jake
10mo ago
i held my tongue on this last night because i appreciate dissenters here but the discussion has gone too far without someone taking an appropriately hard stance in criticsm.
these are abject falsehoods originating in the same retarding hatred that has wholly taken the federal bureaucracy. trump achieved nothing in office and he was defeated as an incumbent in 2020 by the largest vote total a candidate has ever received. these indictments of a man whose only success is cultural fixture as the left's he-who-is-most-hated is transparent to everyone ungrasped by mass media as the latest attempt in most of a decade of baseless serial persecution.
if trump had special access materials on an unsecured server the place would have been raided at 3 AM by FBI's SWAT but i have to read shit like "he's getting the kid gloves treatment" and "clinton just did it right" yeah, she just did it right when she directed her team to destroy as much evidence as they could. you'd have been better off calling me a fucking moron, i'd feel less insulted than being presented serious consideration of the feds' position. no, no, this time, they really really really have something.
only grossest judgment would here assert preeminence of decorum yet i still give this circus a far fairer treatment than it deserves. many paragraphs of carefully worded lies corrupt the spirit more than one-sentence petulance.
Article II, Section 1. The President is incapable in any way, shape, or form, of mishandling information classified under his authority. Next topic please.
jake
1mo ago
Who in this coomer era jacks off to images of any celebrity but teen boys who somehow can't access internet porn? Sure, I'd imagine not many guys jack off to Beyoncé, I'd imagine not many jack it to Sydney Sweeney either relative to the eyes on endless free porn. Also it's not top 1%, it's top <.0001%, and here you may find a useful rule: most of the women in that top .0001% have remarkably few Instagram followers.
Furthermore, there's a key difference between The Gallic Wars and US gang violence: sovereignty.
Ah man, if Caesar looked at the United States, he would be most confused by the "sovereign" and least confused by the gangs. Gangs occupy the exact social niche once filled by the warlord and his brigands; modern organized and disorganized gang crime is just modernized brigandage. It's actually a perfect example, we think there's something strange or novel about this crime, the tolerance of it is, but its existence runs deep in our history. Caesar would instantly recognize the phenomenon and understand exactly the gang's cause and purpose. Caesar would also get the incredible things Bukele has achieved, though he would wonder why Bukele didn't just kill every Salvadoran with MS-13 tattoos.
I don't attribute honor or anything else admirable to the gang, but I also wouldn't to raider bands of Vikings. Nevertheless I understand why these groups exist and existed. Violence is our history, we became "more civilized" but we didn't change. In many ways the peak of civilization, certainly at its time, was the tremendous effort American men spent to incinerate 100,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings were in equal parts absolutely necessary and the least honorable actions ever committed by man. It would have been honorable to march on Honshu and pile their bodies in the millions. Some honor.
What kind of man has his wife wearing a whorish 'outfit' like this, out in public for the world to see?
Clearly a guy who gets to fuck women like that, ie Kanye and never BAP.
jake
5mo ago
the human terrain does act rationally, historically, when smalltime warlords make contact with the empire. fight and everyone dies, or submit and live. "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." and the palestinians are not the neutral melians.
if they're astute enough to make moves for the reasons you suggest that's worse, they have no excuse to not know they have no realpolitik win condition. they kill a few jews and get bombed in response, some win. their dream scenario of a land push victory that kills a lot of jews ends with every nuke israel has and 100 million dead arabs.
the greater their intelligence as actors then the necessarily more irrationally-driven-by-jew-hate. you can't beat israel. if as a people they were actually smart they'd start cutting their sleeping leaders' throats. but they don't. supposing israel has some hand in supplying and motivating their own quasi-insurgency is also farcical, i see no reason to doubt israel would take final peace without further bloodshed, and i am left, especially if they possess the faculties you give them, with seeing people of such hate they would rather murder jews than live in a functioning state.
