magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
No bio...
User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
5hr ago
(Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.)
No. Leia sassed Tarkin in the original film:
LEIA: Governor Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash; I recognised your foul stench when I was brought on board.
TARKIN: Charming, to the last. You don't know how hard I found it, signing the order to terminate your life.
LEIA: I'm surprised you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.
In ESB Luke sasses Vader at the beginning of their fight (though, of course, this is specifically him being a headstrong idiot):
VADER: You have learned much, young one.
LUKE: You'll find that I'm full of surprises.
And in RotJ Han sasses Jabba on a couple of occasions (though, of course, Jabba is not an Imperial):
THREEPIO: His High Exaltedness, the great Jabba the Hutt, has decreed that you are to be terminated immediately.
HAN: Good. I hate long waits.
[...]
THREEPIO: Victims of the almighty Sarlacc, His Excellency hopes that you will die honorably. But should any of you wish to beg for mercy, the great Jabba the Hutt will now listen to your pleas.
JABBA: Jedi!
HAN: Threepio! You tell that slimy piece of worm-ridden filth, he'll get no such pleasure from us!
There's not a lot of it, not remotely to the degree seen in your clip, and RotJ goes very hard on having Luke be courteous even to his foes. But there is a little.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
What are the benefits of not wearing a seatbelt while you're sitting in a car anyway? I might disagree with punishing people for failing to wear a seatbelt since the risk is almost entirely to themselves, but seriously, this one is a good cost-benefit. Having agency for yourself does not mean doing the opposite of everything They tell you to do - that is still refusing to make decisions for yourself, insofar as your actions are still 100% predictable from Their edicts. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; the goal is not to invert the system, but to ignore it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
"All shall love me and despair" sounds much more like the findom end than the GFD end, and sensibly given how much of a rat bastard the One Ring actually is. I didn't bring up OnlyFans - practically a Tartarean pit of suffering - on a whim.
Arguably, "elf dommy mommy" is what Galadriel already is without the One.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
The only thing they did not have were the launch codes
Not launch codes; PAL codes.
Permissive Action Links (and their Russian equivalents) are designed for paranoia against literally this scenario - someone with physical control of the weapon activating it. The weapon is designed in such a way that it is impossible to remove or bypass the PAL without rendering the weapon useless (basically, other stuff breaks first).
To turn a PAL-protected nuke into a working nuke (without the code), you have to disassemble it and remanufacture the physics package. This is easier than somebody acquiring nukes ex nihilo, because you can at least recover the weapons-grade plutonium* and as such you can skip the actinide acquisition, nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant. But it's not trivial; you still need the actual bomb-manufacturing plant.
*This is somewhat more complicated if the PAL fired one of the lenses, because then the core will have been pulverised by the (conventional) explosion. My limited understanding, though, is that they aren't generally rigged to do that on tamper; it's more a deliberately-triggered self-destruct.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
@erwgv3g34 @FistfullOfCrows @sarker
Guy A used guillemets. Guy B said Guy A sounded like a Nazi. Guy C said:
Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » [sic] is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on.
Guy C got whacked; other two did not. Hence, it's SoulFire that was correct to begin with.
Probably a Third World sweatshop worker or bot solely working on "does post contain naughty thing".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
Why do they continue to do it?
Because most of them are based in the San Francisco Bay Area and most of their relevant employees live there. That means they have to worry about Californian regulations and jawboning, and it means their employees are potentially the sort to desert them for being too far right (this seems to be a big chunk of what's wrong with xAI).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos
I'd describe them more as "midwit highly-online alt-rightists" (in the broad sense of alt-right, not the racial sense - highly-non-traditional rightists). The main points pushing them into that camp are 1) inceldom -> wanting AI waifus and 2) schadenfreude over various kinds of artists (whom they despise due to the whole "tainting all their franchises with SJ" thing) becoming technologically unemployed, with a side of reversed stupidity over the various SJ whines about the latter.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
the subtly named Tarquin, no relation to that one [Tarkin],
The name "Tarquin" as a metonym for tyrants is literally thousands of years older than Star Wars. I won't say the name's entirely separate from Tarkin given the extreme number of Star Wars references in that arc of Order of the Stick, but they're at least to a fair degree just referencing the same thing - and certainly it's "Tarkin" that's the variant spelling.
