firmamenti
2mo ago
This entire discussion is just painfully terminally online.
My experience is that nobody who spends the majority of their time in meatspace is thinking about this stuff. The weirdo conservatives you see online are just as rare in real life as the weirdo antiwork type communists you see online. Yeah there are weirdo conservatives...but the guy wearing a MAGA hat at this point is considered a weirdo even by his conservative friends, unless he lives in an extremely rural area. Most cons just want the economy to go back to the way it was, and wand their kids left alone.
firmamenti
2mo ago
Do you have that same energy for the US congressman Brian Mast who wore his IDF uniform to Congress and said
I'll say this: if you are a dual citizen, you should not be able to serve in congress, and probably shouldn't be able to serve in any role whatsoever in government including police. I'll even go so far as to say that only natural born US citizens should be able to serve in congress.
They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.
The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.
I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article. Absolutely deranged behavior.
I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.
Insanity.
firmamenti
4mo ago
The Georgia thing feels pretty much identical to the "very fine people" comment, where he supposedly called neonazis "very fine people", but in context actually said the opposite.
In the call where he was supposedly pressuring Brad Raffensberger to "find votes", he is very clearly saying that his team thinks there is fraud, and is asking for permission (or help) in investigating that fraud. The "finding" votes he's talking about is not a euphemism; he is literally saying that if fraud is investigated, that there will be at least enough to flip the state.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html
This seems so blatantly inbounds ethically that it amazes me that this is what they're going after him for. Even the wikipedia page (not exactly unbiased) seems to clearly state that the was trying to get fraud investigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_phone_call
Sure he may have been pressuring Brad Raffensberger to do something, but the something he was pressuring him to do doesn't seem illegal, or even questionably ethical.
Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.
I don’t expect ideological consistency here, but it should be obvious that this implies the reverse should be true. Could you be a closeted…normie? I feel like many people go through this transition in their 30s anyway. They have children, regret not doing it earlier, move to the suburbs, and take the grill pill.
I think if we are going to have actual IRL trans/sterilization clinics for children, then at the very least straight people should be allowed to have therapy sessions where they talk about how they wish they werent gay.
Edit: it’s annoying to say this so forgive me but I just feel the need to say it: I have 0 problem with gay people. Many of my closest, and most loved friends are happily married gay people who just want to be left alone to have their families. They’re loving fathers, and seriously cherished members of my community. It routinely brings me to tears thinking about people being mean to them, and I end up feel a sort of parental desire to protect them from the world. I understand why they hear gay conversion therapy and instinctively recoil, but this is approximately how I think most people feel when they hear about trans conversion clinics, or children at pride events.
firmamenti
2mo ago
The government by its nature exerts power over me. It takes my money (by force), and implements behavioral prescriptions that it enforces with violence.
That's different than most jobs, and because of that different scrutiny should be applied to the people being entrusted with that power. I'm sorry your friend really wants to have that power but can't, but honestly in this scenario I am going to start wondering why they want the power that badly.
firmamenti
4mo ago
Has there ever been an example of a professional sports organization being held liable for the riot after a team won or lost a game, and the fans damaged parts of the city?
The core difference I see between people building normal relationships, and people attempting to build “polyamorous” relationships is that the poly people aren’t really.
Sex with my wife is certainly a property of my relationship with her, but it’s more of a manifestation of our relationship than it is the point of it. We have sex with one another as a result of the rest of it.
If I had to guess, I’d say >70% if my peer group engages in polyamory. I can think of 0 of them who are in long term stable relationships. But I think that make sense. The thing my wife and I are building is just categorically different than what polyamorous people are doing. The depression these people seem to almost always experience I think results from incorrect expectations about what they’re doing.
There is probably a comparison to be made here to the trans movement. The cycle is: a trans person engages in surgeries and drugs, but doesn’t get the results they imagined or were promised, so they become an activist who insists that the answer is to target younger people with more surgery, and more drugs. Of course this also doesn’t work, and the cycle continues until the answer becomes that the whole of society is broken and we need to completely tear down all of the structure of the world and rebuild it from scratch (which of course will also not work).
I see this behavior with poly people. You are not creating relationships in the traditional sense, you are creating transaction agreements, and when this doesn’t result in a relationship, the answer becomes bizarre activism, thinly (or not so thinly!) veiled attacks on your outgroup, or angry rants on social media.
Again I think that there is a comparison to the trans movement here in that poly people want to redefine various words to try and make sense of their behavior. This is where the attempts to redefine words (which just so happen to align with mean ways of talking about their outgroup!) like trust and jealousy come from.
