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popocatepetl


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


				

User ID: 215

popocatepetl


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

					

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


					

User ID: 215

Trace had massive reservations about the state of The Motte even in 2020, and we're further down the rabbithole now. Besides, Substack and even X have improved as platforms for mottelike effortposts.

you'll have to pony up $8/month for sync

It's cheaper with the .edu discount.

Obsidian changed the price to $4/month yesterday. Pretty negligible unless you're poverty mode, but I already have a good setup, and private github repos are free.

Also, I use more than one vault. Only getting one for $48/year is a bit lame, especially since there's already a 1gb size constraint anyway.

Sounds like you independently discovered Mari Kondo minimalism. Read her book since she's a nut for throwing things away to increase mental bandwidth.

What are your unconventional mental bandwidth saving hacks?

This is more common than unconventional, since it's the GTD method, but be sure to transfer the noisiness of your brain into a coppermind. For every thought that you anticipate will touch your mind more than once: put tasks in a todo app, high-priority facts like face-name pairs in a flashcard app, notes and writings in a searchable reference app. (I'm use Todoist, Anki, and Obsidian atm.)

For those with anxiety, there's a fourth category I use called recurring worries. Thoughts like 'am I on the right path?' 'why am I wasting time on this?' 'what will people think about this?' etc. I put these in an evergreen note called 'The Worry Bucket' and allocate one hour on Sundays for them. This makes them easier to dismiss and focus for the rest of the week.

The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.

Smart saruman would guilt trip the hobbits for colonizing traditional elf lands and tell them that not accepting their uruk-hai migrants into the shire would not be very nice.

Europa Universalis 5 was basically just announced

I hope they will avoid the terrible modifier stacking meta that EU4 ended up with.

I enjoy stacking modifiers. The problem with EU4 modifiers (from ideas and government reforms) is that they're all unalloyed positives. Every country feels the same Risk blob by 1500. It would be interesting if, like in real life, the decision to focus one aspect of national power hurt other aspects. IRL Russia chose Religious and Aristocratic and ended up technologically backward. IRL Britain chose Trade and Expansion and ended up with manpower of a small continental duchy. They had to either adjust their strategy for their strengths and weaknesses, or try painful reforms to adapt to the shifting meta.

In EU4, both countries end up super rich with all technologies unlocked and super powerful militaries. Just like every other successful country on the map.

I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.

I do not have it, sorry. Pretty sure it was the old site.

Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.

This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.

I often think of the economic ramifications when I see memes about single men's apartments. You can see the outlines of the pod, but the pod seems to be arriving quicker than AI will fill in the role of the mediocre men with their tedious infrastructure-maintaining jobs. If a third of young Gen Z men will never marry, and another third will end up divorcees with their wages garnished, and they're happy with a $499 gaming console and a $249 TV, what happens to the economy?

I guess the answer is the state will have to find some way to expropriate a larger portion of these men's wages to ensure they can only afford the pod if they provide a lot more surplus value than they used to, ensuring that incel pod guy must still seek technical certifications and work 40 hours at his lame construction job. Will they be able to squeeze blood from that rock is a salient unanswered question.

There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm. But in the 21st century, the wild men are slovenly gamers and the women are preaching harpies.

/images/17105993514186654.webp

The proper way is to use a lash no thicker than your thumb on parts of her body that aren't seen in public. Non-consensually, aftercare optional.

I'm unable to tell whether your meaning is literal, ironic, pretend-ironic, or pretend-pretend-ironic to express distain for people saying those things pretend-ironically.

Do you think (a) regular birchings are part of healthy monogamy, (b) such disciplinings were regularly practiced in the west before feminism?

Was JP ever really a TRP influencer? My sense was that, when he had his brief moment of being a Person, he was just a vaguely conservativish ersatz dad figure not really associated with the broader manosphere,

Jordan Peterson was the closest thing to sensible moderate answer to TRP. When it comes to posture towards women and society, he told young men to be strong, honorable, responsible, and honest; while the TRP told them to be strong, crafty, mercenary, and cynical. Of course, very online progressives hated him, though IMO they never gave a coherent answer for why.

The fact Peterson had a mental break, became a drug addict, lost his daughter to Tate, and was cancelled from his job is a good, if anecdotal, rebuttal of his approach to modern problems. The boomer advice memes write themselves.

I never liked JP too much. He has the valuable academic skill of sounding erudite, but when you dissect what he's actually saying, full of literary allusions and digressions, it often doesn't amount to much. The anti-Scott.

I don't think that's comparable; they're wielding machetes as slashing weapons (rather like bats actually, and doing a terrible job aiming at vitals), while a hunter's knife would be used in thrusting stabs.