Obviously, this only emphasises how unsubtle the name is.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
We know what happens then. It's in LotR itself, because Frodo offers it to her.
‘And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’
She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.
I feel compelled to note that OnlyFans is practically an ongoing mass LARP of this.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Wasn't it 2021-22? A.k.a. when Substack and then MuskTwitter broke SJ's lock on the public square? Doesn't seem surprising that things would show up "out of nowhere" if they were being suppressed prior, and SJ generally considers birth rate worries a dogwhistle for racism.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
I’m sorry to hear your early life was so awful.
Honestly, for most of my childhood, she wasn't really awful; she always had a violent temper, but there were only about 3 years of my home life being truly hell (from when I hit puberty and her misandry started applying to me personally, to when I ran away from her).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
You guys surely have mothers. Are you really going to say to them "Mom, you shouldn't have gone past high school and you should be glad Dad isn't fucking a 20 year old on the side because you need to appreciate that a man is willing to lead and rule you, you useless eater"?
I mean, I suspect my life might have gone a bit better had Mum not been able to divorce Dad, get full custody, and then beat me with a metal spoon, pour hot potatoes on me, and starve me without oversight*. Admittedly, Dad didn't use all the leverage he did have (on like twenty occasions she called him up saying "come and pick up [m9m], I don't want him anymore", and if he'd called her bluff my understanding is that she'd have had no recourse), and that's on him, but I don't think he understood exactly how bad things were (I, after all, didn't exactly have context for exactly how far out of line she was, and she'd mostly-convinced me I deserved it with her various misandrist rants**); had he been in the house, I think some more alarm bells would have gone off.
Now, I certainly wouldn't call Mum a "useless eater" - she met Dad through their jobs, and her job wasn't negative-sum activism - and Not All Women Are Like That, but I'm not sure she's the example you want to be using here. (More generally, you will find that bringing up the personal lives of X-ists is often going to blow up in your face; X-ists are X-ist for a reason and that reason frequently is "their personal lives legitimately behave as X-ism predicts".)
*The one time the police showed up, I was the one who got an hour-long lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wife-beater, although it's hard for me to blame them given that she wouldn't have shown a single sign of guilt - she was and is utterly convinced she was in the right - and due to how far she'd managed to twist me around I did.
**I specifically remember her teaching me that the Y chromosome was a genetic defect.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
America is imbalanced, there are no major power bases outside the central government.
There's a rather-large "unless" attached to that, which is "unless there is serious doubt about who the government is". A constitutional crisis in which multiple people claim with significant validity to be the President (e.g. if Kamala Harris had refused to count electoral votes for Donald Trump on the grounds that he was barred by the Fourteenth Amendment, and declared herself the new President), or in which there's a "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" could cause both sides to think they had the bulk of the military behind them.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
The word "argument-free" is critical here. Scott:
For a mistake theorist, passion is inadequate or even suspect. Wrong people can be just as loud as right people, sometimes louder. If two doctors are debating the right diagnosis in a difficult case, and the patient’s crazy aunt hires someone to shout “IT’S LUPUS!” really loud in front of their office all day, that’s not exactly helping matters. If a group of pro-lupus protesters block the entry to the hospital and refuse to let any of the staff in until the doctors agree to diagnose lupus, that’s a disaster. All that passion does is use pressure or even threats to introduce bias into the important work of debate and analysis.
In a democracy, at least in theory and usually at least partially in practice, those with the franchise are rulers; they decide what policy is best for the country. However, policy of a modern nation is fairly complex, and needs to be carefully tailored in order to function well; we can outsource some of this to politicians and the civil service, but not all. Ruling based on bellyfeel - System 1 - would quickly doom us all, because System 1 is very old (it's mostly hardwired, and evolution is slow) and thus its conclusions are in many places out of step with correct actions of a modern state.
Attacking claims about policy based on bellyfeel rather than reasoned argument is moderately-strong evidence that one adopts views based on bellyfeel rather than reason, which thus implies that one's a poor ruler. This is the "rap" that Skeletor mentions as being put forward by the most extreme of anti-feminists: if women are all emotional rather than rational, they are systematically poor rulers, and they shouldn't be rulers i.e. women's suffrage was a mistake.
