erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
We were able to keep this site going under leftist authoritarianism; who is to say we wouldn't under rightist authoritarianism?
A lot of neoreactionary though is about how authoritarianism is the default state of mankind, and liberalism is an unstable equilibrium that can only ever exist as an ephemeral waystation on the road to the next tyranny. That being the case, all we can decide is whether we would rather live under leftist authoritarianism or rightist authoritarianism. I know what I pick.
Christianity may have silenced Galileo, expelled Percy Shelley, fought against evolution, condemned heavy metal, and ostracized Dungeons and Dragons, but it also created a thriving civilization that stood for almost two thousand years and conquered most of the planet. Communism gave us the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward. Wokeness gave us South Africa and the Great Replacement.
Catholicism demands that you believe nonsense about the Eucharist and the Trinity, while Mormonism demands that you believe nonsense about golden plates and a planet called Kolob i.e. things that have absolutely no relevance to the rest of your life. Conversely, Progressivism demands that you believe nonsense about gender and race, while Communism demands that you believe nonsense about economics and human nature i.e. things you have to deal with every day. Given those choices, you are much better off taking your chances with the Christians than with the nominal Atheists.
The Dreaded Jim famously said:
The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.
The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.
If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.
And:
If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.
If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.
Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.
Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter. If you want to help future generations, you can do eugenics or genetic engineering. And if you don't want to make life worse for your current population you can avoid importing low-IQ foreigners and giving them voting power.
(If this was a hundred years ago I would also mention iodine deficiency and lead poisoning, but we already fixed those.)
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Accelerationism has a bad track record.
"Surely if we heighten the contradictions by taking stupid ideas to their logical conclusion and making things as bad as possible for everyone people will realize that the stupid ideas are, in fact, stupid and destroy the whole system!"
They really, really won't.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
I mean, this is literally just "wouldn't the world be a better place if the entire population had much higher verbal intelligence?" Which, yes, of course it would be great (and the same goes for quantitative reasoning, too), but schools are completely useless for this.
At best, they teach elementary skills like reading and writing and sort the people who were born with higher verbal intelligence from the people who were born with lower verbal intelligence by giving them well-designed tests and handing them the appropriate credentials.
Increasingly, they fail to even do this; teachers embrace stupid fads like whole language instead of using proven methods like phonics and run into the usual political problems with honestly assessing students' abilities. So you end up with a situation where 90% of adults graduate high school but only 80% of adults can read, making the high school diploma a useless signal.
MOAR EDUCASHUN is not the answer. There is no answer. IQ is genetic.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
What are they going to do if you ignore that and bring a book in your pocket? Fire you?
One thing I've noticed since I entered the workforce is that you can get away with simply ignoring your boss's stupidest orders surprisingly often as long as you don't confront them about it and pretend you made a mistake if you get caught. They don't notice, or they forget, or they give up on enforcement.
Millennial here. I just write my name down in cursive. For a while when I was a teenager I tried to half-ass a real signature by adding come curves on top, but I gave up on that years ago.
Signatures, like wax seals, are an obsolete relic of an age before instant telecommunications and cryptographic security. The idea was to have unique glyph that was easy for the owner to recreate and easy for other people to read and compare with other examples of the same glyph but hard for other people to forge.
These days it basically works on the honor system; I have never seen anybody compare signatures against an example on file before authenticating a transaction.
...hispanics do not hate whites. Where did you get that idea?
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
The assimilated members of the PMC, maybe. I can tell you that, here on the ground, latinos and blacks hate each other with the burning fury of a thousand suns. They hate us because we take their jobs, speak Spanish, and don't feel an ounce of white guilt; we hate them because they steal our shit, deal drugs, and live on welfare. If it wasn't for white cops keeping the peace, we would be totally be fighting each other on the streets.
