magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The question, at that level, is not whether all mass shooters like speed skating, but how many speed skaters turn into school shooters.
That depends on whether you're trying to determine how to treat your friend the speed skater, or trying to stop school shootings. If most Ys are Xs, and you want to get rid of the Ys, it's generally a good idea to take a look at X to see whether you can make it lead to Y less often - whether or not Ys are a large fraction of Xs. This chain leads back to FtttG talking about how trans spaces ought to be given a spring cleaning of terrorist propaganda, not talking about how all the transsexuals are evil and must die.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Oh, right, I forgot that that feature's called "blocking" here (and I wasn't aware you could tell if someone blocked you; some forum software doesn't tell the person being blocked/ignored, and if I've received such a notification it was a very long time ago).
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
The democrats have never cared about “blasphemy” in any form, in fact they quite often (especially with regard to Christianity) celebrate “transgressive” art that is often by it’s nature blasphemy against Christianity.
"Blasphemy"'s a wide category and is not amazingly helpful toward understanding this.
SJers generally celebrate things that denigrate or subvert Christianity, like the aforementioned Piss Christ and like depicting Jesus as black. Arrogantly claiming to be Jesus (at least without obvious subversion as well) implies that being Jesus is a good thing, which is not in accord with the SJ narrative. It's not the worst thing in the world by their standards, but AIUI they generally consider it negative from an ideological point of view.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Even with all these caveats, exempting dating entirely (as you seem to suggest?) from conversations about discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping feels fundamentally wrong.
I'm not entirely sure what you're driving at.
The main thing I think you might be driving at is that you might be thinking I'm trying to shush discussions like this. As you can likely tell from reading that link, I'm not. But I stuck to descriptive objections and acknowledged the Bayesian evidence; I didn't call @self_made_human evil.
Could be barking up the wrong tree, though.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
To a fair degree, yes. Just spotted a common misconception regarding pre-modern lifespan and sought to point it out.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior.
I feel that at the point where we're throwing moral rebukes at people for their dating choices we're dancing very close to "here lies all of France" - this is not how you avoid societally-counterproductive hard feelings. It's no secret that African-descended women do substantially worse on dating sites (and presumably, other forms of dating) than others, almost certainly because an extremely-large slice of men find them ugly. Now, those women's appearance is certainly not their choice, but the men's conceptions of beauty are also not their choice. The only possible compromise here would be literal arranged marriages; if we don't want that, and we insist on making this a moral issue, then we're going to be fighting ourselves forever for no conceivable gain.
The bright line of "nobody gets to tell you you're evil for your dating choices" sounds like a good one to me.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
I also wonder how various kinds of nationalists square the fact that their elders are quite happy to sell out their country, culture etc. for yet another cruise.
I mean, fascists are generally fairly open to the idea of there being a whole pile of parasites on society, and for all its usual reactionary trappings it's fundamentally a young man's philosophy.
(Not all nationalists are fascists, of course.)
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then.
Making it to your 60s was never that uncommon. Pre-modern life expectancy was low, but that low number masks a bimodal distribution where most of the ones who didn't die as babies lived into their 50s. There were some fairly-hard limits in a bunch of cases (e.g. commoners eating bread with rock bits in it will have their teeth ground away over time), but there were definitely quite a few people who made it to 60.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Most of the interesting things Half-Life was doing were not picked up by the games it influenced.
In a number of cases, that was a good thing.
The combination of puzzles and highly-costly information is unfun. A number of the puzzles require you to commit suicide in order to gain the necessary intel. The one where you have to lure an alien into a Tesla coil, for instance - AFAIK, the only way to figure out that the Tesla coil is there is to run past the alien, get cornered in the Tesla coil, and die like a bitch, hopefully not before you figured out what the bad-graphics thing you're looking at actually was.
Puzzles plus permanently-missable information are also not nice. The part where you have to fire the rocket into the alien, for instance, has the main clue come from a Barney, who is hard to hear and AFAIK only gives it once - and you can easily save after that, without a way to progress.
And I mean, it's not like there weren't puzzle games already! LucasArts had been doing them forever, and Zork Nemesis was a 3D puzzle game in '96. Half-Life was only an innovation in trying to be both an FPS and a puzzle game at the same time, and frankly it's an object lesson in why they often don't play nice together.
(I will say, a lot of the problems it has were obviously fixable, just not with the technology - particularly the graphics - of the time. In-game maps - even literal floor diagrams, like the ones present in buildings IRL for evacuation purposes - would have helped so much.)
On the other hand, I will note one thing about HL, and particularly to @OliveTapenade - Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
The "report reason" text-box for "other" is often insufficient to say what I want; could it be, maybe, twice as long?
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
· Edited 13d ago
I want to force you to admit what, exactly, you think is being lost.
I think it's not at all clear that the earring's simulation of a person has sufficient fidelity to qualify as being the original person. It clearly has sufficient fidelity to qualify as being a person whom the original person would want to be, but that's not quite the same thing. Lots of people would prefer to be Elon Musk (or, well, at the very least Elon Musk before he went nuts); this doesn't mean that if we killed them all and replaced them with copies of Elon Musk, that would still be the same people.
Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done.
