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clo


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 November 14 02:02:20 UTC

					

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User ID: 1850

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That's because this is what winning looks like.

Someone once said power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that disadvantage people you don't like look like they occur naturally.

Here's my version: power is demonstrated by the ability to entirely avoid, or even remain entirely ignorant of, the negative consequences of your actions.

The losers have to eat shit. They also get to see the winners shovel it at them even if it is completely by accident.

Pokemon Unbound deserves all the accolades it gets. The game is so expansive, feature-rich and high quality that it begs the question what Game Freak have been doing all this time.

Enderal, for Skyrim. A passion project made by lunatics.

I hear some buzz about Dark Souls Archthrones recently.

I don't understand this example. Are you implying that a sane authoritarian government would exert their power to ban the burning of hydrocarbons for heating or cooking?

How is that in any way sane, especially if they don't have the power to stop other countries from doing it? Unless you are advocating for this sane authoritarian government invading all the others and maintaining this ban through force of arms, in which case it makes more sense, but still a fair ways away from 'sane'. Doing so would require the development and manufacture of weapons at scale, which unfortunately requires large amounts of hydrocarbons.

The reason why is irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons, from cheaper labor to less regulations to quality differences to productivity reasons. But governments are made up of people, and people who are incentivized not to let things fail are obviously going to work in service of those claims.

The Chinese factory example is apt. If you are a western nation, can you compete with that workforce, notoriously selective regulation and an ability to simply make as much as the market can absorb? Well, sure, you could. What's stopping you, aside from, well - the people in your country? (Cf. American Factory)

The other side of the Bretton Woods financial coin making money fungible across national boundaries: if you don't have some sort of protectionism in place, your economy will see significant cash outflows to foreign countries. This is hugely beneficial to countries that are primarily export based, as the US was post-WW2... and not so much in the other direction.

Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.

I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.

I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.

You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").

White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.

Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.

The point is not uncontroversial, because if you're going to blame all those atrocities on intelligent people, you can't get away with being selective about it. Intelligent people gave us the semiconductor, the refrigerator, the printing press - although whether the printing press was ruinous for humanity is a matter for debate in some circles.

There's also a very good argument to be made that you can attribute the atrocities you listed to a lack of intelligence.

Animals live short, nasty, brutish lives, and I think their inability to outcompete, outproduce and exterminate everything else within reach is a matter of capability rather than need. The historical record of nature tells us that they frequently hunt, feed, and reproduce to excess, and when biomes change over time go extinct or ferociously exterminate and outcompete those occupying similar ecological niches. As far as I know, humankind is no different, we're just better at it.

Your last paragraph is typical-minding and an attempt to establish consensus. Please check your consensus at the door. There are people who take these arguments seriously, including yours, and if I took your argument seriously I'd seek the mass extermination of the human race within my own means.

Or, you know, I'd just go around trying to lower the intelligence of the human race by introducing heavy metals into the water supply.

Good riddance. I have been reading Hlynka for years and while he had a lot to contribute and had a viewpoint very underrepresented and definitely worth having on this place, he got worse and worse as time went on.

The rule that I think is most important for this forum is listed immediately underneath "be kind". Make your point reasonably clear and plain.

The thing that I despise the most about this place is the weaselly nature of some posters on an anonymous forum on the internet. What is the point of implying something or putting words into other people's mouths? Hlynka went from contributing viewpoints and arguments to making poorly veiled sneers at other people, accusing them of believing things that they say they don't believe. In the worst cases, this came across as propping up the weakest version of opposing arguments and gaslighting behavior in the extreme. I lost count of how many times I saw him say something to the extent of "you say you believe one thing, but you actually believe another, I can tell." He should have the intelligence to know when he is being baited, and the ability to separate the bait from the true believers.

What are you supposed to say when he implies someone is an an anti-semite in response to a fairly well-reasoned argument about, I don't know, HBD? (To hell with the HBD argument, by the way, it's the same fights over and over.) Whether they're an anti-semite or not, the point of this place is to address the fucking argument instead of doing a snarky driveby. Who does he think he's convincing? If the person is a genuine anti-semite who believes in Jewish space lasers and Zionist control over America, what the fuck is the point of implying someone's an anti-semite out the sides of your mouth? Is it intended to make people discredit the argument because of who's making the argument? In which case, that behavior is well enough represented outside this place and I don't want to see any more of it.

The thing is, I don't know what he hated more, the people who baited him or the true believers he found abhorrent.

We found out what other people really think and talk about, and the conclusion is intolerable. The internet's leveling effect meant that random nobodies could be signalboosted into the consciousness of the body politic.

Once undesirables were allowed an audience and became clearly visible, those who weren't undesirables wanted them destroyed, silenced, and removed from their public spaces.

Don't worry, there is an easy workaround for this mess. Just never be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power.

This is because it's incentivized.

It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.

Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.

It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.

As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.

HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.

The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.

