crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I know this is a tangent to what you're really talking about, but I have to say something about crypto. In short, there is a very short list of people less trustworthy than the Argentine government: the people who advocate for cryptocurrency are amongst them. The sort of people who hold a morbid fascination with the misery and suffering of others to further the adoption of their internet funcoins in the off chance they can offload their bags onto desperate people is profoundly evil.
Crypto is not a good store of value, or a currency. And anyone who says that it is you should be very wary of.
crushedoranges
9d 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
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
10mo ago
This is an unfair argument.
Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?
Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.
All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
So as far as I can tell, Russia is losing this war, as it is almost a year later and they have failed to complete their objectives in forcing Ukraine back into their sphere of influence or secured territorial integrity. All observers assumed Russia would swiftly win this war, but their armies and industry are in such a shambles that they are unable to defeat the Ukrainians in the field and are reduced to terror bombing with artillery and missiles.
Against an inferior foe which they (according to Serge) have destroyed multiple times over. How could you not have great gains against a numerically and qualitatively inferior foe?
Does this sound like the strength of a great power to you?
The 'attritional strategy', so as far as I know, is a cope. There was no grand plan to grind the Ukranian resolve to fight through manpower and material because that would be planning for defeat, and even worse, planning for defeat against an inferior power. Now Russia is isolated and scraping the bottom of the barrel for allies while the entirety of the Western military-industrial complex is pumping every available resource into the country.
The Soviets, with their empire, couldn't match the American spend on military, much less all of NATO. How can the Russian Federation - a faded, declining power in comparison - hope to match a richer, larger version of the alliance? So as long as the Ukrainians want to fight, they will have the latest and greatest in NATO arms. The only hope for the Russians was to win early and decisively. If Serge's narrative is for a long war then there really is no hope of victory left - one that is worth throwing away the last of the Russian youth and prosperity.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
The woke live in the paradoxical confluence of complete confidence in the state's power to bring about their wishes while living in constant culture struggle against its enforcers. It's like being a sovereign citizen, but sometimes saying the right gibberish does make things happen. Just because in the West authority has become completely abstracted from force doesn't mean that the authority's power no longer requires it. The demos has great power that yet sleeps, yet.
If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Just because the Argentinian state is a known bad actor does not make any proposed alternative inherently better. I can point to any amount of rugpulls, from the original MT.Gox to the very recent Polaris to demonstrate that crypto is not safe.
I would ask you to assume good faith, that I am informed and I have good reason to believe in what I do. Then make an argument, if you believe I am wrong. For the same reason, I assume you have no position in cryptocurrency and are arguing purely on its technical and utilitarian merits.
To do otherwise would be a great conflict of interest.
Oh, boy, it's time for the annual political spin and deflection season!
I'm going to dispense with any poll-tracking or statistic-tealeaf-reading and go with my gut here. I think the Republicans will gain the senate while Dems squeak by in the house, making no one happy and reverting the system back to the 2nd-term Obama status quo. This is good for dramacoin. Nothing makes Americans more politically engaged when their legislature starts throwing DNS errors. The imperial presidency grinds on...
'22 is only significant, in my mind, as the pre-season for Trump Strikes Back '24. Fetterman and Oz is a preview of a greater contest, between a mental invalid and a scruple-less grifter. As much as my little accelerationist heart quivers at the idea of the VP debating Trump, it's most likely that we are witnessing the Last of the Boomer Civic Nationalists fight it out. The last of the people who value a liberal rules-based international order will croak in the next eight years.
God help us all.
Who will gain control of America's imperial hegemonic power? The right-populists, or the left-populists? Will the civil war be averted for another generation, or will it happen in my lifetime? The fate of the nation may very well be decided on which geriatric old man has a fatal stroke first. What you see today in politics - the insanity, the terror - this is not the nadir of the republic's fortunes: it is merely the threshold unto the abyss.
In time, we will look upon the misfortunes of our day as a golden age lost to time and tragedy.
But perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps electing corpses is the future of American politics. We have the technology to continue the life of brain-dead patients indefinitely. In the Oval Office, there is a mighty chair beneath the Resolute Desk, a Golden Throne, that will sustain the president's life for as long as it needs to be. A thousand infants are sacrificed each year to feed the device's need for adenochrome, perpetuating the beacon of boomer power from Washington, DC forever.
Anything to avoid electing someone from Gen X.
crushedoranges
9mo ago
In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.
As we've seen in recent years, so-called professional scriptwriters have been putting out utter shit on the big screen and prestige TV that fans of the work would often (and do!) write superior takes for free, on the internet. The only thing that separates the two are gatekeeping and connections in the notoriously nepotistic and corrupt Hollywood system.
SAG and SAW fundamentally rely on the studio system for their collective bargaining to make any sense. As soon as photorealistic 3D generative animation gets off the ground, there will be no corporate giants for them to leech off. They see a future where automated scabs run them out of business, and I can't blame them. The mediocre products they produce can in no way compete.
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
I am of the opinion that stupid people, trusting people, and old people should be allowed to keep their money. It is not reasonable to transfer the burden of 'educating oneself' onto the general public when it comes to investments and finance. When a state turns the deposits in their national banks into worthless nothing, it is of course a wrong thing. It is also a wrong thing when sleazy cryptoscammers run off with all the investor's money.
