crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.
Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.
Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.
But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
It is, in a vacuum, but grudger strategies seem to be replicated in societies across the world while forgiveness ones tend to be the product of highly advanced societies with high social trust. Hothouse flowers, in other words.
It probably says something about the decay of social institutions when grudging feels better than forgiving.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But the land that was in dispute (and correct me if I am wrong) can be described to be 'cold as balls'. Finns were not moving en masse into the north, so the relative population densities were low enough for coexistence to be a possibility.
The Amerindians were OK with Europeans for a while until they realized they wouldn't stop coming. Grumbling about those damn farmers encircling another bit of prime pasture is one thing, but massacring and scalping is another.
Although doing a bit of research into the overall situation, it does look like they did go through the whole residential school and discrimination of language phase - but Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about Finnish policies to such effect: only Norway and Sweden. Since you're our resident Finnposter, could you look into it? Were there any particular programs to intentionally displace them in the 18th and 19th centuries?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
As a newly minted social conservative, bullshit.
Having a house and a family was within reach of the working and middle classes decades ago. Social media is a cope. People just have to compare themselves to their own parents to know that something's wrong. Seeing insta snaps of someone's conspicious consumption might annoy the superficially narcissist but if you rent a tiny apartment and you're single in your thirties you know that someone has fucked you.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.
A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Mainstream media is picking it up: CNN, Telegraph, Washington Post. Even Russia Today has an article!
Oh baby, it's on!
crushedoranges
11mo ago
The presentation of heritage gives a false impression, like it's fifths of a pizza pie, but it's more likely that she's ENGLISH and irish and homeopathic amounts of the rest.
In other words, a Dolezal. She looks a bit brown in her photographs, but much like other fakers like Shaun King there's a ton of things you can do to look mulatto. If Trump claimed to be Namekian because of his spray tan I wouldn't put too much credence on it either.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
A car is not just a means of transport: it is a private space in the public space, so to speak. You can store a great deal of things without watching them, you will always have a chair, a radio, a air conditioner. You can eat and even sleep in your car! These are not qualities that are commonly associated with public transit.
I went on a trip recently and I have never felt the desire to have a car to get around places, not just for travelling, but for its restful quality and comfort.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Watership Down. Or, if they have a higher tolerance for reading, Dune. (Those who are already playing Warhammer 40k can read Starship Troopers.) If they're more of a nonfiction type Machieveli's The Prince is concise and relevant. Art of War and On War are good for leadership.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I attribute the absence of natural rights from the discussion as the appalling dearth of political education in the modern demos rather than its irrelevancy. Ask the average voter where their rights come from and you'll get unhelpful answers (God? the State? being a 'decent' human being?). The degradation of rights into entitlements given by governmental fiat is something to be fought against.
Although it may be irrelevant in people's day to day lives it is of the greatest importance to the philosophy of government, and therefore its character.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Huh, interesting.
I think it makes sense, the theory, but I would caution against imagining that the establishment always had plans to centralize the internet. Lawmakers have chronically been incompetent at creating legislation concerning computers. What I suspect is that lobbyists for giants like Microsoft were allowed to write their competition out of business because no one else understood the subject at all - and those who knew better were, frankly, toe-jam eating weirdos.
Nowadays the government is all for it, but my 'politicians are stupid and easily manipulated' principle as well as 'boomers know nothing about technology' axiom are sufficient to explain how centralization took hold before the technological gains from singularity were realized.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
People feel poorer because they can't own homes and they can't start families. That's a qualitative reality that no amount of quantitative statistics can capture. Something that, I note, that our much poorer ancestors accomplished (albeit, with effort, but not an impossible amount of it.)
crushedoranges
18d ago
At this point, I don't even think that there is a geopolitical goal in supporting Ukraine, but a reflexive conservatism regarding the liberal project. Putin violated the post-Cold War consensus, eroded the Liberal International Order, and he Must Be Punished (even if it would be against the national interest.) The Europeans had 25 years to keep peace on the continent and failed. They failed in the Yugoslav wars and they're failing in Ukraine now.
Even if you accept the claim that respecting the sovereignity and territorial integrity of states is an end in of itself, the time to do that was in 2008, with Georgia, and 2014, with Crimea. Or heck, 1998, with Kosovo. The Russians have never forgiven NATO for supporting a seperatist state within their sphereling, and is happy to pay them the wages of hypocrisy.
