magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Stars crap out planets the way we take a dump on the toilet. Case closed everyone! Planets are fecal matter.
The funny bit is that this is kind of true. The reason stars usually have planets is that a contracting gas cloud has to shed angular momentum to slow down its spin enough to contract to stellar size, and the only way to do that (prior to the star getting hot enough to create stellar winds) is to shift it into orbits - either it splits into two and becomes a binary (with the angular momentum stuffed into the stars' orbit around each other) or it spits out a disc of matter around its equator that coalesces into planets (with the angular momentum stuffed into the planets' orbits).
Of course, Jupiter doesn't have excess angular momentum, so it's not going to spit out the Great Red Spot or anything else.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Scott's covered two hypotheses for what the issue with "processed food" is:
- it has more degrees of freedom, and food producers' incentives are to trick you into eating 500kg of their food and becoming a balloon so more degrees of freedom for the producers are bad for you,
- it's invariably full of vegetable oil, which "normal" food is not.
Yes, many definitions exist which do not correspond one-to-one with a reasonable hypothesis such as these, and to the extent they do not they will be less effective than they could be, but the basic idea of categorising things this way is not insane.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
New term to me, but that's basically what I was gesturing at, thanks.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.
To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:
- The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
- The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
- Both agree on some middle ground.
One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.
I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict.
Remember that there are a decent amount of people not interested in discussing any particular thing. I've been largely staying out of it, for instance, because I've already come to a conclusion on the best policy of the West (get the fuck out, at least as far as military assistance, to avoid making enemies by backing Israel and avoid getting nuked by openly backing Palestine), it doesn't seem especially likely to blow up in a way that leads to WWIII (unlike Taiwan, which I check the news on every week or so), and I'm not enough of a masochist to keep soaking my brain in the endless stream of atrocities without some actual benefit to doing so.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Oh, they're not 100%-retention, but they don't have to be. They just have to be high-enough retention to perpetuate themselves. And while yes, something might change internally to them (although with the Amish it's not really a good bet), anything that didn't get all of them would just start the cycle over again in microcosm.
My overall point is this: you can beat natural selection - Azathoth, as Eliezer called it, although frankly Shub-Niggurath's a better fit from what I know - but you're not going to beat it by accident for long enough to actually die out. Shub-Niggurath doesn't always win, but she always wins by default - you have to actively try if you're going to hold her down. I noted above that such an attempt could indeed be made to destroy the Amish, and of course "not actually the end of the species" is some damnation with faint praise indeed, but keep your head about you.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
Who knows, maybe there really is some sort of equilibrium where this mysterious negative feedback mechanism we can't identify will taper off.
I mean, the obvious natural counterforce is "without state-enforced indoctrination to break their retention rates or some form of genocide, insular subcultures like the Amish and Orthodox Jews - possibly also their Muslim equivalents - will outbreed everyone else".
Note the caveats on that statement, though, and the rather-drastic nature of that transition even if it's allowed to happen.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I get the "gunpoint" part, but why "spermjacking"? Is there a "Bambie" among the various women who've impregnated themselves with stolen semen, or something?
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
One difference, however, was that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" in hindsight by its detractors, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects as they planned it out.
Um.
The aristocrats of Internal Affairs are since many days meditating a movement. Oh well! They'll have it, that movement, but they'll have it against them! It will be organized, regularized by a revolutionary army that at last will fulfill that great word that it owes to the Paris Commune: Let's make terror the order of the day!
-Bertrand Barère (translated), September 1793
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
It has been said that terror is the spring of despotic government. Does yours then resemble despotism? Yes, as the steel that glistens in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles the sword with which the satellites of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his debased subjects; he is right as a despot: conquer by terror the enemies of liberty and you will be right as founders of the republic. The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force only intended to protect crime? Is not the lightning of heaven made to blast vice exalted?
-Maximilien Robespierre (translated), February 1794
The term "Terror" as a description of the period (note that in French it's simply called "the Terror") does seem to have descended from these and other invocations by the Terror's architects, even if it wasn't the official name at the time.
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
It would take a fairly-major spark, yes. Here are some possible sparks big enough:
- hard hit on debt ceiling, police and military defunded for long enough that they desert from lack of pay
- a true repeat of Bush v. Gore without a concession and with a hated candidate winning (Jan 6 was as mild as it was because Trump was clearly bananas to the point that the Republican machine didn't back him, and because Joe Biden was a milquetoast candidate who didn't (yet) have the hatedom that Trump himself and almost every other Democrat did)
- open defiance of SCOTUS by the executive, or possibly court-packing.
None of these is remotely a sure thing, but it's hard to rule any of them out either. Hence, serious possibility.
(And there's at least one other I know of.)
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
If so, it's their biggest failure ever; there's a serious possibility of civil war, and even if unrealised that threat is contributing to other threats such as a potential WWIII over Taiwan.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
· Edited 17d ago
Browsing through a certain interaction I had... some think Trump winning is already a fascist regime taking power, and some think that civil war is inevitable anyway.
You're more right than I thought, but the amount of people I've encountered saying outright that couping Trump would be the right thing to do is still not zero, and as I said this is very much a case of the unilateralist's curse.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Two, actually - self_made_human and FCfromSSC.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.
Mmm, you kinda can regarding the last few years of Mao's reign, with the Gang of Four effectively running the show in his name, although certainly not about the decades prior to that.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.
I mean, technically I'm not sure he's done multiple against a single opponent, but since convicted criminals can't run for President in Russia, and Putin has tight control of the courts, he only needs the one. And this is, in fact, his primary method of preventing election losses; IIRC he's done it to several candidates that looked like they were gaining steam.
Of course, the fact that Putin does, in fact, abuse disqualification is no defence of the tactic.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
My guess is that the Dems would go for a moderate, because throwing in an opposing partisan would get them in internal trouble but they'd want to be seen as not validating political murder. Except, well, in point of fact replacing an opposing partisan with a moderate still is validating political murder, so the Rubicon gets crossed anyway.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Yeah, nitroglycerine is a vasodilator (prodrug to nitric oxide); it's still used medically for such.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
While the establishment Democrats probably don't want a civil war, there are those on the SJ side who think a civil war beats another Republican presidency, particularly if they can leverage being technically in power into enough control of the military to win that civil war.
And, of course, assassinating the President is very much a "unilateralist's curse" issue.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
It should be remembered that for much of the US's existence, SCOTUS wasn't really as powerful as it now is. Jackson, for instance, directly defied SCOTUS successfully.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
to reign in
"rein in" is an equestrian term and has no G.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
Over the past few years, these things have been successfully prevented through organized performance art style protests drawing gigantic crowds of journalists.
Sorry, not sure I'm parsing correctly. What are they preventing?
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
I found "Respectability Cascades" in my initial searching (as I said, I searched SSC quite thoroughly), but that's not it. And indeed, it's not "Seventy Percent".
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
· Edited 21d ago
No, it's not what I'm looking for. As I said to KingOfTheBailey, I'm not looking for "lots of people were already pro-X, but were hiding until it became cool". I'm looking for "people actually became pro-X when it became cool".
Of course, it is easy to mistake one for the other, in either direction, and this may become emotionally charged because most people don't want to admit (even to themselves) that they're part of the latter.
Thanks for trying, though.
My guess is that the combination of Twitter being not really his sort of company with the "Fair Game" notice the Biden administration put out on him in retaliation for buying it is why his star's falling.
If he can figure out how to delegate Twitter, and/or if the massive lawfare stops for one reason or another, he might return to form, but you're right that he's way off it.
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