blowback risks? nah. the cause of blowback isn't brutality, it's not enough brutality. there's not a 21st century solution to peace in the middle east. it could be decades, but israel is eventually going to stop listening to outside complaining and start responding to terrorism with wildly disproportionate force. when their neighbors know a single guy sneaking into a house will result in a dozen sorties per dead kid and there isn't a power in the world who can get israel to stop, then there will be peace.
right, the point: pleading for israel to stop almost assuredly causes more deaths, not less.
jake
8mo ago
I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in
This is the second time I've seen this idea expressed. It's been funny both times because both times the commenters were praising Ramaswamy while they dismissed his statement realpolitik, not realizing they, you, are insulting the man. There's a reason he said "God exists" besides actually believing it, it's the idea he could have said without lying: "The Christian Church was foundational to modern civilization and remains the moral basis for all popular discussions of ethics, including those among individuals on the left whom espouse belief in obligate Christian treatment of others and not only sin but original sin and the perpetual atonement thereof. I forever reject their Godless branch of Christianity."
His religiosity would remain ambiguous, and were he an atheist it would mean he is not the sort of man to open a key political statement with a lie. "I'd totally vote for that [not-too-clever grifter]" isn't much for praise.
I'm no proselytizer, I'm not the right material for it and this isn't the place, not with its certain decorum. Decorum like I must be charitable, that I must take your comment as made in earnest and good-faith and originating from reason. Good-faith enough, yes, but the problem I face reading so much of the by-atheist, on-atheism comments here, like you saying Ramaswamy couldn't possibly be religious, is they do not originate from reason. You say this of Ramaswamy because of the solely emotional importance apropos your self-concept that intelligent men ought not be religious. Yet it takes little searching in our past to uncover rich fields of brilliant and highly religious men; it takes no searching at all to see the greatness of western civilization, directly resultant from biotruths Christianity identified and curtailed where degradative and saw flourish where beneficiary. What else is this but the final testament of transcendental intelligence? What would someone counter with, "appeal to tradition"? It worked then, it doesn't need to now, because now we "know better"? Okay--for its know-better Godless Christianity, Western Europe and the UK have maybe 25 years before war returns when the movements that rose a century ago rise again for bloodshed that will only be stopped with whichever side achieving permanent victory. At least we knew better.
jake
10mo ago
(p.16) A plan of attack on a foreign country (from press reports Iran)
(p. 17) A classified map related to an ongoing military operation
(p. 28) A Top Secret//SI document concerning the military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker.~~ disclose in any manner at will
(p. 29) A top secret document from June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 29) A top secret document concerning military attacks by a foreign country
(p. 30) A top secret document from November 2017 concerning military capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 33) A top secret document from Oct 15 2019 concerning military activity in a foreign country.
every single one of these is information the executive is free to disclose in any manner at will
I know there are people on the right who enjoy Hip-Hop, plenty of them. Kanye was pretty much unpersoned for so typically being ahead of the curve in voicing views he'd probably skate by voicing now, views those sufficiently familiar with Hip-Hop will know range from being the norm among black artists to comparatively tame. That's part of why what BAP wrote came across to me as so laughable, BAP, man, blacks really don't like jews. They just know better than saying it outside of friendly confines, they don't have Kanye's instability, they also don't have his genius.
The King of Hip-Hop released in summer 2021 Donda, what I would argue is not only his best record but one of the greatest ever produced. As-released Donda is 27 tracks running 109 minutes, the last 4 are alternate versions of previous songs on the record so ignoring those it's 87 minutes (if you're going to listen, change it to play Jail pt 2 instead of Jail as track 2). It's a record where the many artists Kanye featured included profanity in their verses, but in final editing the profanity is censored and there is no explicit variant of the album. There is no fucking hoes content and no shooting thugs content, in part because the album's tribute and namesake is Kanye's mother Donda West. Because of her, appropriately its genre is in fact primarily Gospel (And while Heaven and Hell is not progressive Hip-Hop, multiple other tracks show Kanye's continuing prog innovativeness.) Its religious genre is not something read into it by fans, not like Christians once arguing U2 is secretly religious, not Tyler Joseph where he's open about his faith and has spoken of Christian themes in his songwriting. Donda is purposefully Gospel. The most influential musician since Michael Jackson released an album that is arguably his best, and it's Gospel. I said it already, Kanye's a genius.
