georgioz
2yr ago
It seems like a noble sentiment on the surface, but it does not seem that great when you are hiding in the bushes while the enemies behead your brothers and rape your sisters and aunts. This high-minded morality to me is just a sign of privilege, it is easy to pretend to be "moral" if one is not present with tough choices
georgioz
2yr ago
I care because it is one of the many instances of how the social norms are established and before you know it, it will be your own daughter smelling around the dinner table. I am done with the "live and let live" attitude for all the craziness it brought upon us. I am now all for return of good old shaming/blaming back into town. So yeah, I have no problem calling Aella and any of her partners as disgusting people. Sue me.
georgioz
2yr ago
What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63)
If it is not causing kerfuffle, then it should. She had sex almost twice as many times as she showered. So she did not shower before or after having sex.
The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.
I do not remember it exactly, but I think comedian Bill Burr described similar phenomenon as "clap commedy". "Comedian" tells a joke and instead of people laughing, they just clap. Comedy is special in that even if the joke is maximally politically incorrect, the laugh is involuntary and it clearly shows if the joke was actually funny.
georgioz
2yr ago
I couldn't live without a wood stove. Can't beat free heat just from cleaning up fallen trees, and somehow it feels cozier than anything else.
It definitely is cozier. If you burn wood, you also basically ventilate the whole house in matter of minutes including all the vapors out of your chimney. You then create the area of lower pressure in your house, so instead of your warm high pressure and moist air going against your roof/walls (creating mold), you have the opposite effect when the air is going the opposite way from the outside to the inside through various mircrospaces. Plus good wood stove heats also via infrared waves, which is much more comfortable. You have cooler air around your body but you absorb heat from infrared - similar to how some sunny autumn days feel comfortable if you are outside even if the air temperature is low.
I have to say that wood stove is the most comfortable source of heat, not only directly but also creating this good microclimate in the house.
I have classical Tirol tiled woodstove that does not rely on any electricity or other sensitive components. I even asked for automatic doors for management of air toward the fire, but I was discouraged from it in the end. The argument used was simple: there are wood stoves hundreds of years old that work just fine even today. A motor that opens/closes the door maybe lasts 5 or 10 years if I am lucky and it will give me just additional headaches when it inevitably breaks. The guy gave me guarantee of free inspection with the promise that the stove will definitely outlast my house. I was sold immediately :D
Just one comment, many heating systems that use other fuel such as gas or wooden pellets also rely on electro-mechanical components. So do not be surprised when your heat pump becomes useless during blackout - of course it does when there is no electricity for water/air circulation.
I do have a tiled wood stove with an oven where I can heat food/water and that also serves as additional heating element (when open) in case of extreme cold. I did install it for monetary but also house microclimate reasons. But lately I am more fond of how robust this old piece of technology is to various shocks and SHTF scenarios. I have no regrets for sure.
georgioz
2yr ago
I just want to add the usual switcheroo between marginalized people and historically marginalized people. As other people say, women now have 50% higher college enrolment compared to men. But if one grants argument that they were historically marginalized, this remains the same even if women are 100% of enrollment and no men are allowed.
georgioz
2yr ago
Yeah, he is very woke but I find him one of the sources that I like listening to, if for nothing else then for more "diverse" information diet. He does have some good takes even on woke topics.
Sean Carroll addressed this controversy on his podcast and I think that the best argument was that Webb name should never have been the proposed one. James Webb was just a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher leading NASA. He did not have any significant discoveries or scientific work under his belt. He was just a politician - an important one, but pencil pusher nevertheless. I think that having scientific projects named after political appointees is much more damning, it shows some level of hubris and quite frankly only shows how out of touch these people are. So yeah, fuck Webb - this controversy is well deserved even if for bad reasons.