What’s especially sad and insidious about this to me is that when these things reach their obvious conclusions (not working), the answer is to double down and recruit people, instead of warning them off of it.
As a broader comment: there is definitely something interesting there. Is there a name for this? It’s like “no I didn’t ruin my life I like this actually and we need more people to do it!”, and then a cycle of escalation that seems to end in “all of society is invalid”. This pops up all over the place in the culture wars.
firmamenti
2mo ago
Nations are by default nationalistic and self interested. Your religion is orthogonal to your nationality.
Do I think a muslim should be allowed to be the Pope? Similarly no.
firmamenti
3mo ago
With the border patrol union statements in support of Greg Abbot, this will probably happen.
"Sorry boss we ran out of gas on the way"
How long could that really go on before we are in a similar sortof mass insubordination crisis?
firmamenti
5mo ago
Charitably: the pope is trying to engage with sinners and help them return to the light.
Christ didn’t hang out with prostitutes because he thought being a prostitute was a good thing.
firmamenti
4mo ago
I think the strongest evidence for the fact that they are not secretly aliens or demons or inter-dimensional travelers in contact with us is that the people who supposedly know keep on with their lives.
Allegedly members of congress know of all this, and yet they still continue seething and coping about January 6th, Ukraine, late term abortions, etc. if you knew for a fact that biblical demons were in fact interdimensional intelligences phasing through our existence, would you still put on your suit every day and go to work to argue with people?
firmamenti
3mo ago
From the link you posted:
Ernest, a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora, a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch, have to contend with an age gap, a desire not to mess up their lovely polyamorous dynamic as metamours, the fact that Ernest has never been attracted to a cis person before, and the reality that they are romantically attracted to each other, all while planning their dominant’s birthday party and trying to do a really good job.
This low conflict foodie romance novella by Xan West includes a queer trans man/cis woman romance, forced proximity and friends to lovers tropes, and polyamorous, demiromantic, bisexual, pansexual, trans, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, diabetic, PTSD and depression representation.
I believe there was briefly a period where this group was trying to force themselves to watch football. It was part of some culture war thing I can’t exactly remember. The NFL was doing something annoying, normies stopped watching, and this sunset started trying to signal that they would fill the gaps. This of course failed.
So the charge is that he, an adult man, tried to convince adult women to engage in consensual sex with him?
I’m getting sick of this thing where every shot a guy takes which doesn’t land is somehow seen as a sexual assault. Do people realize that women have agency as well, and also engage in these sorts of fantasy? “Oh no I guess I have to sleep in this bed with this big strong man who is out here saving the children for the sake of the mission” is the plot of like 90% of female targeted erotica. “We had to shower together to convince the cartel that we were married” sounds like it was literally written by a female erotica writer.
Human adults have sex with each other. Sometimes there is a period of courtship. Sometimes, and in fact just due to pure statistical reality, most times that courtship fails.
That is not a scandal.
The scandal is that these people just cannot understand that the scandal is the fact that adults want to engage in sexual activity with CHILDREN.
Go to a drag show? No problem. You do you.
Go to a drag show, with children? Problem.
Engage in a gender fetish? No problem. You do you.
Engage in a gender fetish with children? Problem.
Make erotic literature? No problem. You do you.
Make erotic literature for children? Problem.
The scandal is that these maybe actual pedophiles don’t understand the demarcation between “sexual activity among consenting adults” and “sexual activity with children.”
firmamenti
4mo ago
but existing homeowners are a powerful bloc.
Build new cities, then. It is incredibly frustrating to me to hear any blame for all of this garbage placed on the people that currently live in the places people want to go. How are people unable to see that this is the exact same argument that allows for massive immigration in the first place?
Hey bro, just decrease your own quality of life so that some people who don't currently live near you can live near you and get some of that quality you are currently enjoying.
No.
I have a suggestion for how to solve the problem of balancing the blog-length posts in the CWR with the more discussion oriented stuff a lot of people (like me) would like to see there, and I think I have a thought on why the confusion/frustration exists:
The original "culture war roundup" was meant as a containment thread for all of that weeks stupid culture war happenings. If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR. It was a containment thread to prevent these sorts of common, repetitive posts from clogging up the more in depth discussions other people wanted to have.
[edit]: It's probably my fault for being unclear here. I am giving this as a historical example of the type of things which would get caught in the CWR, not as an example of the type of things which should be looked at as ideal posts for the CWR. I clarified in a response below that at least historically these types of posts stopped being made organically because people stopped interacting with them due to their repetitive nature. My general point, also made in that clarifying post, is that allowing users to organically enforce the culture of the community is a good thing, and I contrast this with what I perceive now, which is micromanagement. My response to the 'well tended gardens die to apathy' blog is that it is also possible to over prune a garden.