I think this is coming at the problem backwards. People generally identify with the high-level processes and not the low-level ones, so you'll just get a chorus of "but the low-level stuff's not me and is fine to outsource; the high-level stuff is me and is not fine to outsource".
Don't get me wrong - if you gave me the earring I'd put it on, because I have the Hero Mindset where I'm totally willing to die for the cause. But I'd consider that self-sacrifice, not self-affirmation.
(Props for mentioning that LLMs are worse than the Whispering Earring, though - and indeed, I'm unwilling to use them precisely because of this nonequivalence.)
A like and a subscribe would bring me succor in my old age, or at least give me a mild dopamine boost.
The Matrix has you, self_made_human. Or, at least, the social media algorithms do. Take off that earring; it's misaligned.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
The problem is that if they're limiting counterparties to losers, then it's inherently fraudulent - they're selling a service specifically, and only, to those for whom it's of negative utility, and thus are reliant on explicit or implicit deception to actually get business.
So yes, it is better that those betting options not exist than be run in that manner, much like how shell games are bad and shouldn't be allowed.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
I think there's a combination of:
- BAU-is-eternal mindset. This is probably something programmed into us by evolution, since it was adaptive for 99.9% of human existence or so.
- Accepting that AGI is possible, that machines can surpass us, is one of those cosmic-horror revelations, on par with "God is dead". A lot of people, as Nietzsche put it, "blink" at those.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:
- SJers are systematically likely to not see theMotte's purpose as worthwhile,
- SJers who do find theMotte worthwhile still have to worry about the other side of the social shaming coin - i.e., other SJers punishing them for engaging with us.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
People have recommended psychedelics to me as a treatment for my depression.
I keep turning them down, because of the psychosis risk. That left tail is very, very long.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
I remember someone talking on here about the "you do not belong here" comic, but can't find it (or the comic). Anybody know what I'm talking about?
magic9mushroom
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22d ago
But in most places, definitely including here on the Motte, you can map with nearly 100% consistency someone who is "critical of Israel" or "anti-Zionist" to "really hates Jews."
I'm an anti-Zionist who's part Jew, whose best friend is a larger part Jew, and who considers himself a follower of Yudkowsky/Siskind/Mowshowitz. Anti-Zionism's just not my cause area, especially not here in Oz.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
I will confess to skimming your post. Mea culpa. I also didn't particularly mean to call you an SJer - I was more gesturing at their influence over academia and thus the "default view".
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
Can you not hear yourselves? Do you think any decent woman would want to go within a mile of a man who thinks she should be literal chattel? Do you understand why such comments and attitudes drive feminism, and indeed drive it to the extremes which are bad for everyone? Is anyone really surprised Chinese or Japanese or Korean women would prefer to be spinsters?
It is extremely clear from his links that he does understand this; much of the point of his (or, well, Jim's) proposal to make women chattel is so that feminists attempting to become spinsters could be chained up and raped.
(And that's terrible.)
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend
Not all that hard - well, hard for SJers, but not so hard for others. The fundamental problem was that "China did not want to be equal"; the Qing government did not recognise the existence of foreign nations, only tributary subjects (who could beg for favours, but not negotiate) and rebels (to be crushed). That attitude wasn't compatible with having functional international relations in a period in which the so-called Central Kingdom was not, in fact, the global or even regional hegemon. And, well, the usual result of nonfunctional international relations between countries with interests in the same region is war.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars were not amazingly sympathetic, but ultimately they, or something very much like them, were inevitable; the only way the Qing were ever going to start taking international relations seriously was to have their teeth kicked in.
(An obvious parallel in the West, if less bloody, was Pope Boniface VIII. He essentially declared himself feudal overlord of the world in the infamous papal bull Unam sanctam; the French king proved otherwise by sending an army to kidnap Boniface, resulting in the Pope's death and the Avignon Papacy.)
magic9mushroom
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24d ago
· Edited 22d ago
I will note that social media algorithms could conceivably be bad for developing brains the same way drugs tend to be.
Of course, "social participation de-facto relies on you taking drugs" is a horror for adults too, and so I'm leaning heavily toward "destroy Web 2.5" and/or "heavily-regulate algorithmic social media so that it stops being addictive".
magic9mushroom
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29d ago
Mostly decent points; I was largely criticising the structure of your argument, not particularly taking a firm position on the issue, and I did think of some of these questions myself.
I will note that, uh... not trans spaces specifically, but some SJ spaces can get pretty bad. When I said "terrorist propaganda" I wasn't being hyperbolic; I was talking about the shit I've seen, which is if anything worse than the stuff mentioned in that Unherd article (I hadn't actually read it until writing this post). I was talking about literal calls to do terrorism, and advice about how to avoid being arrested for violent crime. I'm pretty libertine when it comes to speech, but "don't literally urge people to riot and assassinate" is probably like #2 on the list of exceptions everyone makes (#1 being the most blatant forms of harmful sensation, like pointing a concert-rated speaker into someone's bedroom at night). You're right that mass shootings specifically have some mental-illness issues, but I do think there's cause to crack down on the places that start to function as insurgent communications infrastructure and that doing so might ease some of the rioting in the medium-term.
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