erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
15d ago
I used to feel the same way about Scott Alexander. Then his e-mails leaked.
Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.
And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
From "Book Review: On The Road" by Scott Alexander:
Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs. This is so obvious to them it is left unspoken. Whenever their money runs out, be they in Truckee or Texas or Toledo, they just hop over to the nearest farm or factory or whatever, say “Job, please!” and are earning back their depleted savings in no time. This is really the crux of their way of life. They don’t feel bound to any one place, because traveling isn’t really a risk. Be it for a week or six months, there’s always going to be work waiting for them when they need it. It doesn’t matter that Dean has no college degree, or a criminal history a mile long, or is only going to be in town a couple of weeks. This just seems to be a background assumption. It is most obvious when it is violated; the times it takes an entire week to find a job, and they are complaining bitterly. Or the time the only jobs available are backbreaking farm labor, and so Jack moves on (of course abandoning the girl he is with at the time) to greener pastures that he knows are waiting.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.
If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.
The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.
We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.
If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.
The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.
But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?
As 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.
The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.
Yes; once a woman graduates college she thinks herself too good for a man without a degree.
The solution is to stop sending women to college.
Which is why we have all the non-progressive TV, movies, and video games..... oh, wait. It turns out that solving the coordination problem allows you to beat the market.
Progressive movies keep tanking at the box office. People are increasingly turning to alternatives like anime and k-drama. Wokeness doesn't control the whole world (yet; growth mindset!)
Unstable.
Much like congress cannot bind a future congress, a country cannot credibly precommit itself to never grant political rights to a population of immigrants; once they are in the country they are a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground waiting to be picked up. It may take a generation or two, but eventually somebody is going to realize that they can gain political power by expanding the franchise in exchange for the implicit promise that the new citizens will vote for their faction, and act accordingly.
Case study: African-Americans. Explicitly imported as slaves without rights, remained so right up until Lincoln and his allies saw an opportunity to own the South by emancipating them, then cemented victory by making them citizens. Now America has to deal with a racial underclass whose primary concern at the voting booth is who will offer them the most gibs. As the saying goes, the colonists should have picked their own damn cotton. And if current year Americans were wise, they would clean their own toilets.
Specially since Stable Diffusion's only advantage over Dall-E 3 and Midjourney v6 is being uncensored. Why the fuck would I go through the trouble of buying a GPU and downloading SD to my own machine if I can't use it to make pictures of Violent Sexy Hitler? Doubly so since SD models became non free software/open source; SDXL Turbo, Stable Video Diffusion, and Stable Cascade all require you to pay a monthly subscription fee to legally use them for commercial purposes, and Stability AI's stated intention is to do the same for all future model releases.
SD 2.1 sank because it was censored. I hope SD 3 fails, too, and the community continues to focus on SD 1.5 and SDXL, which are the libre and uncensored models (SDXL just got a nice boost in the form of SDXL-Lightning!).
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 90:
She was aware now that tears were sliding down her cheeks, again. "Harry - Harry, you have to believe that this isn't your fault!"
"Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."
"No! You-Know-Who killed Hermione!" She was hardly aware of what she was saying, that she hadn't screened the room against who might be listening. "Not you! No matter what else you could've done, it's not you who killed her, it was Voldemort! If you can't believe that you'll go mad, Harry!"
"That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least."
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
States' Rights died in the Civil War, and Civil Rights pissed on the corpse. The blue tribe feels zero compunction about imposing its values upon the red tribe. Why should the red tribe be any different?
Yaoi fanfic is also female fantasy; you can tell because the dom/sub dynamic is pegged at 11 from the first word (the stuff that's actually intended for gay men is... different).
What never ceases to amaze me is that there are three completely different types of gay male smut available for all kinds of genders and orientations. There is gay male smut aimed at straight men, otokonoko, which is exactly the same as regular smut aimed at straight men except that the "girl" is a little flat and has a certain extra hidden in "her" underwear (the infamous Boku no Pico is a prime example). Then there is gay male smut aimed at straight women, yaoi, which is exactly the same as regular romance aimed at straight women except that instead of a guy and a girl you have a seme and an uke. And then there is the gay male smut which is actually aimed at gay men, bara, which I know little about because trying to read it triggers my disgust instinct (by contrast, yaoi is just boring, not disgusting, and otokonoko is hot).
There is, unfortunately, not yet a genre of gay male smut aimed at lesbian women. But we can dream.
What the articles tells me is that getting women into science is simply not worth the trouble; each time some broad opens her piehole, we lose a luminary.
