aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
8mo ago
Do you think the Palestinians or surrounding Arab nations would accept this if it was actually offered?
As I said, if they raise up the machine god, or I guess this is just getting us past the need for physical labor, then they've won. But it's this generation in the next decade and not a generational project.
aqouta
8mo ago
As the bulge of population retires that elderly care problem becomes more difficult, the ratio of working aged people to dependents becomes much worse. That's before even factoring in burning the other end of the candle by trying to increase birthrates to something sustainable at the same time. If not solved you have a population that at best halves every generation and I suspect would actually spiral even further downwards.
aqouta
8mo ago
as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.
What young people? China has a TFR of around 1.2 if you trust the Chinese data, which you maybe shouldn't. If China is able to use the last gasp of their civilization to birth the machine god then perhaps they'll be on top but this is not a generational project.
aqouta
8mo ago
I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.
I guess I have some problems with these as alternatives. Of them only really SJW selects the whole of the blob and I think it'd have the same problem of being rejected as a label by many that it fits if for no other reason that it's a kind of silly formulation. I don't know how long you've been aware of this particular naming dispute but there was a move to call them social justice activists which I'm happy to use but never really got wide adoption. I suspect because it's a mouthful.
The problem, I think, is that this blob intentionally wants to resist being named because it wants to assert its contentious beliefs as normal, the null hypothesis of ideologies. This is a very privileged and powerful position to be in. It lets them stake out radical positions and if those positions prove disastrous it doesn't taint the rest of the ideology. They don't want the failure of things like "defund the police", a sentiment widely shared by adherents of this blob, to color people's perception on the other ideas they propose.
I guess my question for you is do you deny the existence of this blob entirely? As in do you deny that there is a large contingent of people on the left that are bought into nearly every radical left leaning position including but not limited to:
- anti-racism( as expressed by Kendi and including race concious policy)
- climate doomerism
- anti-western and anti-US in particular geopolitical positions (broadly can be expected to take whichever side of any conflict that is lest aligned with the west)
- intersectional and privileged based understandings of race and gender,
- anti-capitalism economics ( this is a big one and expresses itself and many ways)
- acab or at least substantially anti-police beliefs
- suspicious of free speech
- LGBTQ activism
If you point to a person with this perspective on any one of these issues I would bet they have something like a 95% chance to believe in every other. That's really seems like a group that I should be able to easily point to.
aqouta
8mo ago
I don't really get this critique. You're seriously looking at the 922 page long wish list of a major republican thinktank, noticing that a lot of elements of that wish list are being implemented by a republican president and deciding that the parsimonious explanation is that Trump is just following the checklist? It can't be that a Republican president has a lot in common with a Republican think tank?
The reason that people tried to say that project 2025 was the Trump plan was because, in addition to the stuff that is popular enough for Trump to want to run with, it includes stuff not popular enough for Trump to run with. It's like if Kamala won and implemented some passport support for trans people that also happened to be on NAMBLA's "let trans-aged people attend highschool and sleep with children" 2025 agenda and thus it was right to tar her with every policy on the document this whole time.
aqouta
8mo ago
Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?
On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.
aqouta
8mo ago
Yeah, sometimes I still think it'd be fun. I have a couple frameworks installed on the computer but suffer from a lack of motivation. Not super interested in coding after a long day of coding. Moving across the country also doesn't make collaboration easy. I've gotten to the little dudes moving around on a screen stage a few times and just can't sustain interest. Maybe I'll take another swing more aided by LLMs soon.
aqouta
8mo ago
If you wanted to you could have multiple timelines that different characters could be involved in but that'd depend a lot on how your story is handling the shared space and if multiverse/time travel can fit into the story well. If they're building persistent structures then yeah, that's kind of iffy. If you really wanted to I think you could find a way to write in multiple concurrent timelines.
aqouta
8mo ago
Could even have some incentive to go different narrative paths by having group level rewards gated behind certain paths if you wanted although that a pretty big gameplay decision.
aqouta
8mo ago
If you split multiple characters with shared progression where each character gets their own version of the story you could accomplish this. You'd have a team level and your team could consist of several characters. The team could level up rather than individual characters making switching between them less costly and allowing for gear drops to be shared where most useful, maybe your ranger finds a sword and you decide to play your knight for a few levels. Think Path of Exile SSF mode but with shared character levels. Lot of narrative ways to fit it in, maybe split universes shared souls or something.
aqouta
8mo ago
Woke is just the omni-cause. Woke people are people who were informed of how at least one part of the standard patriotic narrative of liberalism is wrong and then devote themselves to cynically opposing every other aspect of the standard liberal narrative. If the standard liberal narrative is that America is a great place where any plucky upstarts can make a name for themselves through hard work and grit they believe the inverse must be true. America is a place where entrenched powers make it impossible for an under class of minorities - be they racial, sexual or religious - to succeed through violent suppression. They believe the west is rotten to the core and reflectively believe any criticism of it. The null hypothesis for every question is that the liberalism is a failed lie and anyone who opposes it must have a good reason.
Racial Justice activists are woke because they believe America has committed original sin against minorities and the stain of slavery and racism pervades every aspect of American institutions. They don't really even believe in progress, acknowledging past progress would be a concession to the patriotic liberal narrative so they insist that things are as bad now as they were under Jim Crow. If given a free hand to adopt any policy they want they'd find anything they built equally poisoned.
