erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
The classic Disney villain death is for the bad guy to fall off a cliff after getting into a final fight with the hero.
It's the best of both worlds; you get to see the hero defeat the villain in a climactic battle, the hero gets to show how good and noble he is by sparing the villain's life, then the villain dies anyway in a way that keeps the hero morally pure.
See Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, etc.
It's so insane. It's like the European elites looked at all the problems America has with its black underclass and thought to themselves "I gotta get one of those".
Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
To be kind to the cruel is to be cruel to the kind. Watching Aella's reputation go down in flames is what prevents young girls from wanting to follow in her footsteps.
Either being a whore is high status, or it is low status. If high status, good and proper to encourage your daughters to embrace that career. And if low status... this. This is what low status looks like.
So before you feel pity for Aella, remember the alternative.
I feel bad about it, too. But it has to be done.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
From "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" by Scott Alexander:
Would the Czar be corrupt and greedy and tyrannical? Yes, probably. Let’s say he decided to use our tax money to build himself a mansion ten times bigger than the Palace of Versailles. The Internet suggests that building Versailles today would cost somewhere between $200M and $1B, so let’s dectuple the high range of that estimate and say the Czar built himself a $10 billion dollar palace. And he wants it plated in solid gold, so that’s another $10 billion. Fine. Corporate welfare is $200B per year. If the Czar were to tell us “I am going to take your tax money and spend it on a giant palace ten times the size of Versailles covered in solid gold”, the proper response would be “Great, but what are we going to do with the other $180 billion dollars you’re saving us?”
The right has plenty of intellectuals; they have simply been systematically excluded from academia, so they publish their work in blogs instead of journals and get funded by subscriptions instead of taxes.
erwgv3g34
4mo ago
No, it doesn't. Society thinks of relationships like jobs; it is perfectly acceptable to hop around looking for a better deal as long as you give two weeks notice before you actually start. Even marriages work like this now, though the divorce might take a little longer than two weeks.
Doesn't matter how long you were with your old partner and how much you promised to love them forever, you can just wake up one morning and say "I just don't feel that way anymore" and as long as you wait a whole week out of respect for the heartbroken it is totally kosher to start a sexual relationship with someone else.
It is now totally normal for a girl to have a high school boyfriend who she breaks up with when she goes to college, a college boyfriend or two who she breaks up with when she graduates and relocates for work, and another boyfriend or three before she is ready to settle down in her late twenties to early thirties. Toss in a handful of hookups and you are expected to be OK with a woman having half a dozen sexual partners before you marry her.
I hate it.
People who are not logged into Twitter can only see the linked Tweet, not the context.
Here's the whole thread:
Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".
Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.
It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.
But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.
Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.
One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?
Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.
If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.
Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.
If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.
Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.
Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.
But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?
Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.
Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.
Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better of than the UK or canada or india or aus.
Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
It is a testament to how completely fucked up our relationship norms are that sex by the third date is not considered a big deal, but dropping the L-Bomb (saying "I love you") is huge. The modern dating script is that you fuck someone before deciding whether you love them or not. And you move in with them before getting married. It's absurd.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
There is no fucking way Kulak is a real woman, any more than he is actually a Rhodesian catgirl; that kind of autistic obsession with violence screams male. At most, Kulak might be a transwoman, but I doubt it.
It is very easy to have someone else dub over your lines. You can hear Kulak's real voice on several episodes of The Bailey.
Harsh winters is the obvious explanation for why light-skinned races (Whites, Jews, Asians) are the smartest while dark-skinned races (Blacks, Indians, Aboriginals) are the dumbest. Obviously, high latitudes select for low melanin that their inhabitants might better absorb precious sunlight and create vitamin D, but whole months without food also select for low time-preference and the ability to plan ahead; you need to work hard most of the year and make sure to save food and wood for winter and avoid eating the seed corn even when you are really hungry. By contrast, tropical jungle environments where there is food year-around which cannot be stored for long before rotting in the heat and humidity inherently select for impulsivity and r-selection. Big brains are calorically expensive; if you don't need them, evolution is not going to make them for you and might even take them away. See Spiegelman's monster and Homo floresiensis.
erwgv3g34
10mo ago
Football and country music are at best orthogonal to the culture war issue in question. Is Anheuser-Busch willing to put out a statement saying that transwomen are men, or perhaps to send out a commemorative can to a prominent anti-trans celebrity like J.K. Rowling? If not, let the boycott continue until the company is bankrupt, the office buildings burned, the executives' heads on pikes, the barley fields sowed with salt.
They are trying to apologize to their base without alienating progressives; they are trying to go back to appearing neutral. Cannot be done. They made the decision to enter the culture war; now they have to pick a side.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Oh, come on; generalize a little. He obviously means that the average man wishes he had an endless parade of young women eager to have sex with him and willing to do whatever gross, perverted kink he had. Which, you know, is obviously true.
I found it funny how, despite her very unusual views and history, she wound up in the same place as many normie high-earning careergals, struggling to find a man who earns at least as much as she does:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpLudIca4AEQP_0?format=png&name=900x900
Equally funny how she phrases it as "they're poor in a way I'm not financially prepared to support in a world where I want children," but when pressed, clarifies her requirements as "I would like him to have at least equal money to me".
Aella is rich; she could easily afford to support a kept man or a house husband if she wanted, as countless men have done for their wives and mistresses throughout history. This isn't about her needing a partner who can provide for her and their children. This is about her getting the ick from any man who makes less money than her.
This is about hypergamy.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
And in "The Atomic Bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project". And we all know what "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning" was about. It's been clear for a very long time.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator.
We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
It's hard to summarize books with hundreds of pages, especially when those books are, themselves, the collected summaries of thousands of blog posts and comments. But if I had to give you the elevator pitch...
Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows. These lies are useful to women and society, but harmful to you. The Red Pill metaphor comes from the famous scene where Neo chooses to wake up from the Matrix.
Once you learn accurate truths about women, men, dating, and sex, you will almost certainly choose to change your behavior. Both your new beliefs and your new behaviors will be extremely at odds with feminist dogma, and most people, being in thrall to that ideology, will indeed boil it down to you viewing women as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of men. But that is obviously not how a practitioner of the Red Pill would frame it; unlike fictional villains, real people don't usually think of themselves as evil.
A quick sample of Red Pill beliefs:
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Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Men are the expendable gender.
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As a consequence, men are attracted to the majority of fertile-age women. Women are only attracted to a small minority of men.
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Therefore, fertile-age women are able to easily have casual sex with men who are completely out of their league relationship-wise (rock stars, Olympic athletes, etc.) and often become deluded about their actual Sexual Market Value.
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Women and men are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, fertility, purity, and nurturing. Women are primarily attracted to height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits.
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This explains why men age like wine, while women age like milk. Youth, beauty, fertility and purity are things that can only ever go down with age, while status, power, money, and sexual experience tend to increase with age.
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Ipso facto, any dating advice which assumes men and women are the same is nonsense. Few do this explicitly, but many do it implicitly by failing to give out different dating advice to different demographics, e.g. "be yourself".
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A surprisingly common mistake is projecting the desires of your gender into the other gender. For example, a woman in her 30s complaining about the lack of attention from high-quality men despite the fact that she spent her youth getting a fancy degree, a good paying job, a nice house, an expensive car, cool hobbies, etc. Not understanding that men don't give a fuck about any of that and would rather date a broke but cute 18-year-old waitress.
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Women become infertile much faster than men. By 35, usually too late to have children. If plan to have 2-3 children, should be married by 30 at the absolute latest. In our culture, where you are expected to date and cohabit for a few years before marriage, means a surprisingly short window between the time a woman becomes legal at 18 and the time it is too late for her to find a husband. Goes double for middle-class and upper-class women, who are expected to finish a degree at 22 before even thinking about marriage.
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Women often follow a dual-mating strategy of sleeping with high-value men in their sexual prime, then settling down with a reliable provider in their later years. This is called Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks. You want to be the Alpha Fucks, or at least avoid being the Beta Bucks.
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Some implications of this information to your own life; self-improve, lift weights, never commit to a woman over 25, never commit to a woman with children, pretend you have more sexual experience than you do, project confidence, never appear needy or desperate, etc.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
I wrote a comment and gave it to my sensitive reader.
Dude, I like your comments. Stop this nonsense.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
I liked it. It was like an old-timey teletype news wire.
From "Servants Without Masters" by Harold Lee:
Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.
Which is all well and good from a policy perspective, but did nothing for me when faced with the reality of interacting with my host family’s maid. There, in the flesh, was a middle-aged Filipino woman who was just there to attend to my needs, as a guest of the family. I was expected to ask her to wash my clothes, for example, and prepare whatever I wanted for breakfast. And for all my admiration of the political needle-threading of Singaporean immigration policy, this situation completely freaked me out. It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.
And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. My emotional reaction was not really about being an American with sturdy frontier values of self-sufficiency. I was perfectly happy to farm out menial work – as long as it was done by a faceless worker in a uniform, rather than a single person I was expected to have a relationship with. This incongruence was one of the major lessons I took from my trip to Singapore. Even after I returned to the Land of the Free, I kept being struck by the ease with which I blithely accepted the service of servants as long as they were framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.
And I noticed that the same blind spot applied in the other direction, in people’s attitudes towards submission towards superiors. The very word “submissiveness” tends to raise people’s hackles in our culture, but in fact we are happy to accept it – if and only if it’s submission to a faceless institution, rather than to someone’s personal authority. In an old-school apprenticeship, the master essentially runs your life for seven years and can bring you back if you run away, possibly with a flogging for good measure. This seems incredibly coercive today, and is probably one of the reasons apprenticeship and other forms of demanding mentorship are in short supply. But at the same time, it’s considered completely unremarkable for someone to go into nondischargeable debt to go to grad school and work hard to satisfy every whim of their professors. For a more barbed example, it’s considered entirely unremarkable for a woman to be submissive to her boss, but sounds terribly suspect to expect her to be equivalently submissive to her husband.
No they won't. That's what an IQ of 120 means. "A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people." Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.
(A surprising amount of people don't seem to realize this; they talk about good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods as if rich people used their wealth to hog all the good real-state where shootings and robberies and rapes and so on don't happen, as if those were natural phenomenon like lighting bolts rather than something caused by the people who actually live in those neighborhoods; likewise, complains about disparities in funding, as if schools in rich areas were taking advantage of a gold mine they unfairly took over rather than taxing the economic surplus produced by superior human capital)
Education doesn't do shit because trying to teach algebra to a boy with an IQ of 85 is a waste of time. Increasing his IQ to ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING TWENTY would be the biggest improvement in the human condition since the industrial revolution.
Even if they start materially poorer, you have eliminated all the dysfunction. College students also live in material poverty, but they have much better lives, because they are smart and hard-working and nonviolent. "If you take the exact same facilities and you fill them with inner city gang members, drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and single mothers, you get a housing project."
And just like college students, after a while those 120 IQ kids will start accumulating capital and lifting themselves out of poverty. It's much easier to follow the Success Sequence when you have the intelligence of an undergrad.
Yes, they will still be below elite kids who got uplifted to an IQ of 140, but that's relative poverty, not absolute poverty. Caring about that is the politics of envy. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's." It's societal poison.
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