VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
While I'm glad "Free Cuba" is a statement that both Macklemore and Marco Rubio can agree upon, I suspect they mean it in very different ways, and probably don't actually agree on anything there.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
I'm not sure I really want to know the answer, but is "blood drinking" by itself a crime? I'd assume it depends on how you source the blood in question ("ethically sourced from local abortion clinics", ugh, still no).
Last I checked, the Catholics would testify that they drink literal blood regularly, but we've mostly settled the Protestant-Catholic animus over such things in the US.
With the crucial difference that Rafah was demolished, whereas the antizionists are still a decade or so away from possessing the power to demolish Tel Aviv.
Sure, but they demonstrably did a quite a bit to Be'eri.
And Dresden was largely carried out by American forces: no American cities were even modestly impacted by enemy violence during WWII. The total number of civilian casualties in the 48 states during the war is countable on a single hand. Even London with the Blitz wasn't hit anywhere near as hard as Dresden or other German cities. Does "the Germans were a decade away from possessing the power to demolish Washington" (roughly true) mean that FDR was the baddie there? I personally don't think so, but YMMV.
ETA: On looking, there were six civilians killed in the 48 states during the war, who died from a Japanese balloon fire bomb. Not quite one hand.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
I think any other direction has darker implications: to reverse your claim (which, to be fair, is factually accurate to my knowledge), those that would commit mass ethnic cleansing of Jews in the 1940s were stopped by making their cities look like Dresden. Why wouldn't "Never Again" mean turning cities (Rafah) to such in 2026 for the same reason? "Which river? Which sea?". I don't agree with it, but I can at least understand the position.
Ultimately, the cycle of violence is only broken when one side loses or admits defeat — the West Germans were to some extent lucky the Western Allies were more magnanimous than many other historical examples — or when "hippy-dippy peace-and-love attitudes" prevail. In most cases I can imagine, I'd prefer the latter.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19hr ago
I feel like I'd also apply this criticism to Mormons: the origin story is, to put it kindly, a bit hokey. That said, the organization as a whole seems to produce members that are, at least when I've crossed paths with them, consistently reasonable people. Clearly it's at least possible for an organized group to transcend the "quality" of its founding documents, even though I think they still believe them earnestly.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I'll concede it's a bit of an overzealous, maybe even facile model. But I'm not sure I have a much better model for most extremist ideologies (except maybe the Quakers, if they count as such) that doesn't devolve into totalizing revanchism regardless of initial direction: it's a common thread among literal Nazis, through Pol Pot, all the way to the Hutus, Lost Cause stans, and both side in Israel/Palestine. It's really easy as humans to blame all sorts of things on our outgroups; I won't claim to be immune to that one.
But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom". Genocide is bad, but maybe we can poll watchers of The Young Turks how they feel about Armenians. Blasphemy laws are bad, but don't you dare draw The Prophet. Black lives matter, except the ones in Africa killed by (often-Muslim) militants. The most reliable metric for "Omni cause" support seems to be more along the lines of voting blocs than moral principles, and I have real misgivings that the political standards that are IMHO not-even-unreasonably applied to Christianity are largely brushed off for everyone else that will vote for them at present. That part gives me pause.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The dichotomy in TNG between Data, who is often played in a role of AI wanting to be "truly human" (also Spock in TOS, with Facts and Logic) and the ship's computer, which seems quite capable of similar levels of intelligence, but lacks something (agency?). I don't think it was IMO fully explored, but was brought up a few times directly. It's a pity very little modern TV is able to consider such deep questions: too much grim-dark, flawed-protagonist, melancholy slop.
the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm
Sometimes it seems to me that the social currency of DSA types is just, well, unabashed shamelessness. It certainly explains the number of self-identified "working class" fail sons that had daddy buy their first house or live rent-free, or hyper-progressive businesses that haven't paid their taxes.
If that's really true, it seems like all you'd need to subvert it is a critical mass willing to play along by its own rules. Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that "in living memory, Slavs have been the primary victims of capitalism", and raise etymological concerns every time someone else uses the word "slave". Those facts are, arguably, not even wrong. If they kick you out, raise discrimination claims under the Civil Rights Act. There is certainly an element of the crab bucket to it, too. On the other hand, I'd recommend against it because of what could happen if you were successful: what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims of history at the hands of Jews and other European powers?
To tie it back to Islamism, I haven't listened to OP's podcast, but my broader concerns there are that many on the left (not even always Muslim believers themselves!) lack the self-awareness expected of "the rest of us". I'm expected to appreciate the historical nuance and implications, but to them, history always begins at a very convenient choice of time. Byzantium Constantinople Istanbul has always been Muslim land (see also Jerusalem). The only slave trade worth mentioning is the Western Atlantic one. It's only "genocide" when it's done by perceived-as-white people; pay no attention to the last century in, to name a few, Armenia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Kashmir, South Sudan (in some cases, literal skin-color-based murderism), or religious minorities within the Middle East like Druze or Lebanese Christians. I'll pretty reasonably acknowledge that bad things have been done by Christians and in the name of Christendom, but it feels very much like a one-way street.