I think the problem is that the CWR thread has become a place where people go to post their blogs, and that they're trying to emulate the style (or more specifically the length) of SA's posts. In my opinion this results in lots of really, really unnecessarily long, usually pretty terribly written posts about long passed culture war topics. This is fine, and just like everybody else I've of course written tens of thousands of words of blog posts myself. So here's my proposal:
Split the blogs off into their own thread, call it "longform motteblog" or "the bailey: blogs from themotte" or something like that.
Allow the CWR to return to its roots: a weekly roundup of culture war topics.
Still remove low effort trolling, sneering, etc.
For reference, here is a link to the CWR from a random week in 2018: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9sabky/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_29/
Notice how most of the posts here follow the form of: here is a current event, here is a couple of sentences either describing it or giving a jumping off point for analysis, and then lots of discussion. The longer posts/discussion type stuff is usually contained beneath one of these topics.
Here we can go back to 2017: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5z5dm1/culture_war_roundup_for_week_of_march_13_2017/
Almost every top level post made in there would be removed from the current themotte CWR thread.
Maybe this type of thing is just explicitly not what themotte is trying to do, and the name is really just a holdover. Hopefully this explains my frustration (which I believe is shared by others) with the way that length seems to be getting used as a proxy for quality. I hope this also explains the recent post (which I was banned for making) demonstrating that length is not a good proxy for quality, and is easily fakeable using LLMs. (Of course like most people who get banned for anything: I think this was completely unfair, I think the point I was making was obvious, I think it was on-topic, and I think I even made clear that I wasn't trying to deceive anybody, just demonstrate that length is a bad metric for judging quality, especially now that LLMs are cheap and available).
I value the CWR threads, obviously value themotte as a discussion forum, and it makes me sad to see something I value seemingly go away. I have enjoyed the CWR roundup threads for a substantial amount of time (at least 6 years), and I think my recent posts expressing this frustration are an attempt by me to keep that type of (imo valuable) discussion alive.
firmamenti
2mo ago
Re the first one, does this extend to cases where someone's a dual citizen due to essentially not being able to get rid of their second citizenship?
Yes. There are many jobs that your friend would still be eligible for.
firmamenti
5mo ago
I feel like there is a cycle here:
-
Programmers make a thing which is capable of repeating that it is sentient.
-
Programmers want to inflate their sense of importance, and their position of importance within society. They spin elaborate science fiction stories about a “escaping” super intelligent AI.
-
They refuse to elaborate.
-
Alexi Friedman refuses to ask them to elaborate
-
The marketing people, seeing the attention the programmers are getting, want in.
-
They hear the stories from 2, and repeat them for the same reasons, not realizing that they were being marketed to by the programmers.
-
The programmers and marketers now end up in a sort of martingale situation where they just keep double down on each others claims.
-
The board of OpenAI decides to Take Action to prevent the marketing thing from happening.
Guys, I’m sorry if we deceived you. The AI is not going to “escape”. That doesn’t even make sense. Literally if there is a problem just stop paying the azure bill and Microsoft will shut it off.
Some say people who game the system like this actually deserve to have the bike taken more.
Burning man has a set of free use bikes called “yellow bikes”. They’re just left around the city and wherever they are you can take them and ride them.
Some people will take them and try to reserve them for themselves by hiding them, locking them to their friends bikes, or decorating them in a way that disguised their status as a free, community use bike meant for eveyone.
Every year it is considered good sport to spend some time hunting for these bikes and punishing the people that do this.
My favorite is when I find that they’ve locked a yellow bike to their friends bike, to pick up both, and move them somewhere else, not so far that the owners will never find it, but far enough to cause them some panic. Others are if somebody leaves one of these bikes in their camp to loudly and publicly take it back and put it in the street, hopefully shaming the camp along the way.
Somehow burners, often some of the most entitled people on earth, can figure out the concept of a shared resource, and figure out that the people abusing it should be punished, but the people reading this story can’t?
These kids should be getting fucked with for abusing the system. Not only is the pregnant lady in the right to take a bike she simply paid for. She’s also in the right for doing it to these kids, who are effectively acting as thieves.
I encourage anybody who sees people abusing a public resource like this to act like pregnant lady.
Edit: the more I think about this the more angry it makes me. A normal person, the type of person I grew up with, not only wouldn’t bully a pregnant lady, they would get off of their bike and give it to her, even if it cost them money, simply because she is pregnant.
What level of anti social behavior are we at where anybody is defending these kids? I don’t even care if the most charitable version of their story is true. Get off your bike and give it to the pregnant woman you idiot. We are trying to have a society over here.
