magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
I put that down mainly to the Motte having an unusually high quotient of neo-Nazis.
I'd generally object to the categorisation of "choosing a partner based on genetics" as necessarily "neo-Nazi". There's a pretty-clear distinction here between the HBD-believers (the majority, including me) and the specific neo-Nazis, the Jew-exclusionary white supremacists (a subset and a minority, who catch a fair amount of downvotes and probably a larger amount of eye-rolls). The main thrust of that post is not specific to Nazis, and I imagine a lot of non-Nazis upvoted/AAQCed that post.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
I agree that the specific Rat community tends strongly to have a particular set of views on those topics (though I'll note that I do go to LW meetups), and the Rat community is the most active in trying to stop/align AI.
My point is that the Rat community isn't identical to "the set of people who think AI might kill us all". Trump is pro-AI; much of the alt-right is pro-AI for tribal reasons. Actual conservatives... I know one IRL, and he's got a higher P(Doom) than me even if he doesn't use that term. One can hate the Rats and also hate AI.
(I mean, sure, "existential" in this sense is to a fair degree Rat jargon and will mess with your poll results compared to "is it possible AI will kill us all", but I understood you as making a point about people's predictions of worldstate, not about vocabulary.)
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Based on people's answers to questions like "does AI pose an existential threat to the human race?", you should not be able to predict their opinions about completely unrelated topics like polyamory, gender ideology and factory farming. But in practice, you can, and with remarkable accuracy.
This isn't really true. I mean, if you applied that to me you'd get 0.5/3 (I think polyamory works for some people, but I imagine I'd wind up stabbing someone if I did it, and I think a lot of people have similar inclinations and less self-awareness than I). More generally, conservatives are generally pretty worried about AI; they just aren't particularly organised around doing something about it.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
The interesting question is why corporate America (including but not limited to Big Tech) went full woke during the first Trump administration.
SJ escalated massively in response to the Trump campaign, and then again in response to COVID. The SJ-sympathetic personnel were already mostly in place by 2015 AIUI; Trump just created perceived urgency.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Definitely not the post I was thinking of, although there's a similar point in there. The one I was thinking of was specifically reacting to a memo to doctors advising them to frame things in a way that blames the people SJ wanted to blame.
I don't remember enough about what the political environment was like in 2017 to remember if this is absurdly prescient, or if enough of this stuff was already in place to make it a pretty straightforward expansion of visible trends.
Not prescient; I'd already seen an SJ forum go down exactly that path before 2017 (I know this, because I got politely asked to leave in early 2016 which gives a point of reference for my memories).
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property.
No, that's socialism. Communism, as the name suggests, is "commune-ism", where there's no need for individual ownership because people care about others as much as themselves. This works pretty well at small scales and utterly-terribly at country scales due to human nature.
The confusion is because Marx claimed that socialism was a necessary stepping-stone to achieving successful large-scale communism, and hence the Marxist countries (which were socialist, and said as much - "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", "socialism with Chinese characteristics") were/are frequently governed by Communist Parties (named such aspirationally).
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
The post might have been before then, yeah.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
I remember this post (maybe by Scott, maybe not) discussing some SJ-aligned advice to doctors (essentially, trying to use conservatives' trust of doctors to push SJ framing of issues, I remember an anti-corporate point in there though I forget exact wording) and pointing out that this would merely cause conservatives to stop trusting doctors, with horrible side-effects. Can't find it. Anybody remember what I'm talking about?
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
The emergence of an artist like Pollock would have proven the Communist point about the decadence of capitalism, but is this the point that a conservative like Carlson wants to make?
While conservatives and neoliberals are in coalition in most of the Anglosphere, it's an uneasy coalition (and a weaker one in the USA than elsewhere). Small-town conservatives are generally quite suspicious of laissez-faire capitalism, even if they're also suspicious of the words "communism" and "socialism" (there is some real distaste for the bureaucracies of socialism, but note that the Amish and similar groups are literally communes).
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
The problem with guerrilla warfare in urban settings is that it generally involves war crimes, e.g. fighting out of uniform, relying on your opponent to have qualms about killing civilians by accident.
As a general rule, in civil wars nobody cares about the laws of war. A major reason for this is that each side in a civil war considers the other(s) to be criminal traitors rather than legitimate parties to the anti-war-crime treaties (because, after all, the country has one ratification of those treaties, and the whole point of a civil war is that they can't agree on who "owns" that ratification). There are others, as well, like the "proximity + small differences" metric applying much more strongly to a civil war than any international war.
I can't find the source, but there's a quote out there that's darkly humorous and accurate: "Civil war isn't".
(The US Civil War was actually an outlier among civil wars for how relatively-nice it was.)
What you've described is basically just "one sin (defeat), one grace (victory)", though, and there's a reason that that saying is put in the mouths of a group called the Legions of Terror. I wouldn't say that they're never words to live by*, but the only typically-accepted reason is emergency - total war, human extinction, that sort of thing. To engage that mentality outside a true emergency is a mark of delusion or evil, and usually results in atrocity.
*I have to admit to holding that mentality with regard to stopping AI, because yeah, I believe basically anything's justified to prevent the end of the world. I'm not a terrorist, and I recommend against terrorism, purely on practical grounds (i.e. I cannot come up with any terrorist acts - at least in present conditions - that both are plausibly achievable and actually lower P(Doom)).
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