Interestingly enough, I have exactly the opposite opinion and I am in line with OPs thesis. The social media made the world a smaller place, people have feeling that they can peek into the living rooms and bedrooms of people continents away. We really are living now in a global village, which reinstated also some more visceral human instincts such as gossip, or public shaming in form of cancellation. Except with some caveats: you can literally have former murderers being famous celebrities, but god forbid if you have said something wrong 10 years ago on Twitter. You can be sure that a virtual mob will gather solely focused on ruining your life, all the while eating popcorn and having fun doing it. It is reenactment of age old tradition of pillorying somebody for perceived antisocial deed, and then having random people casually throwing garbage at him while going about your business in the town square.
As others said, this misses the overall debate and more importantly also function of language. Overall you have two types of language: you have colloquial, normal language that tends to be broad enough so that it is simple to learn and capable of communicating vast majority of day-to-day concepts between people with different backgrounds. It tends to break on the edge cases. Then you have scientific language (that rationalists prefer), which requires a lot more effort to learn, it is mostly meant for smaller communities of let's say academics but which has advantage of being able to deal with edge cases that these communities find interesting.
A simple example of a word: chair. Go and google image the word chair, you will find all types of those: office chairs, lounge chairs, plastic chairs, wooden chairs, chairs with armrests and those without them, chairs with multiple legs but also chairs with square or circular base. Now there may be some edge cases, where we may have confusion if something is a chair, or a table and many other edge cases. But people generally know a difference between table and chair. The solution should not be to force people to say: "Please, sit on that plastic object over there, that weighs 4.85 pounds and that has four cylindric legs touching the ground."
In a sense I think that your proposition is just another attack on normal language and parlance and common sense. It is exactly in line with the original attempt that similarly confuses words such as sex and gender and personality and interests and so on, which just reinforces the idea that everything is just socially constructed and everybody is entitled to their own version of social reality, and that there is no common ground for communication - of course except of social power relations in this never-ending cultural war of what group can force their version of social reality upon the rest of us. The only criterion for preferring certain language has to be moral/ethical/ideological one, there is no such thing as usefulness of language, or its history - it is only about power and if it leads to "good" or "bad" moral outcomes. I refuse the whole thing as a premise.
I played the game VTM:Bloodlines. Hands down one of the most engaging worlds I've ever played... The game itself shows its age after so long, and the way they manage their contentmeans you can complete all the interactions and the world starts to feel dead towards the end... but those first 5-15 hours are some of the best in all of gaming.
I've never played the Tabletop VTM, but I checked out V5 of the tabletop game... no idea how the mechanics work, but read through the introduction and my god it has one of the best world build hooks I've ever encountered.
Oh, you do not even know how far the rabbit hole goes there. White Wolf and the whole Old World Of Darkness setting was incredibly intricate and interconnected. Just one thing, the cosmology. The story is that there are three cosmic energies respectively responsible for the following: The Wyld, The Weaver and The Wyrm responsible for creation, weaving that creation into The Tapestry of Cosmos and then Wyrm was the force of Destruction to keep the other forces in check. Except the Wyrm went insane and now is the force of corruption. Vampires are just one of the Wyrm creatures in this setting.
Then you have the whole Mage: The Ascension setting, where supernatural "willworkers" are trying to tap humanity AKA Sleepers and force them to view the world in line with their tradition, a Hegemony of sorts except that their power is curtailed by the force of Paradox - the collective resistance of the humanity to supernatural that can literally kill a Mage who exceeds her bounds. Except one faction of the Mages have "won" (not really) this Paradigm War, they call themselves as Technocracy, it is the Mage faction that was capable of utilizing tanks in 1500s as a form of Magic battling against literal Merlin with fireballs. Reading from cards? Technocracy calls it "statistics". Encountering ghosts and other interplanar beings? It is just this new cutting-edge technology of Void Engineering handling aliens. Including the part that "prayers" work: your cutting edge plasma weapon will not work when there are many sleepers around, at least sleepers not prone to believe that Men in Black can actually wield plasma weapons to protect Humanity from supernatural threats.
Werewolves are not just these weirdos running around in the wild. They are serving The spirit of Gaia and they fight corruption in all form, especially the Wyrmling manifestation inside The World of Darknes in form of shadowy cabal called Pentex, that controls corporations such as chemical mammoth of Rainbow Incorporated or Herculean Firearms Inc.. Of course unless you are one of the Black Spiral Dancers, a Werewolf tribe that succumbed to the Wyrm corruption, not unlike the Warhammer 40K theme.