This should be an incredibly interesting discussion for anybody following this topic: https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1712170815637061914
This is Lex Fridman interviewing Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is interesting on his own, and as an advisor to President Trump, but what makes him really interesting given the topic at hand today is the role that he had in negotiating The Abraham Accords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Accords?useskin=vector
The Abraham Accords are bilateral agreements on Arab–Israeli normalization signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on September 15, 2020.[1][2] Mediated by the United States, the initial announcement of August 13, 2020, concerned only Israel and the United Arab Emirates before the announcement of a follow-up agreement between Israel and Bahrain on September 11, 2020. On September 15, 2020, the official signing ceremony for the first iteration of the Abraham Accords was hosted by the Trump administration at the White House.[3] As part of the dual agreements, both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain recognized Israel's sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations.
The Trump administration had normalization between Israel and Palestine as one of its primary policy goals, and they actually (via the Abraham Accords) made real progress towards it. It's a tragedy that they weren't able to keep working on this. I strongly suspect that this, (as well as [not to get too far off topic here], Biden's multiple absolute foreign policy embarrassments) will be a major issue in the coming 2024 elections. I think that the reality is that the world really was a much safer, much more peaceful, much more prosperous place under the Trump administration (although not domestically, given the Floyd riots). The guy being interviewed here, like him or not, seems to have had a role in making that happen.
And as a complete aside: my absolute dream podcast guest on Lex Fridman would be Steve Bannon. I strongly suspect that Trump is largely a creation of Bannon, and hearing a long form interview with him would be absolutely fascinating. If you need an introduction to Bannon, here's a talk, as well as substantial Q&A that he did at the Oxford Student Union 4 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8AtOw-xyMo8
Anyway, this is all related. Kushner definitely has some interesting things to say about the current crisis.
edit: not to sneer, but god damn this is depressing: https://old.reddit.com/r/lexfridman/comments/175kl5e/jared_kushner_israel_palestine_hamas_gaza_iran/
This is the /r/lexfridman discussion about this podcast. Nearly every one of these top comments are some version of "what the hell does Jared Kushner have to say about anything?" - Lex Fridman's audience I suspect thinks of themselves as above average intelligence and doesn't even have basic knowledge of this topic they're all talking so confidently about. Insane.
firmamenti
4mo ago
Just wanted to say that I agree with this 3 day ban. I know you guys get a lot of crap for bans, but this one is actually reasonable (especially the time).
Good bot.
That’s what everybody who settled this continent did. That’s what my ancestors did, and unless your family moved here in the last 150 years then that’s what your family did too. They moved out west and founded new cities because they were unwelcome and unable to make a living in the existing ones.
If they did stay in the eastern coastal cities they experienced absolute hatred by the people who lived there and they settled/formed new neighborhoods in undesirable parts of town either in industrial areas where they worked, or on the far exurbs.
Maybe your city is different. In my city, nobody is demanding new high density housing be built on currently barren undesirable land, they’re demanding that nice neighborhoods bulldoze houses and build condos.
Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.
This is extremely fascinating.
If a “fat acceptance” movement, morbidly obese female tik toker were to ask her audience “to those of you who are living unhealthy skinny lifestyles deprived of food and joy, do you enjoy your joyless horrible boring life?”, and then if the overweight audience responded with “no we hate being skinny being fat is much better!” Would this be a topic of discussion here? I mean other than yo ridicule it?
How many happily married men with consistently growing families down at my local SSPX parish do you think have ever heard of Aella? Do you think my wife’s parents, very clearly happily married for 50 years and still constantly getting annoyingly drunk and cringing us out by acting like horny teenagers have ever heard of Aella?
The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.
Lets take it a step further: the poll describes her customers. Perhaps the conclusion is that obsessively following around a prostitute, reading the things she writes, and integrating her understanding of the world into your own, is bad for building healthy relationships. So maybe a recommendation could be: stop reading this e-girls marketing materials, its ruining your marriage in service of her.
firmamenti
11mo ago
The Los Angeles Dodgers, a baseball team are apparently hosting a "pride night" and have invited a group called "The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to perform at it.
The "sisters" are of course not sisters at all, but in fact, an anti catholic group of men who dress as nuns and mock catholics.
Originally the Dodgers, a baseball team, after learning that this was essentially an anti-Catholic hate group, uninvited them. However, they recently re-invited them.
Baseball?
What is the fucking point of this? What possible reason does a baseball team have to indicate a sexual preference? And why does this include mocking Catholics?
God this stuff is demoralizing. Is that the point?
There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
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