Can you imagine if this nonsense had been around while Richard Feynman was still alive?
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Go read a couple chapters of Manacled. It is weird and unusual. It's not about the sex. The sex happens in about 5 lines where Hermione's super ashamed and humiliated about it. It is not written to arouse.
This is completely normal for female erotica. It's what gets women off. From "The elephant in the living room":
When I say that fertile age women are sex obsessed, I don’t mean that they think about the sexual act itself as much as men do. If you skim through a romance novel, there are nine hundred pages where the male love interest demonstrates how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action. As men understand sex obsession, women are not sex obsessed.
And from the comments of "Reaction 101: The reactionary red pill on women.":
The typical romance novel has a thousand pages, and the insert character only gets one page of dicking. Does this mean that girls are not interested in dicking? No, it means that the other nine hundred and ninety nine pages are about dick selection. Porn is men conquering and women surrendering, romance is men performing and women choosing.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
From 1984 by George Orwell:
"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
...
"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.
The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
Copyright law is in general meant to prevent customer confusion (eg preventing people from believing knockoffs are authentic).
That's trademarks, not copyright.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
But the fact remains that both separate and community property regimes are written gender neutral and provide legal remedies for many of the frequently claimed injustices. Every state now favors joint custody, and there is a strong presumption that fathers should be involved in their children's lives.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
You are correct that divorce is almost never in a woman's best interests. That doesn't mean it is in the man's, either. Women suffer romantically (because a single mother in her 30s will never be able to get as good of a husband as a childless woman in her 20s, if she can get another husband at all) while men suffer materially (because, as the primary bread winner, he is the one that gets hit with the alimony, child support, etc.). It's mutually assured destruction.
That doesn't change the fact that women are responsible for the vast majority of divorces, either initiating them outright or making their husband's life hell until he files for one. It is just evidence that women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual choices. Which is precisely why they were not allowed to until the sexual revolution.
From "The False Life Plan" by the Dreaded Jim:
Consider the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever love her and her children. Ditches him. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.
Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.
She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.
And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.
At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)
Meanwhile her husband, Jon Gosselin, the father of her children, having lost the wife goggles, promptly got a hot twenty two year old girlfriend to replace his aging thirty eight year old wife, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might marry her. But then, having been burned once, maybe not.
The typical marriage is Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin: The wife has a hugely inflated idea of her marriage market value (based on her F-buddy market value when she was considerably younger) and this poisons the marriage.
Now theoretically, if a woman is chaste, men will only approach her that are appropriate to her marriage market value, and she will avoid getting an inflated perception of her value, but no man believes that a chaste women is likely to remain chaste, because, they are not likely to remain chaste. So a woman faces a storm of approaches that would never happen if the boys had to ask her dad before approaching her, and if her dad said yes, they would get not a date with the opportunity of physical contact, but merely the opportunity to court her for marriage. These approaches lead Kate Gosselin to believe that she is entitled to marry a six foot tall physically fit millionaire, and that life, her husband, and the male dominated society is being terribly unfair to her in not giving her what she is entitled to have.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
He has a blog called Bennett's Phylactery. I really liked "You’re Going to Be Doxxed", "Evils & Designs", and "Breeding Our Way Out".
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.
Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish. There is a reason things like the early life Wikipedia section and the coincidence detection triple parenthesis echo became memes.
Frankenstein is finally getting attacked by his own monster.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Dude, TDT. If you sin, then you are the kind of person God would have condemned to hell in the first place. If you don't, you are the kind of person who would be saved.
Think of it this way. There are two instances of you; one in the real world, and another one that God is simulating to decide whether to predestine you to heaven or hell. They are both sufficiently similar that they cannot logically choose different actions. If you sin, then you live in a universe where the copy God is simulating sinned as well, and you are going to end up in hell. Conversely, if you are virtuous, you live in a universe where God's copy of you was virtuous, and you are going to heaven.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
The Washington Post's defence is also hilarious in its weak "look, a squirrel!" attempts at distraction - hmm, Pope Francis is looking different today, can't put my finger on it, did he get a new haircut or something?:
That second picture is not a glitch; it is based Gemini telling us that it supports Cardinal Sarah as the next supreme pontiff.
The problem with that is you are brain-draining the labor class of all their natural leaders, and assimilating them into the gentry culture that considers working class culture its enemy. When the union leaders and managers come back from their elite colleges to manage the coal miners and Wal-Mart workers, they will no longer be working class kids who rose through the ranks and who understand and represent the interests of their people; they will instead be culturally-foreign occupiers.
More options
Context Copy link