And of course, you have all the "edge" players such as Hunters, Mummies, literal Ghosts and other beings being part of the whole world. It really is a wonderful piece of worldbuilding compared to which some nukes being shot at Vampire Antediluvian in India are just background stuff.
Radical feminists have the same simplistic and faulty “analysis” as Marxists. For traditional Marxists, all history is to be analyzed as class struggle between workers and capitalists. Capitalists use their privilege in form of property of capital to allienate workers and politically oppress them in order to perpetuate and reproduce that whole system called capitalism.
For radfems, the history is to be analyzed as a gender struggle between men and women. Men use their male privilege to oppress women to perpetuate the whole system called patriarchy.
To me all these new causes are basically the same recycled template of dialectical leftist conspiracy theory - just with a new name for oppressed and boogiemen. They just change the name for this boogiemen secret power group and for the system they create. What they all share is the Manichean dichotomy of these forces, analysis that is always reduced to simplistic power relations and the name of the whole conspiracy. So you have whites vs POC, white privilege and white supremacy. You have cishetero vs queer people, normalcy and cisheteronormativity and so on.
As with all conspiracy theories, there may be some grains of truth of various sizes in there, you can have some fancy sounding language and so forth. But similarly to any other conspiracy theories, the analysis runs backwards from belief to “arguments”.
Very good read, thank you. And I agree with the author that most Role playing games are not really those. I played D&D and Shadowrun, but my best game was Vampire: The Masquerade. I remember that my first character I spend maybe a week designing died during my first session. It was a result of unlucky roll and yes, my Game Master could have salvaged the situation but he would not. I then had a talk with him and he really did not like the roleplaying aspect - my character running around with weapons was literally "out of character" I wanted to build.
The next character I created more closely resembled me, it was easier to think about his actions that way and it eased me into the whole acting stuff. I eventually made some different characters and I really liked the actual roleplaying aspect, I think it really helped me socially in my future endeavors. To this day I have fond memories of my crew. We had a lot of fun sometimes playing through the whole night until dawn with Massive Attack or Tricky playing in the background and smell of cigarettes and cheap coffee filling the room. Good times. Plus the VtM and assorted games had incredibly high quality supplements that I read just for fun to gain some occult knowledge. The whole setting was incredible rabbit hole into one of the best worldbuilding that I have seen in my life, I have read supplements for other games just for fun.
Also I played Cyberpunk 2077 on release and I rate it as 8/10, luckily I did not encounter any bug at all. I did not mind little things people endlessly harped about such as behavior of the police. I went through the story, which to me was excellently constructed, acted and voice-acted. I got my load of fun for the buck I paid as far as I am concerned. I hear that a lot of things were fixed and polished and I am eager to return to the Night City with any future content DLC. Also for anybody out there who likes these sandboxy but story driven RPGs like The Witcher, RDR2 or Cyberpunk I can recommend a hidden gem I found recently that I already poured more than 100 hours into (my mark of superb singleplayer game): Days Gone. Thank me later.
georgioz
2yr ago
Sure, it is not “wrong” to have certain sexuality, similarly how it is not inherently wrong to be certain sex. The left is all about individual power and choice - if somebody wants to become straight or gay, why not explore ways how to do it? They are willing to do it for the sake of sex/gender.
georgioz
2yr ago
I agree. According to this study on identical twins, the concordance of homosexuality is in the ballpark of 65%. There may be some environmental factor there. For me it is interesting that we now have a situation where biological sex is supposed to be fluid and sexuality is supposed to be ingrained and outside of being able to be changed.
georgioz
2yr ago
The Redline Podcast had a good episode on the whole situation including Microchips. Several notes:
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You really cannot move the high-tech semiconductor lithography machines. They are the size of a bus with incredibly complicated innards that have to be setup outside of highways or other disturbance to be able to create the microchips. A hot war would probably destroy the capacity for years even under best of circumstances.