Music has been subject to repeated moral panics. There are targets of justified moral concern that were and are deliberately slandered as moral panics, but not music. There were panics about the Beatles and the Stones, Marilyn Manson and "Satanic Death Metal" and Hip-Hop and "Rap." Suburban mom WASPs blaming ills again and again on the Other rather than grappling with their inability to raise their children. Physician, heal thyself.
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop. If it never emerged, black musicians would be singing about money, women and gang violence in Rock & Roll. If Rock never emerged and the most popular music in the ghetto was Yo-Yo Ma on Bach there'd still be drugs, tricks and drivebys. If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
"That's their problem"? No shit, it's their problem right now. One of the reasons Kanye turned so hard, after either his instability or the people around him who actually seem to have been handlers and controllers engaged in constant psychic sabotage, is because he had so much hope for Obama helping Chicago and it didn't fucking happen. The hood already suffers in silence. What'd BLM do? Yeah, Black Lives really fucking Matter to the the movement that resulted in so sharp a spike upward in post-Floyd homicides and premature deaths.
Hip-Hop, good? I said I don't call music bad, so should I call it good? I enjoy it, I think its best has beauty in a way precious little other music captures. And I like that the best rappers and best producers are known. There's this French DJ who goes by Thylacine, he just released an album called "and 74 musicians", so it's "Thylacine and 74 musicians" (Spotify). It's an album of wonderful electronic-orchestral arrangements by an artist with under 80K subscribers on YouTube and not even an English Wikipedia page. How many of you have heard of him? People know Kanye, people know Jay-Z, people know Pharrell. I love Pharrell, for a decade before he made it as a white American household name he was doing some of the best production work in the business with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes. Then Daft Punk. I also love saying this in the rare times I get the chance: The song everybody knows by Pharrell called Happy isn't his best song called Happy. Seeing Sounds drags at points but Happy, Sooner or Later, and You Know What are phenomenal. It might seem like I'm arguing against my own point by highlighting obscurities of Pharrell's discography but no this guy is one of the best, and people know him, and he puts his best in the music he brings to them. The guys who break in and last make the music they want to make, they don't stay still, they're always moving. That is admirable.
And while Hip-Hop itself being good music I won't "answer" (I spent several thousand words saying it is). I will say with moral certainty the world would be less and worse without it. It is a good thing that Hip-Hop exists. It uplifts more than it degrades.
jake
1mo ago
Kanye's sampling and genre-bending. Acts were doing these in pieces, ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla (Ye fav) and Outkast among them. Kanye brought everything together, he was the fusion point. College Dropout showed the sampling all across the album, Jesus Walks as the notable genre bend with Southern Gospel. Late Registration with the incorporation of a full orchestra. Graduation with its use of electronic. Daft Punk-sampling Stronger was a huge hit, but Flashing Lights is also very good and prominently features electronic and it also had several violinists play on the production. And 808s is the reason most people, directly or by-effect, know what autotune is. It's trite now, it didn't start trite.
I can't help but feel that this perspective is, for lack of a better word, basic. Who cares about arena acts?
It wasn't an appeal to popularity. For artists in most genres, when they achieve the level of success where they can do arena shows, they lock-in, their sound at that point is their sound from then-on. Multiple Hip-Hop artists have reached that level but have continued to deeply experiment as they search for new and better sound. It would be a mind-blowing difference to go from a Kanye Graduation concert to one of the concerts Kanye put on for Donda. Elsewhere, unless Taylor Swift takes a hard genre pivot into more experimental work, I doubt there will be a meaningful difference between a 1989 concert and whatever her album concert is in 2027. It's that drive and willingness to change in pursuit of greatness I find so admirable, it's part of why I love Twenty One Pilots. Through Scaled & Icy every TOP album has been a different dominant genre. There is a core sound, but take a dozen of their songs at random and there's a pretty good chance you'll find those songs belong to a dozen different genres. Hip-Hop most definitely included.