It's not a young man's game anymore. A careless idiot degenerate gambler who loses his inheritance by blowing it on a shitcoin is highly unsympathetic. But you read the bankruptcy documents of these shams of companies, and you see the pure despair of the investors. They are men and women in their fifties and sixties, who were sold hopes and dreams of financial independence. They are ruined now, and it is unlikely they will find good employment: they will be working now until the day they die. You read about marriages falling apart, people losing their houses. These desperate, foolish letters begging the judge to be pushed to the front of the creditor line, when the truth is that there is no money at all. All they have are the worthless tokens on a server they can't even withdraw from. So much for the promise of a decentralized currency!
There is no protection against this, in the technology, in the services that have sprung up around it. It is as safe as a screaming buzz saw for the unwary. It is not their fault: they were deceived, by advocates who were full of themselves, who gladly pumped them up - but dumped them, and called them witless fools and rubes when they lost it all.
So I find it hard to argue on the 'merits' and 'technicalities' of cryptocurrency when it has created so much human suffering. You may be able to ignore it, but I can't.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
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.
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
1yr ago
From what I can tell it is so undeniably woke in that it effectively sets up a reverse caste system, enshrined into the law.
And since South America lacks the advanced institutions of the cathedral to implement this outside of the viewpoint of the majority, the Chileans have to write it into constitutional law - and exposed to the light of democracy, it withers and dies like a vampire.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But the entire point is that there is no argument being made (because even having a debate would be a concession of the nature of the topic as up for questioning.) The overall cultural milleu of the present day means that many leftists try and bludgeon their political opponents through authority, not argumentation. If a evangelical Christian showed up to a university and cited the King James Bible as an authoritative we'd all laugh at him but that happens all the time in spaces like these.
When left-wingers make grandiose claims of moral and cultural authority, they get greatly offended when I tell them that I don't accept their expertise. They don't want to get down in the weeds and fight it out because that would give the right a platform and validity, as if our positions were equal to theirs. Their counterparts on the right have to fight for every inch of ground to even be heard and they don't even want to step out of their ivory-tower citadels to engage with opinions they don't aesthetically like!
So I don't care what they think, to be perfectly honest. They can wring their hands and whinge behind my back on how mean we are all they'd like. Chekists deserve only contempt.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency. Aside from the obvious downside of longer trips: whether you get there or not is out of your control. The wariness of being in a public space, of watching your possessions, of keeping your eye out for the urban lumpenproletariat - it's stressful in its own way.
Once again we return to the revealed preference of most people: when given the choice between the public commons and paying money and labor for a private space, they elect for the latter.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
The fundamental bargain of neoliberal capitalism is that you'll forgo radicalism, tribalism, and religiosity in exchange for bourgeoise prosperity. It worked, until the gains of industrializing the world ran out.
The internet didn't cause the problem, it just makes it obvious that A) everyone is getting poorer and B) your elites still expect deference for riches they no longer provide.
So why care for a system that no longer works for you? Why care for global prosperity when you're getting none of it? When you bear the burden of upholding the order?
Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But that's not true, not in the least. If you are scammed in real life, you have several avenues of recourse, through the financial and legal systems. The very virtues crypto advocates praise (untrackability, anonymity, trustless systems) are exactly the qualities that make it possible for scams to be pulled off with incredible ease.
There are certainly those Don Quixotes who tilt at the windmill of the USD being a hegemonic currency, but that doesn't make alternatives to it better. If you create abusable tools, advocate for them, and don't tell naive newcomers of the dangers and only the benefits - you're more awful than you think. You don't get to walk away from the moral implications of your actions. You can't hide in the theoretical wonderlands and ignore how the implications of the technology come about in real life.
The devil isn't the inchoate maw that devours sinners at the bottom: he's the man who pushes a wavering soul at the edge.
crushedoranges
23d ago
What has always frustrated me about Freddie is that he gets it, he really does, but at the last possible moment he crimestops himself and reaffirms his loyalty to the progressive agenda. It's never the fault of progressivism that it fails in practice: it's the no-good grifters who corrupt it away from Real Communism.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
If there is anyone in the world that has the right to complain about Jewish women, it is Jewish men. For most of the world's masculines they are a folk tale told to scare impressionable youths but they (the Jews) have to live with and marry them. The closest thing in our reality to an actual monstergirl.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
This is, bluntly, underpants gnomes logic.
I know you're an enthusiast, but liking (and seeing) those things as worthy of pursuit in of themselves does not make it true. There are a lot of X and Y things we can introduce into systems that exist, but would we want to? Is there a tangible, economic benefit? Is it cheaper? Is it better? Or, lacking in those two essential traits: is it the right thing to do regardless?
Forgoing the efficiencies and economies of scale of the current system is a cost. Trusting centralized institutions is extraordinarily cheap on scale. And sure, there may be a market of legitimate use - buying grey-market goods, sending funds to dissidents, etc. But that economic activity is a sliver of a sliver. That's not what advocates are pumping. They're envisioning a mass adoption across the whole economy - of which crypto's limitations and decentralization's costs would become rapidly apparent.
Crypto without exchanges is a currency without liquidity, a nightmare of passphrases and uncertainty of payment. If everyone self-custodies and that is the result, what value is the technology? How are you going to buy a pizza with your cold storage wallet?
At least underpants physically exist as a tangible good.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Japan comes to the rescue: just call them futanari and be done with it. :P
crushedoranges
27d 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
3mo ago
If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.
Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
More options
Context Copy link