But even with all this, I am still pro-West, because Putin is not a realist actor, but a map-painter, who justifies atrocities with dusty history books. He's not pushing back against NATO's expansion in his sphere, but reclaiming historical clays. Motivations are important in geopolitics, and irrational actors shouldn't be tolerated.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
From what my admittedly lacking research tells me is that there was an initial, 'strong' version of the constitution that did enshrine them as rights, but the finance department took one look at the figures for such a welfare program and said 'no way, we can't afford it.'
So they were degraded into nonbinding 'directive principles', so it has the weight and pomp of one's Amazon wish list. But still, it is a relic of the strong Catholicism that was once strong in Ireland, which the government is now desperately trying to remove.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*
*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.
and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism
Hereditary ideological enforcer.
Gack, my memory is hazy. You are correct.
I'll leave the mistake as it is, as a mea culpa, but I believe the rest is essentially true.
crushedoranges
7d ago
But, seeing as it is functionally a non-universal principle that must be adjudicated based on arbitrary definitions of oppressed and oppressor, isn't it just post-hoc rationalization? (Adolf Hitler, great advocate of social justice: taking from the Jewish bourgoise oppressors and giving to the German proletariat.)
crushedoranges
18d ago
They're perfectly fine games. (Paarthurnax and Trevor are my favorite characters from each, for vastly differing reasons.) They're just open world games and are considered inferior to their predecessors by auteurs. To a certain degree, they're right, but they exaggerate it for memes.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Your point would be better if Yud was a prophet in the wilderness, but instead, he's an influential idiot who has influence in the development of LLMs (and whatever AGIs emerge from their development.) It would be like having a board member on Intel who wants to make their chips hotter and slower. He's past the point of contrarianism: he's a Yuddite.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Alberta is the standout but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are no slouches either: as global warming progresses the US agricultural zones slowly creep northward. All of our Ukrainians have historically lived there, as well.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
No.
Or rather, it doesn't matter if your baseline is of low intelligence so as long as you have a talented tenth that actually runs things. Sure, you wouldn't be able to get the results of higher SD nations, but you can get something like modern-day Rwanda or Ethiopia going. Not great, but certainly above the (admittedly low) norm.
What is far more impactful is the threat of pernicious ideomemes like communism. You can throw as much high-iq Asians and Slavic technocrats at it to no avail. Even the most degenerate of African states are paradises to say, Pol Pot's Cambodia. Communism, in terms of HBD, is equalivant to a primal reversion to humanity's primate ancestors, an intellect-shredding machine. Even if one must accept the premises of HBD, it gives one hope that the right ideomeme can produce results out of porportion of one's intellectual talents, but we haven't discovered the right solution yet.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I've made my position clear in other posts quite recently, but the problem is that centralization is orders of magnitude more efficient than decentralized solutions, and technology increasingly pushes in favor of it. I've written some speculative science fiction on the matter. The larger the system, the more data it pushes, the more it can feed its machine learning algorithms. Giving up on the holy grail of machine learning just means that someone else will make a leaner and meaner finance transaction-bot, that will reduce fees to infinitesimal slivers and process a year's worth of financial transactions in an afternoon.
Given crypto's abysmally slow transaction speed (and the dubiousness of the solutions proposed to fix that) it's not competitive now, much less with whatever fintech comes from the next generation of money robots.
So long as crypto interacts with the conventional finance system, it will always be at a disadvantage. It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower and crypto is not. The fact that the majority of its current user base sees their hopes and fears rise and fall on its USD value will always make it less than it could potentially be.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
It is my position that those policies create a caste system in the more affluent West as well - nakedly open racial preference in service of social justice is just as abhorrent as it is in the service of the majority, like in Malaysia. Either way, you're creating distorted incentives that are rife for corruption and nepotism.
There's a certain degree of wokeness to all modern media of which must be tolerated, but RoP is where I draw the line.
I don't like series which disrespects its core material, its literary fanbase, which sneers on twitter and all of the fashionable places to mine for engagement eyeballs. It may be a perfectly servicable show but I hate the modern hype engine that intentionally turns up its nose at the nerds to try and gain cachet with an audience that doesn't even exist.
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