Anti-Rich rhetoric is woke because it is against the liberal idea that free enterprise is positive sum. Woke people believe every billionaire is a policy failure because they genuinely believe that to get that right you must be stealing from others.
Degrowthers are woke because they believe the liberalism must be destroying the planet. They don't want to use liberal solutions like carbon tax or deregulating nuclear because that would be allowing liberalism to try to solve the problem. Instead they oppose these liberal solutions and advocate for unworkable policies. They're more interested in using climate change as a bludgeon against liberalism than working on actual solutions.
These things are all joined by a disillusionment with the liberal order and reliably each of these and many other woke beliefs are found in the same people not as some kind of coincidence but because all those people have the same burning intuition that they were betrayed by the liberal promises they grew up hearing.
Maybe to people who live fully immersed in these illiberal mindsets it's like water to a fish but to people outside of the milieu it is very very obvious within a few seconds of talking to a woke person exactly which side they will take on any new subject that pits western liberalism against literally anything else. That a memetic clusters exists here is beyond doubt, what you call it is fairly irrelevant.
aqouta
8mo ago
Think about the incentive structure. What does Musk have to gain from capitulation here? The end of a media cycle about something none of his supporters or normal people care about freeing them up to dive into the controversial executive orders more? Every drop of ink spilt on this is a win so why not juice it? Especially in a way his supporters will get some enjoyment out of. I don't think the salute was deliberate but the response seems to perfectly follow what I'd expect someone in his position to do.
aqouta
8mo ago
In the abortion example, the cold calculation is something like looking at the impact on the economy, birth rates, education, and many creative ways of gaugibg the effect. Usually the answer to whether something is a good idea in hat sense is contextual and not an absolutist stance (compare a country with a popukation that is too large to support, versus one that cannot replenish its population).
This frame for abortion can only make sense from a pro-choice framework. The Pro-life framework obviously brooks no compromise. It'd be like asking for a pro/con breakdown on allowing violent nonconsensual rape and taking seriously the boons to the economy and fertility rate. This, and many problems just actually grounds out in values differences which you can't really do utility calculous on because you have different utility functions.
aqouta
8mo ago
As he's not been banned can we consider that other question answered or will it be implied again?
aqouta
9mo ago
I find the framing of capital vs people to be misleading. There's only really one vector for commerce to care about or impact your focus, advertising, which we can certainly attack in a number of ways. Its demise would result in the death of a lot of things like most massive free websites but that could be seen as a benefit. I don't think banning it outright is really possible, there needs to be some mechanism for matching products to people who would like to have them but surely many forms could be banned and with them the goes the doom scrolling media sources that rely on hooking you into watching ads to exist.
The other end of the coin for rootedness is family. having kids gives you a ready made community with a shared prosocial interest in the kids. The decline in family formation is really probably partially the upstream cause of most of the ills of modernity. As someone who also moved across the country away from family I think this probably isn't a good thing in hindsight. My immediate family has since split into several different cities and only now has there started to be some interest in coordinating moving back closer together, maybe not surprisingly as my generation has started to work on families of our own. Much ink has been spilt on suggestions for increasing family formation, I won't put another attempt at a solution here.
aqouta
9mo ago
This smells like giving Israel and out. Big bad Trump comes in and makes them take a ceasefire deal saving face internally.
If your point is just that the groups themselves are epiphenominal to the desire to help minorities and it's instead sympathy for minorities that causes open advocacy for racial discrimination in favor of them that also creates the groups that are purely symbolic then sure. I guess what I object to is whatever egregore allows open unidirectional advocacy against my and my family's interests on the basis of or skin color.
aqouta
9mo ago
To me, appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately.
I don't understand why you think a mod would need to say this, surely you can, and do, call out fallacious arguments and evasiveness? Egregious use of fallacies and refusal to answer questions makes their argument poor and is an opening for you to point this out to which they can contest whether their argument was actually fallacious, revise their argument, or leave the conversation.
I can't help but think what you're really looking for is a win condition, some universal ruleset so that you can declare yourself winner of a debate. When an interlocutor is using fallacious reasoning you want that to be punished without the need to individually address it yourself, exhaustively, every time it comes up. That's just not what we are. We trust the individual users to come to their own conclusions how convincing arguments are and decide if they find potentially fallacious arguments convincing.
If your plan is to make a list of all the bad and fallacious arguments various users make and then wave that around and say "fix this" then I think maybe that could be useful for discussion but doubt it would inspire any change in moderation.
aqouta
9mo ago
Terrorists don't really operate like that, the point is to tie the damage to the cause. It's supposed to further a political goal. This would be sadism, not terrorism.
The one thing he keeps bringing up that I think actually lands, and it's not surprising he started with it because of that, is the unilateral disarmament that is whites not having an affinity group despite every other racial group having one. I don't really know how that point could realistically be discharged though - It's too easy to compare to naziism. Considering the makeup of likely people who would first advocate for and join such a party the comparison would probably not even be unfair.
edit: I should say my preference would be to abolish all the affinity groups, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
I think it's fine to use llms in the writing process but you really really need to take on the role of an editor. This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially. I do think that the credit system as it exists now is suboptimal but at the same time we do need some system for determining credit worthiness. Part of the problem is how very regulated financial markets are and credit scores are a hack for lenders to use to discriminate without fear of capricious state sanction.
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