You'd get less pushback if you said this out loud. Especially since nothing about this argument you think is so difficult for people to understand is not regularly discussed on this forum and the limits of utilitarianism are commonly understood even by the people who espouse it depending on their utility functions.

Stop going after specific people and go after arguments. This passive-aggressive bullshit is something I expect from Americans, but as someone who tells us all frequently about how he is a member of the warrior caste, your snide jabs and thinly veiled sneers are irritating in the extreme. If you want a fight on the internet, you can get one quite easily without having to resort to these sneers where you pretend to hold yourself privy to some secret of the universe all the stupid rationalists don't get. Nothing is new under the sun, not least of which the things you think other people don't get or haven't considered.

I spoke plainly, before the server reset, about fighting ecological x-risk and climate change by nuking India, and by attachment, any other nation with significant growth potential, with the express goal of making sure that no country ever industrialized again. I was pilloried and given mod warnings, but I was still allowed to express my opinion.

By comparison, "cui bono" is barely even an argument. If you want to speak plainly, then you tell us. You tell us who benefits, and then we can see if that's true in the long or short term. Personally, I have little faith in the ability of anyone at all to plan for long term outcomes, especially if the outcomes are distributed over other people.

Fair accusations, but I believe nobody has consistent principles. Having consistent principles is not socially or evolutionarily advantageous in the long run. To navigate a world where power changes hands constantly, fluid principles are a necessary precondition for survival for those without power.

As mentioned, banning drunk driving is an attempt at modification of unwanted behavior. There is also self-preservation strategy; drunk drivers are a hazard to anyone who has to use the street.

And post-COVID I'm not sure anyone believes the FDA is non-politicized anymore. Today, the FDA picks winners and losers w.r.t. the pharmaceutical industry.

Power accumulates. You want to be on the winning team, no matter who's winning. Expect everyone to 180 at the drop of a hat if the other team is winning.

Instructive recent case: citing national security concerns, Chinese governments and state-backed companies enacted policies banning Apple phones from the workplace.

What happened was that even companies without ties to the government with nothing in the way that could be realistically be construed as a national security concern attempted to do the same regardless, and made a point of doing so publicly, believing that by doing so they were demonstrating their allegiance to the government.

"We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."

I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.

People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.

My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.

Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss.

This sticks in my craw a fair bit because this is who, whom all over again. The truth will set you free, but point deer make horse is an easy way to tell who is on your side and who isn't.

In both his examples, the truth is not the problem - it's the very short men, women's sexual preferences, the severely handicapped, society, and resources that matter instead. You can crow in the streets all day about the emperor having no clothes, but that doesn't make him not the emperor, and if he can execute you and yours at will, you'd be damn certain that pretty much only the suicidal would say the quiet part out loud.

I think this is kind of a weird take as I played the hell out of the starship troopers FPS and most gunfights in that game are also extremely close, although it is possible to engage enemies at range with one or two gun variants.

Helldivers 2 has pretty bad gun balance issues and a flawed armor system, that's it. And fighting bots is an entirely different experience than fighting bugs that just rush or ambush leap you, bots can often snipe you crossmap with extremely accurate rockets.

This is not unique to modern western democracy, nor are powerful Jews the only one taking advantage of the hierarchy of everything. You are describing power. Power has not changed in thousands of years.

This is the most incredible thing I've ever read. I'm kind of amazed by it, honestly. Amazed and impressed.

I'm sorry because this really isn't the place to make assertions without evidence, but I don't believe you. I think you are a liar, and if people were this coldly utilitarian about their community, let alone their country, civilization might be at genuine risk of breaking down and the hardcore red-tribers who believe civilization is constantly inches from the precipice are not full of hyperbole and hot air.

To clarify, it's not the fact that you see the benefit in doing as you claim that impresses me so. It's the fact that you think not doing so is rational and pragmatic. The borders, rules, abstract nations of distinctions between nations and ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level that you claim to not respect are the very same rules that draw lines between you and others.

The house metaphor is overused, tired, but still apt. Do you respect fences, doors, barriers? Do you not understand, as a self-avowed rational actor, that if you show that living in this manner is possible for you, then others will realize the same thing and apply the same lack of respect to your fences, doors, and barriers?

And again, as a self-avowed rational actor, you are willing to say this out loud? Are you insane? In your own words, while you understand the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law, you feel no obligation whatsoever to America as a legal entity? You realize that what you are claiming is that that you like it when the laws govern others to your benefit but don't intend on following the same laws. Leaving all questions of morality aside, I struggle to believe you genuinely think this is a position with any pragmatic value at all.

So I don't believe you. I do not believe you are a pragmatic or rational actor, I believe you are reveling in taking advantage of a system designed to benefit you while caring nothing for its maintenance, under the belief that this is rational and logical behavior. Do so at your own peril, there's enough people who do the same already, but crowing about it makes other people who maintain the system you benefit from and contribute nothing to feel like maintaining the system less every day.