I am not convinced of the premise there. At the very least, as even Dave Sim notes in his infamous essay*, the bell curves overlap; there are certainly some women who are more rational than some men. But this is why the accusation's being treated with such gravity; the "women are irrational bellyfeelers" => "women's suffrage was a mistake" implication is well-known and commonly accepted in the Ratsphere (especially the right-leaning half of it), which makes the truth or falsity of the premise direly important.
*I don't really recommend said essay; it's an example of what I call the Capitalised Important Concept Rant, which is how psychotic people tend to write essays (and indeed, it's known he was mentally ill at the time). If you enjoy CICRs, or want to see a good example of what they look like, there's a copy archived here (skip down to "Writings from "Reads""). Note that I still don't agree with all of it even after disregarding the obvious layer of crazy paint.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
Given that it's not really possible for every generation to be worse than the preceding one and to have a functional civilization, this complaint should be taken with a few pounds of salt.
-
It is true that this trend is obviously inconsistent with a civilisation that remains functional indefinitely. However, Western civilisation has not remained functional indefinitely. It has remained functional during current trends for ~75 years (NB: the 1950 date I'm using here seems to be relatively bipartisan and static; SJers and their foes both seem to talk about the 50s as the paradigm current trends have moved away from, despite their diametrically-opposed views on the value of that paradigm and the trends since, and haven't started talking about the 70s instead as time has gone on). It is possible that the trend is slow enough that the chickens merely haven't come home to roost yet; "there's a lot of ruin in a nation". Indeed, most of the people pushing this claim at any given time are specifically worried that we might stop having a functional civilisation at some point, and this is something that has happened before albeit rarely (e.g. the Fall of Rome, the collapse of Qing China into warlordism).
-
I can't help but notice that the USA and significant chunks of Western Europe are not in a good way at the moment. Germany's been talking for a while about banning the party that is now #1 in their polls. The USA has significant groups of people on both sides of the political aisle who literally support murdering their political opposition (citations: this board, and the Blue Tribe Internet following Charlie Kirk). Suicide is a non-negligible cause of death. We have cost disease, one of the causes of which is regulatory sclerosis of productive activity. The USA can't pass laws much anymore, to the point that it's become standard for the President to govern by executive order. It would seem that our civilisation is indeed somewhat less functional (at a nuts-and-bolts level) than it was 75 years ago, which is not in contradiction with the hypothesis you're attacking.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
16d ago
Yeah, should have included it (I am a member, and all that), but it is a bit less active than here IIRC.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
18d ago
· Edited 9d ago
Arguing with leftist is impossible because they pretend not to know things.
I suspect that a lot of what you interpret as "pretending not to know things" is "not knowing things" - and that latter in the profound sense, the sense of not really grokking that a physical reality exists independent of the narrative and social games - living on simulacrum level 3 or even 4. Some of it is also "not knowing things" in the less-profound sense of "not knowing these specific things due to insufficient brainpower/attention to derive them from first principles (NB: Zoomer attention is scarce due to smartphones/social media) and due to a total lack of paths for others to feed the person the correct answers due to censorship".
And, of course, some of it's just a mistake on your part, as you admitted to here (good job there), and some of it (though relatively-little) hits the mark.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
18d ago
Scott Alexander was wrong. The natural end state of liberal discourse is not "seven zillion Witches and three Principled Libertarians" it is "seven zillion Witches and zero Principled Libertarians" because all the libertarians have been shouted down, driven off, or banned, for refusing to compromise on one point or another.
Scott said that the natural end-state of free-speech alternatives to captured discourse venues was "approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches". He didn't say that this was the natural end-state of those captured discourse venues themselves, and almost certainly doesn't believe it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
18d ago
A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side.
You know that most of the reason the Near East hates the West is because of us propping up Israel, right? Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11 and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea.
And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
MAGA did win the popular vote, but not an absolute majority of Americans (I don't think that that's ever happened; turnout and the existence of children make it really, really hard) or even an absolute majority of Americans who voted (he got 49.8%, significantly more than Harris but not quite an absolute majority).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
· Edited 21d ago
QQ used to have politics discussion before, well, they banned politics back in 2017. It was not an echo chamber. It wasn't the most civil place, but there was actual discussion going on. But, as noted, it's over now. QQ still has people of most political persuasions (some SJWs, a lot of real liberals, a few alt-right; essentially-no true conservatives for the obvious reason); they just don't talk about politics. (Well, sort of. I keep getting away with it because I'm polite enough and moderate enough to frequently be a calming force, because I'm erudite enough to be able to avoid saying the magic "political" words while still getting my point across, and because I know when to take things to PMs; however, even I've gotten close to the fire on occasion and I don't recommend trying to pull that off.)
