning and huge in the files, the hype surrounding the matter and the “what’s to hide,” vibe people keep letting off has only reminded me that the average person loves a conspiracy and is duped pretty easily.
A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child, and mid-to-high human capital still benefits from competent educators
I know what TM’s general view is on this and the logic that tends to sit behind it and in one sense I’m with them, but we differ in how we interpret the science on this (IQ). I’m quite the strong hereditarian myself but people vastly overemphasize its importance relative to other effect sizes.
They [almost] tend to think IQ has a causal direct link to some kind of meritocracy in the way they think about it. And I don’t like how they treat the matter in reference to other populations, because then everything goes haywire and becomes a shouting match.
Here’s where TM and I agree. Yes to two points:
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Success requires mental ability.
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Social rewards are often linked to this success.
But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain. Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate. If I could make more money working at a call center than I do with my current employer, I still would not partake of that arrangement due to other factors at play. And in fact I’m prepared to abandon my present vocation for a less satisfying and more demanding job because of the way in which it aligns my priorities with family life.
And how do we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society. In the current paradigm it has about as much importance as height does (which is to say it’s not irrelevant at all, but it isn’t at the forefront of policy decisions in such regard). IQ in this sense is mostly irrelevant for the state of an individual to want to be what he is and pursue what he chooses for himself.
Tretiak
12d ago
Enrollment should go down purely on account of the fact that we have far too many people enrolled already. There are ‘way’ too many kids in higher education than there should be.
I don’t think the major universities or even community colleges will likely close. Maybe their endowments should change. Some commitments these institutions have put upon themselves may have to be rolled back as a consequence of them perhaps being involved in programs and outreach they shouldn’t be involved in. But I doubt it’ll be a closure similar to what people have worried about, with libraries closing for instance because of the digitalization efforts and also a far smaller population of readers (which is sad).
I’m very grateful that I haven’t grown up with the educational system of the post-millennium compared to what I went through. Relative to what you have today, my K-12 education was preindustrial by comparison. Education was harder in a sense because it’s meant to be. You’re meant to achieve breakthroughs in your understanding as you build upon concepts from the simple to the more advanced. Book reports were still a regular. Cheating was more difficult. You still had calculators but good luck smuggling them into math class. For English literature we had SparkNotes to provide us with synopses for crap like Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which definitely put me to sleep. Can’t a brother read about Alexander the Great slapping people all over the Indian subcontinent?
Education has been very slow to adapt to the changing landscape over the last 20-30 years or so. If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F. Classroom sizes should be much smaller IMO and unruly little POS should be thrown out of the classroom. I don’t recall where I saw the data on this but I read charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system. Maybe there’s some social/economic bifurcation there were the increase in mediocre performance is kept to one side (e.g. public schools, or urban vs. suburban vs. rural, etc., in more detail). I grew up in suburbia so I can’t comment on what education is like outside of it.
It’s funny one of the last books I read was Human Diversity by Charles Murray. The book contains a lot of width that covers much ground, but one thing he states is that much of the environmental landscape in education is going to be demystified. We know there’s significant interplay between heredity and environment and all is some mix and interplay of the two categories. Men and women for instance are remarkably similar and perform just as well in science and math as men do, but men concentrate more heavily in proportion to that category because of social and cultural factors. Men on the other had have been observed to be slower to develop if not sit below girls in social skills, and that’s actually due to biological factors. It’s the People-Things distinction and boys and girls use different cognitive and psychological tools in how they learn and navigate the world. How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.
Tretiak
14d ago
Mark Twain had a useful heuristic to give us on the matter:
“If you don’t read the news you’re uninformed. If you read the news you’re misinformed.”
Tretiak
14d ago
I thought this was evident already for anyone who’s ever seen a BBC Hardtalk interview. All these institutions are prejudiced and to that end are involved in setting the agenda. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or left either.
Tretiak
14d ago
In a hunter gatherer tribe 10,000 years ago, you could rely on knowing what everyone else knew. Nowadays it’s impossible for someone to say science doesn’t know x. There’s too much science. Things are coming to the edge where human understanding is finding it increasingly difficult to penetrate to higher levels of understanding the natural world. Maybe future AI will represent a new information/industrial revolution of sorts and take us to places we can’t go and in a way, it’s already doing that.
Tretiak
14d ago
If my family and friends were allied with Nazis I’m pretty sure I had other problems somewhere along the road.
If I were ever in such a position I’d hope I would betray my country before I would my family and friends. Man’s a hero in my book.
Tretiak
15d ago
I had a hilarious conversation once of my relatives once where we were brought up movies as an example of American arrogance to the rest of the world. Two of the movies we came up with were Die Hard and Independence Day. If you try to look at them with our inborn cultural blinders off but as someone who’s a complete new initiate to our way of life, they’re actually incredibly chauvinistic movies when you think about it.
Trevelyan had a vendetta against the British because they betrayed his parents and left them to die. They later recruited him to be an agent for MI6 and figured he wouldn’t have remembered what they did because he was a young kid. He hid is true motivations until he became a fully trained spy and turned on the British just as they did to him.
That was the whole point of the story. It was a story about vengeance. I don’t blame him one bit. If my adoptive country did that to my family and friends I’d conceal my true intentions as well, and turn on and fight to dismantle and destroy them with everything I’d learned and mastered. The “bank robber” element was an insignificant sidebar to the main plot point.
The British once understand the art form of political and economic bureaucracy. Then the wrecking ball of stupidity came in with Thatcher and the Friedmanites and the British lost touch with that side of their historic traditions. Them and the Chinese were masters of the concept at one point. I’ll always be satisfied when the Keynesians smacked him around a bit on their turf. His neoliberal policies have done so much damage to this country.
Lmao.
This is why I don’t take a lot of the AI hype seriously. Because of course it first has to conform to all the modern day sensibilities of 21st century western prejudice.
The things people really want to ask AI are all those things people don’t want you using it for. “Tell me how to make high quality TNT for the 4th of July.” “How would one commit the perfect murder?” (Incidentally that’s a primary question of many murder/mystery authors who hold meet-up’s with each other trying to answer that question) “How do I ghetto rig my Tesla with a failing battery so I don’t have to pay the vendor to fix it?” You know. All the fun stuff.
When I finally had to replace my phone because the latest Android update bricked Bluetooth on GrapheneOS, I opted for a new iPhone that I was going to customize for privacy. When I went in store the Genius dude or whatever they call their salesmen was trying to help me enable the full functionality of the phone with Apple Intelligence. I told him thanks but I wasn’t very interested and was somewhat in a hurry. I later played around with it a bit and found it to be completely useless. Not because AI is useless. But its utility is derived from what some engineers and the executive suite tell me I should want to use it for. And that’s the problem. Our goals here are not aligned. The alignment problem in this context has more than one axis.
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