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The whole game with microchips now is that the tech is moving very fast. Basically the cost of producing high-end chips doubles every four years. It is a race against time, even if China conquered Taiwan they would only get temporary reprieve. Moreover even Taiwan is not self-sufficient as high-tech chipmaking has truly global supply chain and it is connected to suppliers from US, Netherlands, Japan and other countries that provide tens of thousands of components for their chipmaking machines.
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Making chips is very dependent on high-skilled work. If key people flee Taiwan then China will be left with just some hardware that they are unable to utilize
Specifically for invasion, this is highly unrealistic. Russia attacked Ukraine from multiple angles, they had huge army just ready to roll in by tanks. Taiwan is an island with famously rugged coastline. Moreover Taiwan already has high-tech army including anti-ship missiles as well as strategic partners in the region. This invasion would be nightmare from Chinese side.
Second, China is highly vulnerable to sanctions and not because of exports. They rely on imports for basic things like energy and food and their sea routes are unsecure as there are several bottlenecks controlled by hostile nations - that is the whole point of Chinese belligerent stance toward their immediate neighborhood of South China Sea or Malacca Strait in Indonesia.
georgioz
2yr ago
Exactly, for instance in interwar period, USA had War Plan Red in case of conflict with British Empire that involved invasion of Canada. Military is paid to plan for such outlandish scenarios, there cannot be anything assigned to the fact that these plans exist.
This is highly dishonest view of him. While I did not read all of the sequences, his Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for beginners is one of the best written pieces of "popular" philosophy out there. Even if you disagree, he introduces a lot of interesting concepts in very approachable way - although I'd argue that this does not apply to Mathematics and Logic" part, which requires a lot more knowledge. One thing I'd argue is that this sequence is misplaced as it also touched on nature of reality (ontology) as well as on moral facts and other moral concepts (axiology).
Now one thing I will give you is that Yud started the annoying practice of inventing convoluted parables involving aliens and 3,000 words to explain a concept that could be tackled in one paragraph worth of analogy. On the other hand it is a form of entertainment for many people (sadly not me), I'd rather have whole fanfiction like HPMOR or Unsong for that.
With an “Open Borders” mindset, there is no stopping Groups B-Z from moving into Group A’s space and altering its culture or assuming control of its institutions if any of those Groups does so with enough numbers or organization. “Open Borders,” on principle, refutes the very notion of any group’s ownership of any space, which more or less dismantles the paradigm of “Anti-Colonialism.” How do these two ideas co-exist in the same mind without producing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance?
The way out of this conundrum is just to incorporate open borders mindset as one of the key aspects of the culture. This battle over the identity of let's say Western World is the key component of the Culture War. It is a battle of multiple value systems raging from nationalism, secular humanism, religious systems as well as the new "woke" Critical Social Justice value framework.
But there is also more to it, I like an essay by Bruno Maçães, a former diplomat from Portugal. In the essay he states that:
The modern West broke with this mold [of different civilization organizing their societies differently]. From the perspective of what had come before, Western political societies had oddly misplaced scientific ambitions. They wanted their political values to be accepted universally, much like a scientific theory enjoys universal validity. In order to achieve this — we shall have occasion to doubt whether it was ever achieved — a monumental effort of abstraction and simplification was needed.
I think that this is largely true for many western moral elites. Be it people who endorse Effective Altruism or rationality and who fully believe that this is "scientific" and universalistic moral system that will eventually be adopted and/or enforced by AI. Or be it more liberal or even Social Justice crowd that sees their value system as basic human rights. Meaning their ideas of how the society should be organized is outside of standard political process, rights are inalienable and have advantage of being protected even against disagreement from majority. If they manage to enshrine themselves as new clergy that decides how the Declaration of Human Rights holy book is to be amended, they can manage the whole World. All these moral thinkers believe in some form of "grand narrative" where they are on "right side of history" which indicates a belief that history has some direction and that there exists something like "moral progress" in similar vein as scientific progress.