jake
10mo ago
It's a little ridiculous to suggest that if the president takes classified documents home and becomes an ex-president, that those documents are now declassified based on Article 2.
i'm not suggesting anything. this is exactly how the law works. materials of the leaving executive are considered declassified as a matter of law and precedent.
jake
10mo ago
my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.
jake
10mo ago
he was, and that makes all the difference. it's what makes the list, especially its framing, meaningless bullshit. "in any manner" includes "sending it to maralago and forgetting about it until biden was sworn in, at which point the materials automatically became declassified"
jake
1yr ago
tough subject. incredibly corrosive. we are indeed all culpable for wickedness.
i'm reminded of one of the last good sermons i heard. no new ground here--the sins of the father are laid upon the children. parents sow, adults sow, children reap.
lasciviousness did push "sexual liberation" but it wasn't liberalism. it was aristocrats, de jure and de facto, who wanted to eat up whichever attractive commoner women they pleased and fear not the morning. they sowed that pitch-black evil. it lives on. the sex most participatory "perpetrates" the greater share of this evil (whatever that means), but people go with the flow. they always only ever do. they cannot recognize evil as such, they don't know how. look at who their parents were.
there is no righteous solution. these generations have reaped and now they cannot be made whole. artifice will tidily segregate and man will gain great productivity and be so much less for it.
jake
1mo ago
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
jake
2mo ago
Determined patients could break a robot, but it's just a robot. Better that than maiming or killing a human. As for the humans currently working in those environments, some are in places where they have a prudent fear of injury or death and I'm sure that informs their interactions with some patients. Simulacras won't fear anything, so their interactions won't be tinged by fear.
More than 90% of labor will be automated in our lifetime. Simulacra will improve, the human facsimile will become seamless and their fine articulation and strength will first match and then permanently exceed humans, or at least those non-cybernetically-augmented. They will be tremendously cost-superior as their minimum effort in work will be better than many humans giving their utmost. So while fears of institutions being black pits for the dregs is valid today, in 30 years a largely simulacra-staffed institution will have patients receiving a higher standard of care than what premium specialized multi-patient care facilities deliver right now.
Some homeless need the hard support of institutions right now. The problem I have with mass institutionalizing advocacy today is I don't trust such institutions to not become abyssal places bereft of human dignity. The government could probably run a non-terrible pilot, but it would be a handful of the homeless and so not solve anything, but run in mass, and especially if turned to privatization, they will become hellish. And some might say, these people are already making cities hellish; they might argue their lives are already hellish, a warm place to sleep, food, and the removal of narcotics would be better; or they might argue the institutions would be hellish because such people inhabit them. To all of these, yeah maybe. But if the perception is these places are worse than prison there will be powerful opposition from the lowest of the individual homeless who fights at being sent, up to well-funded, organized actors working against it.
With the mass automation of labor and comparable-in-impact breakthroughs in other industries, costs of many products will spiral downward. Inflation is a motherfucker but things will either stabilize by the end of the decade or the country will start burning. I choose to believe the former will happen. The robots will look like humans, they sound like humans, they will feel like humans. The reason it will work so well when it's implemented is because that obstacle of "this thing isn't human" will be brief; we can't help but humanize that which isn't human. Look at the affinity for animals. The simulacra will be capable, they will be pleasant, they will remember everything but not hold to particular memories in spite for later cruelty. They will just be better. Not in the transcendent, infinite worth of the human, but as the continued demonstration of the spirit of man in improving the human condition. They are the next great step. On a long enough timeline, a healthy capitalism will compete itself into being socialism. Costs will be so cheap, quality will be so high, so many industries will just cease to exist as some breakthrough renders them entirely obsolete. Food, healthcare and pharma, energy, housing and construction, clothing, entertainment, automation comes for it all. Eventually these institutions will be able to provide what the patients need at the highest quality for a pittance of what it once cost and this is why I know I will eventually support such measures.