To be clear, this isn't an "all Muslims" thing. There are plenty of quite reasonable minds here. Whom amongst us doesn't have weird teachings in corners of our religious texts that we are at least a bit uncomfortable with? It's more a question of what you choose to do with it and where we go from here. The Reformation was, to put it bluntly, not the best time to live in Europe, but the Westphalian peace and the Enlightenment seem important results from that which aren't as universally-assumed as they ought to be.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Imagine a chimpanzee trying to align a human being. What could it really do other than try to be cute, to play on the human's affectionate and childraising instincts?
I occasionally see people muse something along the lines "We domesticated dogs. Cats domesticated us." I do see some truth to that model: being cute, fluffy, and mercurially aloof and affectionate demonstrably works. I put up with feeding mine and cleaning the litter box for it.
But also in the last hundred years intelligent humans have started appreciating the environment and biodiversity. Not always successfully, but we at least try not to exterminate biodiversity just because we can. I'd even suggest that "support for preserving whale species" is correlated with intelligence. I can at least imagine a situation where medium AI might accidentally stomp us underfoot, but a super intelligence would care about preserving us, if only like pampered zoo animals.
Not saying it'd definitely work, but it's not a completely zany gambit.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
That might be a concern at some point, but current hardware that can (effectively) run bleeding edge models is really rare. A machine that can effectively run GLM 5.3 Flash (not a frontier model even, but close-ish) at nontrivial rates is, last I checked, six figures. Can it even run on a single 12A (120v US) breaker? A rogue frontier AI isn't going to spin up instances on smart TVs or even most desktops.
That might change in the next decade assuming demand and technology make these things commonplace, and that is worth preparing for, but seem oversold as risks today.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses.
There have been plenty of comments here about how much the CDC and NIH were funding gain of function research, despite a Congressional ban, some of which was done in Wuhan, and some of that proposed included specific mutations later seen in a pandemic coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan. Whether or not this was the source of said pandemic remains unproven.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Isn't all of it hobbled without login now? There are some mirror services, but I don't expect those to last forever.
I'm sure Aaron would have been proud. /s
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Surely Providence should have thought of, uh, safety before allowing this cellular life stuff to engage in evolution by natural selection. You can't just let that happen, or FOOM.
But that same Creator also didn't consider the gray green goo hypothesis, and now that stuff is everywhere, even deep underground and ocean vents.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The argument in favor of the "top ten six five percent" rule was that high schools were heavily segregated in practice --- barely now within living memory, by fiat, but now mostly by school zoning area demographics. Ideally the winners are supposed to be poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley and historically-Black communities getting to send graduates from poorly-ranked high schools to top-tier UT Austin, but I've definitely read anecdotes of parents of means, uh, venue shopping come senior year of high school. I can't speak to how common that is, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The most rabidly xenophobic nations are generally the ones people are least interested in migrating to
This partly depends on your definition of xenophobia. I've known no shortage of weebs dismayed that Japanese immigration laws are basically "no". I'm sure there are KPop stans that have similar situations.
Japan is an odd example here because general claims of "Japanese success" happened mostly after a dramatic period in their history in which Western culture was aggressively adopted by (local!) top-down fiat.
I'd be remiss if I suggested that Western ideals were the only reason for this success, but it certainly complicates the example. China has also had its own run-ins and adaptations from Western ideas too (literally Communism! Although that's not the only one).
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
That lets their population grow yet further past their decreasing food supply.
It's not a requirement that any region, state, or even nation be self-supporting in terms of food production, even if it is probably a good idea where possible for a few regions. But Singapore is never going to grow enough food for itself, for example.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
The writing style was far clunkier than I expected
It's been a few years, but I recall thinking that the prose in Hyperion was pretty good. It's not something most (many?) science fiction authors are very strong in, though, and it may have been a relative observation.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
It's interesting the Houthis have been remarkably restrained.
One possibility, although I have no specific evidence for it, is that the open conflict has allowed interdiction (or just dissuaded) Iranian shipping to their proxies. Sinking Iranian-flagged (or obvious false flagged) ships smuggling missiles in peacetime would cause trouble; less so today.
I don't think Yemen is making it's own long-range ballistic or anti-ship missiles. Small arms seem less of a logistical concern. But you could be right that restraint is being exercised locally.
Assuming we don't all die in the process (IMO unlikely, but not ruled out), I look forward to explaining our assumption to our new overlords that they'd go all murder robot on us. Ripley wasn't wrong to say "nuke it from orbit", but I'd expect bringing thermonuclear warheads to a First Contact event would be poor form.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
The bar for "tried" here isn't related to success rates, but to whether she thought it would be effective. It is, admittedly, a more difficult thing to prove either way.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Anything going by sea to or from Bahrain has to pass the Strait: it could just be ineffective (high risk) for logistics at the moment compared to more distant but clear options. But you could also be right.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Time-wise, I would expect some Iranian (or proxy) action or attempted action to embarrass the US before the mid-term elections. I'd also expect the Americans to expect such a plan. "Baiting" like you suggest doesn't sound crazy.
As very much an outsider, would you be willing to elaborate? Do you mean the ways, as the musical put it, "That the current President of the church, Thomas Monson [not the current President anymore], speaks directly to God", or something else?
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