fuckduck9000
1yr ago
In WWI they didn't have material superiority and lost, in II they did and won. What wars are you thinking of, where sheer manpower defeated a clearly industrially superior enemy? Manpower has been irrelevant since guns.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
It says nothing about you, society, morals, what fictional characters you root for. Or what music you like. Pretend you’re a genocidal genius or a vicious gangster, it has no moral relevance. Self-reflection just gets in the way of fun, people can only enjoy things “ironically” now. Or they have to condemn the characters before they watch, like a hayes code era title card ‘these are bad people, don’t try this at home’.
And Assholes fucking up is more entertaining than watching good people prosper. You could apply this rant (and people did say the same things) about seinfeld or breaking bad, any show worth his salt. Maybe the little house on the prairie is good, I wouldn’t know.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Thoughts and desires are unlimited and uncontrollable. What prevents us from acting on them is downstream from the chaos, and it is only there that we can control it and assign moral responsibility.
What is mental abuse? Clear-cut, garden-variety example.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Because it's fun, it enhances the proxy experience to be emotionally involved, like picking a sports team.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
So by despising others, you telepathically harm them? That clears it up, I don't think mental abuse is real abuse.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
They’ve certainly fallen for our trap, haven’t they. To think how hard it must be for them to shoot at their ukrainian brothers in a war everybody else caused. And now their true enemies won’t even help them extricate themselves from a little war of aggression. Fuck them.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Will Schryver, which has been praised as ‘consistently more accurate than western observers’ by some people here (Shakesneer) , said 12 hours ago “neither Kupyansk nor Izyum are threatened; AFU casualties are catastrophic. ”Well, ukrainian troops are in the center of Kupyansk, and if a bunch of russian sources are to be believed, Izyum and Lyman are being evacuated.
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/imetatronink/status/1568370298373967872#m
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1568519813332406274
https://twitter.com/BarracudaVol1/status/1568531278256799750
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Agreed, we're made from the same mold, they just picked a different team.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I guess @KofmanMichael (tends to hedge excessively) and @powerfultakes (rationalist-adjacent) have the least egg on their faces of their respective teams.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I think your dislike of political enemies is spilling into your assessment of geopolitics. I can’t see the last few year’s events as anything but a win for US hegemony. Russia’s prestige is at its lowest point since the fall of the USSR, and China, wih its turn to dogmatic authoritarianism exemplified by its zero covid policy, and looming real estate crisis, is losing influence and slowing down. From their tepid response to western sanctions towards their ally, it doesn’t look like they think they have a great deal of leverage in an economic war against the west.
Being self-sufficient, high oil prices shouldn’t concern you, they’re probably good for you relatively speaking, they hurt china and makes europe more dependent on you. Only russia could benefit, but they’ve helpfully decided to waste it all on some lost cause.
You’ve depleted munitions, but unless you were planning on the mother of all land battles against china for control over eurasia in the next five years, I don’t see how that should affect you. Medium term, you’ve gained greater capacity and more committed allies.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
It doesn't seem to have helped Russia this time though, even heavily dependent countries like Germany and the baltics haven't taken a soft stance. It works for minor transgressions and concessions, until it doesn't. Then the consumer finds other sources and your own economy is in shambles. It's the "King Cotton" myth.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
It's a double-edged sword. Sure, there will be damage in europe, but the russian economy is also screwed. Using your market power like this is not some "I win" button, it's brinkmanship, you can squeeze some advantage in the beginning, but if you keep pushing, the two cars collide, and not only is your leverage gone, now you also have a serious problem.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Relax, it's also sexism if they don't want to. First time?
Women don’t have agency, as can be seen in the article itself. These women don’t make decisions, they are “plagued by midcareer derailing”, “have not been properly prepared”.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
It's way too early to say that. I do think russia will suffer far more than europe from the severing of trade, so you can count me in the gdp camp. I'll grant that some predictions on the deterioration of the russian economy under sanctions (I've heard -50% early on) were exaggerated.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Sexism means the reason they are not in these positions is that external forces prevent them from doing so.
No, not according to feminists. Ever heard of internalized sexism?
If you managed to prove that discrimination was non-existent or even favoured women in some cases, which has been done, they would retreat to this position. Even if men were absent or every single act of sexism was performed by women, feminist theory would still stand tall. Because it's an unfalsifiable castle in the air, floating above dozens of nested baileys.
As I alluded to, according to me and other critics, the deeper belief at the heart of feminism, is that women have no agency: they are either acted upon directly, or, if they act, someone else (men) made them act. Accordingly, all blame always devolves to men, no matter the circumstances. This tactic, of course , can prove the 'oppression' of any group one cares to name.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Technology ushered in a utopia of unlimited wealth for everyone for one of the basic desires of humanity. Men are just humans with above average sexual desires, only degenerate as far as women are frigid. Those desires are now sated. I for one am grateful , but perhaps when other dogs caught the car, they found out they never really wanted this, they want to keep running. By banning it, they hope to recapture the energy and pain from this unfulfilled desire to produce more stuff, kids and gdp. Or perhaps they think people should be in pain, not get what they want, and pray with thorns in their underwear.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I don’t think it indicates any kind of vawe breaking, this is intra-progressive infighting.