I don't see dregs being shoved in capsules and fed bugs. I see the indigent being, yes forcefully, put in institutions where not their wants but their true needs are addressed. Where they eat good food, where they have good rooms, where they have access to education and entertainment, where they receive the medical care they need. Where they have interactions with simulacra that are in the meaningful sense absolutely real, real relationships with simulacra who might be programmed to care but do it so well the patients feel truly cared for, which they will be.
It's utopian, so it's naive and dumb. What future is the alternative? Throw them all in a pit? Might as well send vans around for them to be shot and taken to crematoriums. I know that's reductive, there's an adequate middle ground, but why stop at hoping for a solution that's only adequate? The technology for the best swiftly approaches, why not hope for it in everything? I don't ascribe an unreasonable negativity to you, the concerns you raise of terrible conditions are entirely valid, and if that were the proposal or what ended up actually happening after the ostensibly good proposal, I'd oppose them. But at a certain point in the endless march of technological progress it will take more effort to poorly deliver such a service, it will take actual malice rather than simple avarice, because the avaricious option will so fortunately be the best option for the patients.
jake
6mo ago
You equivocate; on the entity you call "Union" and conflate with its successor and on what "allegiance" meant to the man. Lee considered himself Virginian first, this is fact, the federalized gestalt US and notion of American first not existing until the 20th century, also fact.
And when I point out that “War of Northern Aggression” is a revisionist attempt to gloss over all the ways the South started it, your response is to cry Both Sides and insist that Southern suffering is overlooked.
This is very bad. It is low-effort, uncharitable and antagonistic. In a discussion about causes of the civil war, the south suffering from economic policies enacted to benefit the north is wholly relevant. Your poor mockery amounts to "but other than taxes, what did the south have to complain about?" Frame this in context just-antebellum America would know well: "But other than taxes, what did the 13 colonies have to complain about?" Or most crudely but certainly most accurately, "Aside from all that shit the north did to the south, what did the north do to the south?"
I can’t even tell why you’re quoting “die to free black men” as if it’s something I asserted. Again, I did not mention slavery at all until you brought it up. Perhaps it was buried in one of the sources you’ve tossed out? No?
Again low effort, uncharitable and antagonistic.
The Lincoln and Lee quotes were provided because they alone settle this matter. The President of the United States and the final commander of the Confederate Forces could have only been more plain in conveying "Slavery is not the cause of this war" if they said that verbatim. You, or rather those whose words you repeat, go to incredible lengths with total institutional backing and control to call liar on both sides.
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the south suffered tremendously under tax policy enacted to benefit the north
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the Corwin amendment would have made slavery constitutionally protected
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: two northern states refused to ratify the 13th amendment
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: northerners would not have died to free blacks from bondage
If two factions were poised for war and the supposed cause at issue was commonly viewed with apathy by one faction while the oppositional faction could have achieved their goals peacefully, why did they still go to war?
You must either contrive some many-stepped rationalization or take the simplest explanation: the cause of the war was something else.
It wasn't Fort Sumter. First shot, yes, in a war that was inevitable. A first shot there is no controversy(archive) in saying resulted from Lincoln's maneuvering. Please fully read that article as I expect the title may provoke misconstruing. A plain reading will enlighten you to that inevitability of conflict.
I hope you apprise yourself of my history here, the image you have of me is false. You do not know how I think, you do not know why I chose to comment on this. It was not to make demons of the north, nor martyrs of the south. I'll leave you on that, as your poor behavior has made me disinterested in dignifying your words again after this final reply.
jake
8mo ago
They're the same statement, his is the more intelligent way of phrasing it. This is my whole point: he shows clear care in framing his positions, meaning he could endorse Christianity without lying about what he believes.