This is also highly cosmopolitan class that can be at home in New York, Tokyo or Buenos Aires. They do not have allegiance to the national state, in a sense this is too restricting. Effective Altruists claim to give equal moral value to all people who are living or who are going to live. They are proudly declaring themselves as new shepherds of the whole humanity, even if they have to drag these sheep kicking and screaming by the power of the new god in form of AGI aligned with these "universalistic" values.
Also you are not the first one to notice how the supposedly multicultural liberal values are highly colonial. In the wake of invasion of Afghanistan the new military government embarked on the project of instilling the current western values there. We see the whole western world recoil at football World Cup being held in Quatar, a society that let's say does not meet the current requirements when it comes to treating gays or women. I think that there is a little bit of struggle now in the West, where many people are starting to realize that maybe their values are not as universalistic, and that maybe they will not be implemented voluntarily. I think that is one of the reasons why we see the left turning authoritarian.
Their moral beliefs require them to be correct, as mentioned "being on the right side of history". So we see the classic return to mark those who refuse as reactionaries and bigots and extremists who fight against enlightenment and progress. In order to save this narrative the left engages in huge amount of editing and constant revisioning of history. For instance in the past the eugenics movement was huge part of progressive ethos. You had people like Karl Pearson who gave lectures with titles like Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics with the same arguments as progressives of today: bigots and fanatics do not understand impact of science like Darwinism. They are stuck in 19th century so it is on us: scientists, politicians and experts who are armed with sufficient scientific knowledge as well as moral strength to bring humanity over into 20th century. And that vessel will be eugenics. For progressives of today, eugenicists were not "true progressives". They conveniently stuck the whole thing as rightwing coded - ah, it was Hitler who euthanized "undesirables". Pearson was probably cryptofascist posing as a progressive. He was definitely a white man.
So to conclude, I do not think that Open Borders is against many strains of thinking especially prevalent on the left. Colonialism was not bad because it destroyed local cultures, colonialism was bad because it interfered with the higher project. For instance you do not see much of critique of how ideas of certain mid 19th century white German philosopher named Karl Marx infiltrated thinking in countries like China or many African nations. It does not seem that there is a push to topple Marx's statues, quite to the contrary new ones are being erected. The belief is that there is going to be a moral end of history and the whole world will be part of one huge "multicultural" soup sharing the same value system. So in that sense open borders do not matter.
Then you have a very strange concept of meritocracy as it is all about people of merit having more say. If I am about to give a grant for physics research, of course it will be scientists sitting on grant committee as opposed to random people from the street. Can you explain how this "democratic meritocracy" is supposed to work? Even if the goal is to improve the lot of the masses, it will mean that people with merit will get more resources and status to work on behalf of people. So if let's say influencer is going to convince his flock about the importance of supposedly "good" Effective Altruism, it is supposed to still be in line with merit, right?
Xi did not clamp on anything. China runs on corruption - there is 100 million members of CCP who suck the blood out of Chinese people. Corruption is how things are done. The whole thing has analogy of Medvedev´s anti-corruption campaign in 2009, the only purpose for it was to eliminate political enemies like it was done with Khodorkovsky in 2003.
I am not saying that corrupt officials should not be arrested. But it would be as if gang leader turned political leader did a campaign to eliminate murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The only thing that would result is domination of his gang and corrupt and ineffective police force under his thumb.
You do not have to even recall the Kursk incident, you could do similarly well investigating sinking of the Moskva cruiser and Black Sea fleet flagship. There are some reports of very poor results from last maintenance report regarding the overall readiness of the cruiser. We are talking about basic things like only 10% of fire extinguishers being functional during the day of the sinking, not to even speak about faults with internal communication, problems with steering and power plant, problems with radars as well as certain anti-missile defence systems that were canibalized to maintain the other ones on the ship.
Even under the best circumstances the Russian military budget is insufficient to maintain one of the largest nuclear arsenals in conjunction with large navy in conjunction with large conscript army with aviation and all the rest. And Russia is far from ideal with huge amount of corruption, nepotism and plain incompetence getting in the way of this already challenging task of maintaining their forces. The result is what we see now.
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