Again, I am making assertions without evidence, but I am willing to make a guess that you do not have offspring. If I am wrong and you are not a liar, and you genuinely hold this opinion, I wonder if you have any goodwill for those who carry your genes into the world and have to live in the countries - yes, countries! - of the future.

To wit - I never thought I'd see the day where ignoring the phrase "don't shit where you eat" is treated as a rational belief.

Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers.

I know we do our best to not typical-mind around here, but goddamn, when it's staring you right in the face and they are telling you exactly what they think, to deny it in this manner is like watching someone deny the walls they're walking into. From the suit alone and the tireless, documented efforts of the NBCFAE, it's clear that the competency and effectiveness of air traffic controllers mattered less than if they were African-American or not.

I remember TracingWoodgrains' attempt to try and start an offshoot of The Motte he believed needed to exist with "less of a right-wing slant". I remember thinking that the attempt was idealistic, misguided and naive at the time. It's nice to know that he hasn't changed that much. I wish him all the best, but when the leopards eat his face I won't be at all surprised.

As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.

If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.

If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.

While I am not sure about the main body of your argument, I think that you are incredibly wrong on the China AI prediction and drastically wrong on the oil prediction. I've got skin in the game and am quite long on oil futures, specifically exploration and drilling. Whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are currently the lifeblood of civilization and we do not have any appreciable replacements - even if it could conceivably replace energy needs, which it won't, especially given the modernization, buildout and investment in Mexico, India, and a growing second world, hydrocarbons are used to make goddamn everything from aspirin to solar panels. The current dip in oil prices and subsequent resurgence of unsteadiness in the ME is caused more by US fracking than anything else, making them energy-independent and less interested in ME politics as a result. The smarter players in the ME know this and have tried their best to diversify their economies with mixed results, or alternatively are looking to allow countries to purchase oil in currencies other than USD (it was barely covered in the news but the UAE agreed to let China purchase oil with RMB recently).

China is already suffering because of a massive deficit in professional or service jobs. AI will make that worse. It's not an instability problem - the Party can levy pretty much everything under the sun to make sure they stay in power - but their internal governance, domestic market and stock market is quite weak and will take at least six to eight years to recover, let alone supercede their growth for the last decade. Their foreign policy is the wild card: it depends entirely on BRICS and how that shakes out. BRICS is considered a joke or a threat depending on who you talk to, the truth is probably somewhere in between. None of the BRICS nation really trust or like each other, they just want to form an alternative non-American power bloc in case America decides they don't like them all that much one day after a change in presidency.

I also think that progressive/liberal blue America is an opposition based party. They are anti-Israel because team Red is nominally pro-Israel and support for Israel has been the unstated government line for decades. Given that Team Blue is more about stomping Team Red into the dirt and laughing as they die of opioids and despair than it is about anything else, I think that their care-o-meter about Israel is entirely limited to the extent that Team Red is for it.

Exceptional steelman of trigger warnings.

I finally understand. They're more easily understood as a way of gimping everyone else to make the triggered person feel more powerful.

Overthinking it.

Far easier to understand it as the way it slots into power dynamics and progressive stack thinking. Jews have strong ingroup ethnic preference, traditions, and cluster together in money management, media and entertainment fields in the strongest country in the world, and exert outsized influence in its politics because America is the country where money talks louder than anything else and allows capital to do insane, outsized things.

Muslim states across the ME are, to be blunt, shitholes dominated by tribal winner-takes-all politics or foreign power influence, usually some combination of both. The average westerner only sees them in the context of the Cold War (plucky rebels fighting communism), the War on Terror (9/11 perpetrators), or Predator drone victims (we fear the blue sky).

If you go back a few decades, or even as recently as Dubya, you can see the dominating force of Christian religion and puritanism in American politics. American red tribe has traditionally used this leverage to back Israel, because Israel and the promised land features heavily in Christian theology and they were an ally in the Middle East back when oil interests there were considered much more critical to America maintaining global hegemon status. Plus, Israel is much less likely than its neighbors to maintain a percent of extremists that will pitch Christians off rooftops.

Of course, as America secularized, an ascendant Blue tribe would calcify against this, because both tribes in America define themselves by what the other tribe is not. Israel support is Red-coded, along with Bible-thumping, Dubya-supporting, bomb-the-brown-people, military-industrial-complex enriching itself by selling Israel weapons they use to oppress the brown people. So blue tribe looks at this and starts bible-bashing, Dubya-is-a-moron bitching, campaigning against America's foreign dalliances (imagine that not being red-coded before Obama-Trump) and whining about the MIC war profiteering. [Unsolicited Opinions On Israel] showed up in a Marvel comic book as a boo-outgroup signal.

No guess which side would equate Israel's existence to modern colonialism.

I'm pretty sure you could get the left to be pro-Israel as soon as you got Red America to be pro-Muslim. I'm not quite sure how that could happen, but stranger has happened before in American politics.

Definitely! As soon as they become the world leader militarily, economically, culturally, etc. while still allowing their population to vote.