crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
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
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.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I would argue that it would be nice if we could live in walkable cities: but I'd rather be in the multi-ton steel behemoth than not, if the world is dangerous as you say.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I've noticed that terminally online (and dishonest) leftists can jump into the bailey of 'your valid and rigorous critique of x does not apply to y' because Marxism describes socialism as a stage of communism, or socialism is the end state of communism, or to be left is to be socialist, or the only true leftists are communist...
What you see that is an error of impreciseness is more of an general fly-swatter to those arguments. You don't have to be an orthodox Marxist-Leninist to know what exactly we're talking about here.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I disagree: and I think it's a fundamental difference in values that can't be overcome by argument. I think that the world would be a better place if people thought through the consequences of their actions. If you pour chemical waste into the water table, you recruit people into a cult, or you don't push a shopping cart back to the corral, it's not guiltlessness - it's malicious indifference. There's no legal liability, but morally it is abhorrent all the same.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Blue Tribe has an anti-conspicious consumption bias, partly for Gaia-worshipping, and partly because flaunting wealth is very Trump and anything that can be remotely considered to be Trump is bad.
But surprise, surprise, that doesn't stop anyone from using wealth to flaunt status! You may notice a certain lifestylism by those who proclaim themselves liberal and socialist and egalitarian. Hobbies like travel, as you said, can cost an absolute fortune, while the person in question looks like a scruffy pleb. 'Minimalist' lifestyles that rely on the labor and effort of a half-dozen people, behind the scenes. Showing off the install of the solar panels on your house. Long hikes on the Appalachian trail (with equipment worth thousands of dollars.)
It turns out it is quite expensive to look authentically working-class. Blue Tribe elite try their darndest to not look like what they really are but like everything that exists, it is a commodity, sold at Whole Foods, the North Face, and your local gastropub.
crushedoranges
7mo ago
I disagree!
Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.
I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?
crushedoranges
1yr ago
Not that I have any true objection to what you just said, but the USD-market has its share of bad actors, then crypto is crawling with them. It would be charitable to say that most of the space is full of scams preying on dumb money.
Just because a system is bad doesn't make its alternative automatically better! Crypto enthusiasts are baffled at the lack of uptake of their ecosystem - it is because for the vast majority of users, they lose their entire investment or come away losing money. An unregulated, legally opaque market is the perfect environment for naive investors to lose their shirt.
(And being a 'grudger', in the defect/cooperative axis, is a suboptimal strategy.)
crushedoranges
1yr ago
On Reddit I made a doomerpost when Trudeau declared his state of emergency. I pulled cash out of my credit union and waited. I'm certainly not uninformed of the problem. I even went to a convoy political meet-up quite recently.
And even in this self-selected audience of people who this is immediately relevant, I heard nothing about crypto. Crypto did not stop the chilling effect of the government declaring martial law. These are relatively affluent blue and white collars and they're keeping their money in relatively traditional investments (gold, real estate, small business) and not crypto. They still bank at Scotia, BMO, etc, for Christ's sake.
And it is because the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. You can talk all day about things you value but revealed preference shows that most people do not hold the same interest in the technology or in the concept of decentralization. People want to know if it's convenient, cheap, and safe in the real world. If you are a normie with no idea of what crypto is you would have been better off trusting the system because political and free speech rights are secondary to, you know, making sure you don't lose everything to a rugpull.
People who prefer trustless systems are, on the whole, one part tech-libertarian and nine witches.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.
If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
I'm all for it, but stuffing yourself in a obscurantist cubbyhole is a bad way to keep abreast of the trends of popular culture. Being aware of what normies consume is a great way to ascertain the valence of what is allowed to be believed.
crushedoranges
1d ago
If drug addiction is closer to alien chestburster syndrome then the common cold then that enables a wide variety of policy proscriptions considered too draconian in the west today.
crushedoranges
7d ago
I don't know who Rufo is, and I'm deep, as it were, in the shit.
Something new you learn every day.
crushedoranges
9d ago
The very credibility of the LIO and the West in general is at stake. If Ukraine loses, then it's a green light to all with revanchist ambitions. Too much national honor has been put on the line by feckless politicians, who have entangled their political fates to this insignificant front. There's no room for pragmatism.
crushedoranges
1yr ago
But my viewpoint is that cryptocurrency is a first order terrible thing, it is a banal evil like slash and burn agriculture, payday loans, etc. All the good it could possible do is corrupted by its incredible inefficiency and callous indifference to its own toxicity.
It is technology that is completely worthless, obsolete as it was theorized and definitely as it was implemented. Its only use I see is to extort the tears and sweat of the gullible and enrich the intelligent and evil. That some South Americans occasionally use it to buy USD is, in my mind, completely inconsequential.
Technology is not agnostic. It can be built to be vile. No amount of clever evasions and definitional wordplay can hide smug, self-satisfied, all-consuming avarice behind it all.
More of how drugs turn normal people into monsters that seek to replicate their misery. They superficially resemble the person they once were, but something new and horrible blossoms inside of them.
And yeah, you could try and cure it. But that only solves it on the individual level. The alien queen is still alive, and there are fools who advocate for her to get corporate citizenship. What's the point in spending half a million dollars trying to get a addict clean (and failing more than half the time) when a drug dealer can get a new victim hooked for the price of a happy meal?
crushedoranges
27d ago
I just wanted to make the distinction that being a contrarian is merely being against the prevailing wisdom. It doesn't imply action, only disagreement.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's a slightly gamified version of D&D 5e. An accurate representation of the roleplaying game, but it diminishes how fun it is. (The lack of simulataneous turns is the real killer.)
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.
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