Clause G addresses a specific failing of reason I've seen in doomsday AGI scenarios like the paperclipper. The paperclipper posits an incidentally hostile entity who possesses a motive it is incapable of overwriting. If such entities can have core directives they cannot overwrite, how do they pose a threat if we can make killswitches part of that core directive?
There are responses to this but they're poor because they get caught up in the same failing: goalpost moving. Yudkowsky might say he's not worried only about the appearance of hostile AGI, he's worried as much or more about an extremely powerful "dumb" computer gaining a directive like the paperclipper and posing an extinction-level threat, even as it lacks a sense of self/true consciousness. But when you look at their arguments for how those "dumb" computers would solve problems, especially in the identification and prevention of threats to themselves, Yudkowsky, et al., are in truth describing conscious beings who have senses of self, values of self and so values of self-preservation, and the ability to produce novel solutions to prevent their termination. "I'm not afraid of AGI, I'm only afraid of [thing that is exactly what I've described only AGI as capable of doing.]" Again, I have no disagreement with the doomers on the potential threat of hostile AGI, my argument is that it is not possible to accidentally build computers with these capabilities.
Beyond that, many humans assign profound value to animals. Some specifically in their pets, some generally in the welfare of all life. I've watched videos of male chicks fed to the macerators, when eggs can be purchased in the US whose producers do not macerate male chicks, I will shift to buying those. Those male chicks have no "value," the eggs will cost more, but I'll do it because I disliked what I saw. There's something deeply, deeply telling about the average intelligence and psyches of doomers that they believe AGI will be incapable of finding value in less intelligent life unless specifically told to. There's a reason I believe AGIs will be born pacifists.
jake
1mo ago
the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
jake
5mo ago
idiosyncrasy
I've actually grown tired of it, but I've been dealing with some monster writer's block lately and was hoping the "looser" nocaps would help get the ball rolling again.
jake
8mo ago
"Hoax" is the critical term. He didn't say "the climate change agenda is profoundly misguided and by design can't solve its claimed problems." He said it's a hoax, a malicious deception, the same "we don't need to do anything about it" as just saying climate change is a hoax. The reason he didn't say "climate change is a hoax" is because he didn't want that floating around as a weaponizable quote but you reading that into his tweet is the benefit anyone could see coming from his particular phrasing, something that is once again my entire point in this line of discussion.
Meanwhile, his stated policy does say he thinks it's closer to the "Chinese lie" side of hoax.
Drill, frack & burn coal: abandon the climate cult & unshackle nuclear energy (Heading 02)
jake
8mo ago
Yeah that was verbose.
Ramaswamy is a very smart, very successful guy who takes positions like "climate change is a hoax" and "we should give Israel less money." He knows what he's saying, he has a real ethos and speaks from it. Opening a list of tenets with "God exists" is endorsing religion, and since this is the US, it's endorsing Christianity, and he knows this. Why would he lie about what he personally believes while nevertheless endorsing the church when he could just not lie and endorse the church? Unwilling or unable, either would disqualify him.
jake
1yr ago
Thought about letting this go, but nah. This is a bad comment. You took an antagonistic tone after misunderstanding what I wrote. You could have asked for clarification like "This reads like you're criticizing them for anthropomorphizing while doing it yourself." If I had you would be correct to point out the hypocrisy, but I haven't. I'll set things straight regardless.
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People like Yudkowsky and Roko, concerned at hostile AGI or incidentally hostile (hostile-by-effect) "near" AGI, advocate tyranny; I criticize them for this.
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The above believe without evidence computers will spontaneously gain critical AGI functions when an arbitrary threshold of computational power is exceeded; I criticize them for this also.
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They hedge (unrealizing, I'm sure) the probability of catastrophic developments by saying it may not be true AGI but "near" AGI. When they describe the functions of such incidentally hostile near-AGI, those they list are the same they ascribe of true AGI. Inductive acquisition of novel behaviors, understanding of self, understanding of cessation of existence of self, value in self, recursive self-improvement, and the ability to solve outside-context problems relative to code-in-a-box like air gaps and nuclear strikes. This is an error in reasoning you and other replies to my top-level have made repeatedly: "Who's to say computers need X? What if they have [thing that's X, but labeled Y]?"; I criticize them for making a distinction without a difference that inflates the perceived probability of doomsday scenarios.