I did only say "used to be this". DWW's dead (as in, offline), QQ doesn't allow politics, and SB/SV/[whatever Jackie/Ritterin Sophia's board is currently called] don't allow moderates or rightists (NB: don't touch that last one with your real IP; Jackie's a doxxer). I suppose I forgot about Frozen in Carbonite, but I don't know much about it (there is similarly the slight issue that the admin, Horton, is known for black-hat hacking and acted like a man with a candy van when trying to get people to join up).
EDIT: Oh, and THASF/Train Dodger (the owner of DWW) wasn't a jerk. He was a little schizophrenic, and then a lot schizophrenic when COVID hit, but he was never an arsehole that I remember. Yeah, technically he's banned on the big three, but two of those were self-requested and the third was because of the aforementioned psychotic break (he refused to stop posting his Big Folder About COVID everywhere - this being the folder that popularised hydroxychloroquine, no I am not kidding - and so the QQ mods permabanned him).
EDIT2:
The most progressive posters, mainly those who were fans of a censorious power mod (who in my view did deserve to be fired, but the firing process was arbitrary and incompetent), schismed off to their own website.
Most of them came back to SB and maintained dual accounts after The Observer resigned. Of course, that very capitulation did eventually lead to the PM scandal and third exodus, which is part of why I blamed SJ's tactics for that.
Incidentally: the first to flounce off SB during the Athene Affair was, um, me. SV would have happened without me, of course (Squishy and Ford had been cooking it up for months without my knowledge; they just went public early to capitalise), and I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't had massive existing issues with The Observer and some of the mods, but that was still not a great decision on my part; I'll cop to that.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
I mean, those effects were involved in the SB/Sietch breakup, although significant chunks of it were just SJ pulling the standard entryism+inevitability playbook that it was playing for the entire decade. QQ and DWW, though, died as politics venues for unrelated reasons, and SV/SB mostly retained a common userbase rather than siloing happening (of course, now SV's dying; never mind QQ eclipsing it, its post rate is outright going backwards at a significant rate).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
So tell me, bud, where are the other places I could go to share opinions and maybe express skepticism about whether or not trans women are really truly heckin' 100% biological women, even though I by no means hate them or want them killed or put in camps or forcibly detransitioned?
Some parts of the SpaceBattles diaspora used to be this (most notably Digital Wild West and Questionable Questing), but DWW's dead (its owner had a psychotic break) and QQ banned politics. I think The Sietch is roughly similar to here in outlook, although I haven't actually joined due to being satisfied with ACX/here.
Speaking of which, the ACX comments still do exist, although Substack's UI is hilariously inferior.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
24d ago
It’s clear to me now that the time for talking is over, and that there can be no further productive use for sticking around and trying to bridge the ever-widening divide in realities between “woke” America and “antiwoke” America.
There are actually a lot of people in the middle here. I'd largely consider myself one; I'm often grudgingly willing to ally with the conservatives against the progressives (particularly since said conservatives are weaker here in Oz), but as an erotic fanfic writer I know I'm not exactly their favourite person either.
It would be nice to keep more diversity here - real diversity, that is, diversity of opinion. It has been noted to me that theMotte is not feeding me an especially-accurate view of "the left", and you could help with that.
I said "travelling", not "commuting". I was thinking of going to visit family or going on a holiday, which (unlike commuting) often involves driving through long stretches of nothing (my general feeling is that the speed limits in built-up areas are generally about right, but those on highways are frequently far too low; many of the high-end divided roads and outback highways in Australia, for instance, could support far more than their speed limit of 110 km/h).
Also, here in Australia, there are certain highways where you're not just saving days, but potentially saving the need for a bloody caravan because the towns are over a day's drive (at the speed limit) apart.
I mean, the Royal Flying Doctor Service here in Oz has 500 km/h and even 800 km/h ambulances, which are in fact very handy. That particular solution doesn't work so well for random people travelling, though, because lol piloting is hard.
More options
Context Copy link