At one point we were reduced to talking about "muggle realism" and "Horrible Banned Discourse" in the Slate Star Codex comment section when Scott banned the strings "HBD" and "Human Biodiversity" (the former was a play on an earlier euphemism of "Death Eaters" for Neoreactionaries, because Scott, hypocrite that he is, also banned that word after he wrote his posts on Neoreaction).
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Dr. hbd nrx is pretty good.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
...but I don't have the means not to rent? Around here, houses are going for $500k-$600k. I guess if I wanted to I could put most of my life savings into a 10% down-payment and sign up for a 30-year mortgage, but I don't want to do that, because again, I refuse to use credit. Also because I don't know if I am going to be working this job in 30 years and if I have to move I don't want to go through the paperwork of selling a house most of which is owned by the bank but in which I own like 15% equity. Also also because as long as my mother is alive, she is going to force me to allow my bipolar drug addict spinster genderqueer lesbian sister to live with us, and I don't want to be stuck with her in a house that I own.
I completely agree with your first paragraph (I have a shitty credit score simply because I refuse to use credit, so I had to show our landlady that I had a couple of years worth of rent sitting on my checking account along with a copy of my last few paychecks and an e-mail showing my latest job offer to get her to rent to us), but I'm not going to read through your AI slop.
Can I recommend you get a packable rain jacket instead? Umbrellas are just a bad invention. Bulky, fragile, take up one hand, cannot protect you from windy rain.
If you need a plausibly-deniable self-defense weapon, get a Maglite.
Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.
I am always amazed at the things people will propose just to avoid rolling back 60 years of feminism.
Widows are a tiny percentage of single mothers. The vast majority of single mothers fall into two categories:
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Women who had sex with a man whom any fucking idiot could have told you would be unwilling or unable to marry her and work hard to provide for the kids (criminal thugs, bohemian drifters, married men, etc.)
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Women who divorced a perfectly adequate man for the crime of not being Chad, excusing their decision to destroy their own lives, their husbands' lives, and their children's lives by saying that they were unhappy.
That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?
More like saying there is no need for the government to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage people to teach their kids to read. Which is true. When I was a kid in Peru, there were government schools, but they were seen as the last resort of the poor; anybody who could afford it sent their kids to a private school. Which, admittedly, was much cheaper since all anyone needed to set up a private school was a spare garage and enough money to hire a teacher, but that's just another point in favor of the free market.
If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.
A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.
I'm not seeing the "benefits", is my thing. Like, let's leave aside the nonsense where grifters get paid to do research on hating white males (not because it doesn't happen, but because it is too easy a target) and focus on the strongest arguments for government-funded public research; things like NASA and the LHC that are discovering real scientific data that it is impossible a private non-government actor would have done.
How does the New Horizons probe improve my life? How does finding the Higgs boson? How does developing the correct theory of quantum gravity? Why is the government stealing money from me to pay people to do these things?
The beauty of market-driven research is that it only happens when somebody with money has a positive expected rate of return, which means convincing other people with money to pay for the results, which means that the research is expected to make people's lives better in some way.
Government grants have no such fundamental tether to reality.
Right. But unlike the military, there isn't actually a need for Congress to fund any science. Let it all be done by the private sector publicizing their breakthroughs as patents and citizen-scientists who want to spend their own time and effort and money doing research. Burn academia to the ground.
It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.
Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.
We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.
If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)
But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...
...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.
Is it? It's very, very right-wing, but that's not the same thing. From "I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup" by Scott Alexander:
From what I can tell, most of us are Grey Tribers who refused to go along with the blatant falsehoods of wokeness and got thrown into the pit with the rest for it. The surveys support this. From the same essay:
How many "God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III" conservatives do we actually have here? I think the most prominent ones were @HlynkaCG, who got himself permabanned, and @FarNearEverywhere, who left. We got a couple of other military vets and Christians who fit the bill, but the bulk of us would be as completely out of place in a USMC boot camp as we would be at Sunday church service or a Super Bowl watch party.
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