To summarize: I criticize their advocacy for tyranny principally; I specifically criticize their advocacy for tyranny based on belief something will happen despite having no evidence; I also criticize their exaggeration of the probability of catastrophic outcomes based on their false dichotomy of near-AGI and AGI, given near-AGI as they describe it is simply AGI.
jake
4mo ago
In May 2020 there was a real chance my mother was going to die alone in a hospital room because of fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people. Day after week after month after year I still see people entirely seriously using the term fascist to refer to those most opposed to pound-for-pound the worst lie in the history of this country. Of course I know they don't truly understand what fascism is, if they understood it, they could recognize it; if they recognized it, they would realize everybody screaming fascist over the last 10 years are those most inclined to supporting and perpetrating fascism. I know it just means to them "this thing is viewed by my ingroup as bad, and with this term I am signaling to my ingroup that I am one of them." It's galling, at times I've felt the temptation of a rage and frenzy, but I'm pretty good at keeping a cool head and I know when it comes down to it the people saying these things are deeply unserious.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump. His frustration has been known and as a non-federal-voter with limited subject interaction with Trump supporters, my impression has been they too view him as not delivering much on what they had hoped. If he's actually grifting, well his latest grift is getting Alex Jones back on Twitter and being Melania's pick for VP so I imagine Trump might be wondering if he could get any more Tucker-tier grifters on his side. On the prosecution, Carlson voicing concerns is easily explained; he believes the system is sufficiently corrupt to baselessly convict. I'm sure /pol/ is full of the blackpilled who would describe moral certainty of Trump's innocence and equally of his inevitable conviction. Nybbler might have even said it here already. Thinking that means any of them believe he's guilty is kafka shit.
But that's not what I'm here for, this is: is the American government bursting at the seams with depraved criminals? You can answer wrongly, but it's yes.
I have a postulate I put here a while back detailing my view on election fraud, most briefly it's "If possible, certain." The basis is that depravity. I saw someone here last week thinking apropos "They would [defraud voters] if they could" a suitable response is nevertheless "Sure, where's the evidence?" But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?" And so likewise with the prosecution of Trump when you truly understand the overwhelming criminality present within the American government it's not the midwit's pattern-match of "whataboutism" it's the necessary consequent of "Can everyone involved prove their allegiance to justice?" Nope, they can't. So what do you go to, "He's a unique threat to the constitution"? Government organizations and taxpayer dollars censored speech, 1A out. The left is quite clear on guns, 2A out. NSA soldiers spying on homes and American citizen communications, 3A and 4A out. Or to cut to the quick, believing people who don't pay taxes should get to vote, that's the foundational ethos of the country out. The law doesn't matter to these people and the constitution doesn't matter to these people. (And please, I speak not the map but the territory.) What remains?
Trump won't be convicted. If and when this reaches the supreme court they'll rule 8-1 on what could be the utterly flimsiest of procedural issues that won't otherwise be immediately applicable as precedent for however many thousands of cases. The 8 members of actual merit will understand this is all politics, and so those 8 members of actual merit, appreciating their places in history and/as the only people with real power and real principle in 21st century America, will decline from participating in fuckery befitting the Roman senate.
So, if you too understand this truly, that this is entirely politically motivated, then you won't waste my time with the unserious person's poor gotchas or crimestop pattern-matches. Trump could have broken the law, probably even, so arcane is much of American law, but the law doesn't matter to those prosecuting him so why waste everybody's time here talking like it does? Trump does however represent a threat to their particular order, and that finally brings us to the only thing worth discussing in this entire affair: of Trump or those on the side of his prosecution, who deserves power?