As such, disagreement is fundamentally to be resolved by who can cry the hardest. Or in more rational terms, about who can claim oppression status, women or ‘women’. Find out who gets to join the ranks of ordinary cis men as oppressors, cis women for oppressing the trans, or trans women for still being men?
The LGBA lawyer goes for the M&Ms argument that is the mark of a racist when applied to blacks. Mermaids counter with word games. The opponent’s riposte is to start crying, checkmate. I forgot which pigeon I was rooting for.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Of course it can work, that’s not the question. It’s all about the should. Debates shouldn’t be settled by who can cry the most, has the best rhetoric, shows the most apparent devotion to God, accuses the other of the most digusting things, censors most thoroughly etc. Those things decouple the winner of the argument from his correctness. They lead us down the wrong path.
What’s your plan to get out of the woods? Trust in our feelings of sadness, disgust, hate? Let the best actor and showman guide us? And if someone tries to engage him on a rational level, dismiss the critic because they must be rationalizing anyway and ‘feelings are natural’?
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Obviously 3, but I wouldn’t express it in terms of corruption or selling out. It’s the totalitarian politicization of everything. Most critics afaict now believe their role is to judge movies for their supposed effects on society, not technical skill or the viewer’s personal enjoyment.
They’re not really reviews in the old sense, more like the stamp of a political commissar, similar to those advisory ratings for christian parents that simply subtract points for any cursing, kissing and not doing homework. Only the checklist goes: Are DEI casting goals achieved, oppressed classes portrayed positively, does it raise awareness of important political issues, do the oppressors get their comeuppance, etc.
A parallel with advertisement that may explain the woke capitalism phenomenom is the trend towards extreme identification of the consumer with his product. As Ed Norton says, ‘what kind of dining set defines me as a person?’. You can’t just like a good movie artia gratis, it’s serious business now, your self-image, and with it, the world, depend on it.
If you can manipulate people into defining themselves by their consumption choices, you get very motivated and loyal consumers. Similarly, you want your voters to be invested in your ideology with every fiber or their being, no decision too small to be left to personal quirks.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Why would westerners protest this war? It's painless, morally and geopolitically easily justifiable. You casually cheer on nukes and civil war, why would you be squeamish over a little proxy special operation, especially if, as you say, both sides are terrible.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
What do you say if the majority wants to commit genocide ?
They exist for a reason.
And that reason was replicating our genes, in an environment that has nothing to do with the present. Dog puts his paw next to the fire, experiences heat, then pain, backs off. His pain, disgust, dislikes, like ours, just a crude control system. We can do, and have done, better.
Why should those be disregarded for rationality?
Because it works better, eg science. Conflicting feelings cannot be valued against each other, whether internally or between people. What good would it do for me to express disgust at your worldview? Conflicting ideas can be tested, filtered, harmonized through dispassioned discourse. That's the only way out of the jungle.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Agreed, rats really shone during covid. I felt vindicated in the usefulness of our talks here, that was objective proof we were more than a fun debating club, we had actual knowledge of how the world works. Expert opinion, or perhaps more accurately, the mainstream perception of expert opinion, was just wrong. More importantly, we could have made real money off this, sigh.
The most interesting part of the saga as a culture war observer was that in the first few months, the political sides hadn’t fully crystallized around the covid danger issue, which made partisan discussions amusingly unstable and prone to whiplash (eg, parts of the left tried to make ‘globalism is good, therefore covid is harmless’ happen, and the right played along by going for the ‘dangerous foreign contaminant’ disgust reaction ) . Then they would find something else in their respective memeplexes to attach to the issue and suddenly switch sides, as if choreographed.
I don’t know if we can repeat the covid feat. It seems the BLM covid riots radicalized some of the more right-wing commenters, and our coverage of the ukraine invasion has not been stellar (imo those same commenters seemed to support russia purely on culture war grounds, like normies, forcing their memeplex battle into the object-level issue).
Perhaps we were just lucky contrarians that time, and we’ll be automatically wrong when the mainstream is right. Or we only have a true advantage on certain subjects that are unprecedented, emotional and involve some, but not too much, multiplying.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Lives-destroying madness, but ballsy. Putin started out thinking he could buy the whole of Ukraine for a few thousand russian lives (and a few more ukrainians), now he’s gambling for 3 provinces at 100k. Unless this is some sort of ploy to force Ukraine to the table before the grinder really gets going, the risk and rewards matrix based on available information makes it morally worse than the original invasion.
At least your paranoia has served you well. They could, and they will.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Do it. If putin keeps marshalling all resources of your nation for his bloody charade, you’d inevitably become an accomplice by providing them in one form or another.
Petition to merge all the lighter or more personal secondary sticky megathreads (wellness, friday fun, small-scale questions, etc) into one.
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