The other difference is, unlike machetes, once fighters are within fistfight range, bats cease to be very powerful because of leverage, while the wild flurry of a stabbing knife remains devastating.

Maybe if you're completely incompetent at judging where something will be based on its velocity. But most people aren't that incompetent

I wish we could plug into the training simulation to demonstrate this. When a person winds up to swing a bat, the knife wielder can tell exactly where the blow will land, and when, over a full second beforehard. It's not terribly hard to avoid. Unlike the path of a baseball, the trajectory of a human closing in to stab you is anti-inductive.

and there's very little chance the knife wielder is going to get within stabbing range before getting a solid hit from the bat.

The extra 28 inches of distance afforded by the bat can be closed in a fraction of the time it takes to swing a bat.

Also, what's up with the insult?

Eggheads? All in good fun.

Can't you use the bat more like a baton than in Double Dragon? Two hands somewhat far apart for leverage, poking motions where appropriate to keep the guy out of arm's reach, wear him down with rib shots? It would seem awfully hard to get a stab in this way, and trying to take the bat away while holding on to the knife with the other hand is out of the question.

Using the bat like a truncheon is a better strategy than baseball style (lower latency and more unpredictability), but the damage dealt goes down dramatically, and it's still much slower than a knife.

It's my understanding that this is more how bats are used in 'teaching people a lesson for money' circles; even a partial swing choked up or a poke to the solar plexus is going to be pretty tough on a guy, and you don't exactly need to be Jackie Chan to figure it out.

The mafia use of the bat is ideal for giving a beating to a mook who knows he can't retaliate because there are more goons behind you.

If forced to confront knife-kun with a bat, my strategy would to be lob it at him before he enters melee range. Perhaps the surprise would make him drop the knife or at least nonplus him enough for me to deliver a disabling punch before he stabs me.

As for you guys arguing the bat is better... come on eggheads. Try swinging versus stabbing motions. Even if your opponent has the combat reflexes of a teletubby and can't dodge/disrupt your telegraphed swing, you'll have two fatal wounds in the gut before landing your first blow.

Why did no one tell me about Obsidian before 2024? It's like Evernote but actually good. The one downside seems to be you'll have to pony up $8/month for sync if you don't know how to use git or some other VC for the plaintext files.

Other lifechanging programs or apps? Anki is another one for me, for specific types of memorization and study.

Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?

Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)

Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.

The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:

  1. It makes you angry, but ninety percent of searchers don't notice. The sculpting works.
  2. It's very stupid, but a culture of fear inside the company prevents anyone from dialing back. The sculpting is counterproductive.
  3. The purpose of propaganda is not convincing people but demoralizing them, etc. The sculpting works.

Is there a way to tell which of these is true?

Are you a member?

I wouldn't provide value to the group, nor do I think the group would provide value to me (I'm not much of a cancel target). If one of these two variables changed I'd consider giving it a shot.

Watering holes with similar discussion norms: DataSecretsLox, /r/theschism (slowly dying)

Blogs: I interpret 'similar to here' as trying to understand the cultural moment at least one layer of abstraction deeper than Current Thing, and making observations besides the most obvious talking points from their political perspective. AstralCodexTen (obviously), PSmith's bookshelf, Ecosophia, Scholar's Stage, EXIT podcast, Richard Hanania's Newsletter.

The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)

The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.

Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.

If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.

Males typically enjoy competition provided they have some chance of winning. I've never met a male who continues to enjoy a competitive activity in which they consistently lose. (For footraces this means near last-place finishes.)

To find meaning it's important to find a competition within an arm's length of your competency. See: eudaimonia, or flow state.

So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.

The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)

Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?

/images/17101081322472017.webp

Since we're on the topic of peer pressure against small rules violations

Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?

Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?

There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.

There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt you would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.

The only difference between these two sentence pairs is the insertion of scorn. Would it be so bad to tone this down please? If you're modded you might feel vindicated for proving The Motte is too soft for ingroup criticism, well done, but if so this will be the reason. While your instinct now is probably to go hunting for examples of scornful language elsewhere on the Motte, you're delivering scorn here in distilled juice concentrate.

@bfslndr @curious_straight_ca Guys I figured it out, it's the old reddit link conversion. Just copy+paste 'reddit.com/r/196/s/Qimfce7wOf' into your URL bar.

As for the link, one of my favorite genres of internet content is "Smart autists derive social rules even social butterflies don't know except on an instinctual level". Yes, friend groups are status alliances, and you endanger your own position by trying to bring a low value add into the mix. Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid though, can't say whether the character descriptions are accurate.

I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".

Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?

Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?

Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.

You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.

Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.

A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.

Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.

High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.