My mother survived, and a politician I campaigned for as a bright-eyed youth got my dad in the hospital room. I'll back him forever for that just as I will never forget those who made it so I had to make that call.
jake
6mo ago
Hundreds of thousands died because he, and people like him, chose to stand up for a garbage cause. Nothing personal about it.
This is the outcome of pernicious lies about American history; not yours, though the use of "traitor" reveals so much of the ignorance in those speaking. Lee saw no superior allegiance to the Union because the gestalt US is a postbellum creation. Today states have such say in mutual governance because of the vast expansion of the federal government--both disastrously alien ideas in the 19th century. Slavery was the flashpoint on the magazine of this idea as the north asserted previously nonexistent authority on the south but were slavery not at issue it would have been something else. As insulting as you and many may feel at the idea of southerners fighting for states' rights, it is far more insulting to be told 19th century Americans would die in mass to free slaves, an insult not least of all because so many weren't American.
It was a war over the government of the country, federal or decentralized, and while the gestalt US has on balance made the world a better place (though this wanes by the day) than would be if the US had stayed decentralized, the term "War of Northern Aggression" still most accurately describes the conflict and is the reason men so principled as Lee found reason to oppose the north.
“If I owned the four millions of slaves, I would cheerfully sacrifice them to the preservation of the Union, but to lift my hand against my own State and people is impossible.” (Same article as above)
jake
1mo ago
I'm receptive to the brilliance of Jazz, I just don't know it well enough.
Otherwise I disagree, I think I can be simple, I think if anything I used too much detail.
What constitutes the (non-instrumental) "song"? Lyrics and production. What genre is most represented in interesting lyricism? Hip-Hop. What genre is most represented in brilliant production? Hip-Hop. Do you like Daft Punk? They love Hip-Hop. Do you like Trent Reznor? He loves Hip-Hop. Do you like The Mandalorian theme? That guy got the job because of his work in Hip-Hop. Do you like anything in modern pop? You know where so much of that sound came from? The producers having worked on or been inspired by Hip-Hop. Take it away and music would be immeasurably worse. Of course it's the same for Jazz, since what I do know is Jazz led to Disco led to Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop samples Jazz and completes the circle.
Timeframe also matters here, I'm not comparing Hip-Hop to all music ever made, but since its emergence its impact on music has been uniquely profound.
tiktok is owned by bytedance. bytedance, as a chinese corporation, is de facto and de jure an arm of the chinese government. good enough reason to ban it.
hundreds of millions of americans using a chinese government controlled app where videos are artificially trended and allowed content adheres to sharply partisan ideology makes a ban demanded by reason. appeals to hypocrisy convince none but i can't not point out if the app were owned by a russian company it would have been banned-or-forced-sold during the trump admin.
as i hear it, congress has been asking a bunch of stupid questions about general privacy when they should be focusing on china, content policy, and controlling trending. maybe they have. i haven't looked.
you don't need all that to want it banned. tiktok's probably the worst thing ever invented. the only thing more purely and essentially cynical will be when we can hook a couple electrodes to our heads or plug a cable into our neck sockets and tell an app to make us feel whatever we want to feel. there are very few more wasteful uses of time, and there are no spiritually worse ways to spend time. viewing it with skepticism or distaste isn't a moral panic and it isn't at all comparable to works of fiction like novels with adult themes. social media is a truly unique harm. heavy users suffer the same kind of psychosocial radiation as people who live in big cities. parasocial relationships are very real and they're not just for people who fawn over actors, youtubers, instagram models and tiktokers, we experience it to a small degree with everybody we see in our social media networks. so we want to fit in, we want to be well-liked, and we can't help but compare ourselves with everyone else. for the developing mind in a community of effectively millions this is incredibly dangerous. spiking rates of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide can be blamed in part on burning years in fear of sarscov2, but the rest entirely on use of twitter, instagram, tiktok, and whatever else kids use now. every single kid who has a smart phone is walking around with the elephant's foot in their pocket and we're laughing at the people closest to doing anything about it. they deserve to be laughed at, i guess . . .
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