popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
13d ago
The comment you chose in particular is as clear an example of outgroup bashing as its possible to be.
Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comment like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
popocatepetl
19d ago
Exactly, which is my point in general. It's not about sports, it's about using sports as a pretext to attack trans people. This is why I'm not as quick to dismiss progressive claims of racism, or sexism, or various phobias as I used to be.
No, that's not my point. Sports is the best terrain to attack the idea of transgenderism. The fact a man is not a woman is never more manifest than when you set trained men and women against each other athletically. For anti-trans activists to choose the most favorable situation to make their case suggests nothing about their motives. Some may be motivated by phobia, others by reason or tribal affiliation or whatever; for anyone, it's the best place to set the battle lines.
Do people on both side of the debate actually care about women's sports, or is it just an excuse to wage the culture war?
Why do crocodiles ambush prey crossing the river instead of coming on land to snatch them?
Sports is where the weakness of the "trans(wo)men are (wo)men" is most visible, and where the apparent moral highground of progressives defending the weak against bullies is reversed. It's the ideal terrain for conservatives. So that's where they choose to fight, hoping victory there translates to victory elsewhere.
popocatepetl
22d ago
Does what we know about microplastics/estrogenics justify making lifestyle changes to avoid them?
popocatepetl
24d ago
The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.
Underlined. I was wrong on this one. They didn't study "transmission", because stopping transmission would be unnecessary if the vaccine stopped infection.
popocatepetl
24d ago
It accelerated existing trends: the security state, government regulation of social media, political polarization, the decline of small businesses. I don't see it as turning point in any area.
popocatepetl
25d ago
Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. In this case it's caused by the fact that a number of major governments decided to spend several years printing money like there was no tomorrow, and then tomorrow came. The only way to undo that would be to round up all the money they printed and destroy it.
MV = PQ
Possible explanations for inflation include money supply growing, the number of exchanges increasing, and/or the economy shrinking. If the money supply increases apace with the economy, no inflation will occur. If the money supply increases slower than the economy grows, deflation will occur. And "money supply" includes not only greenbacks, but money lent into existance via fractional reserve banking.
You are correct that the fed will not allow this to happen, but it's not because they'd have to physically round up and destroy greenbacks to cause deflation.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I expect it to make him deeply uncomfortable and hopefully start the process of convincing himself that he needs to change his approach
Without actually giving him an opportunity to mull it over at leisure in written form, there is no way we can agree on a common set of facts. And if at worst, he doesn't want to look at it, at least I am arguing from the moral high ground of actually putting in the work to find the truth.
Cordially, please get your head out of your buttocks and do what's best for your nephew/cousin-twice-removed/whatever. This approach is folly. You've received a unanimous chorus of feedback telling you it's folly. Do you want to save your kid relative or does that come after making the father agree with you on gender ontology?
I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.
Multipolar trap. The only way to signal you're intelligent, dilligent, and agreeable is to spend four years purchasing a $100k piece of paper. The best way to know you're hiring someone who's not dumb, lazy, and/or antisocial is to fish from that pool of people.
Appoint Bryan Caplan Education Tsar (and overcome ideological aversion to tests that reveal population differences), and you can solve this signalling problem quicker and cheaper. By a lot.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
LOTR is the exceedingly rare case where I prefer the movie adaptation over the book.
For real, Peter Jackson made tons of canny revisions and cutdowns. I read the books first. The movies were better. So much of the LOTR screams "this author can't kill his darlings", with all the poetry and digressions into the Middle Earth history and Tom Bombadil sidestories. Furthermore, Jackson made the brilliant decision to add scenes from the villains' POV, creating opportunities for tense foreshadowing of the threats the fellowship will soon face.
The good professor Tokien of course remains a legend and a trailblazer, but only in the same way Newton is. Everyone respects Newton. No one thinks he was right about everything.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Every forum discussing politics that isn't wordy gets very unpleasant very fast. In the spirit of this subthread, I'll refrain from theoryposting why that might be.
Does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society? Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is.
My favorite Scott essay ever covers this better than I can. Forcing people to believe false things is inherently destructive, even if the truth doesn't matter at all. Sometimes the repression is worth the squeeze, because the falsehood is load-bearing for the functioning of society. Reducing suicide rates for perhaps 1% of population doesn't qualify. Meanwhile, the truth regime required to force everyone else to believe a man is a woman — or at least pretend they do while never ever letting the mask slip — boggles the mind.
Could you get me down with "Transwomen are men, and we all know that, but for therapeutic purposes we will pretend they are not"? Maybe. But that's not what they're demanding.
Has anyone run into a really good case against the Great Replacement theory?
While I don't think "western democracies" are properly democracies these days, neither are they despotic. They don't rule by fear, but by meeting the demands of various interest groups and the people. Skilled professionals at least. (And the rest enough so they don't rebel.)
"The people" demand a comfortable lifestyle and rights that reduce fertility to <1.5 TFR. These demands, unfortunately, contradict each other. Cheap consumer goodies and early retirements need cheap labor to pick the fruit, make the iphones, and empty the bedpans.
Western governments are resolving this contradiction by importing young people from abroad and offshoring what dirty work they can to other countries. Is this popular? No. Is it out of malice for the natives? No. It's just that the other solutions to the problem would be more unpopular.
As usual, WTF Happened in 1971 is a fitting reference. Productivity and compensation stopped correlating in 1971, and we haven't (effectively) collectively demanded a reduced work week yet.
We could have transitioned to three day work weeks way before 1971. The flaw in Keynes's famous prediction is that, past the point of basic subsistance, economic utility is relative. People don't want to make $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 inflation-adjusted household income to be happy. They want more than their peers. They want to have class-markers that low status people don't, not the luxuries that those class-markers manifest themselves in. It's why the canard about modern trailer trash having it better than kings in 1900 is so ridiculous.
If whatever happened in 1971 never happened, people would still be working as much as ever. The hedonic treadmill would just be moving faster.
the violent and angry responses from conservatives
....? They're not buying beer. One guy shot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. It was not a case with Mulvaney on it, just a blue box.
now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.
Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless. This is not some pedantic nit I'm picking. Please demonstrate that a legible conservative can enter a gay pride space and not get a hostile reception. I've tried to demonstrate it's possible for legibly gay people to enter a conservative space in the same way.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
You're continuing to demonstrate my point. A conservative has to display specific political speech in liberal spaces to have his presence politicized.
Putting aside that you consider "wearing a police uniform" a political statement, what do you propose as a clear way for a conservative to self-identify at a pride parade to see whether or not he'd be threatened?
Could we raise some money and get Ben Shapiro to attend a pride parade, just attend, with no political statement of any kind? I'd be willing to wager money people would get up in his grill, if not literally attack him.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I think cutting off a child's sexual organs meets a very clear and universal definition of "sexual abuse".
Equivocation. Sexual abuse for my entire life has refered to using children for the sexual gratification, not just "abuse that involves primary sexual characteristics". Why not call it "child abuse" or "child disfigurement" except to free ride on the negative associations of the term? Same with "grooming".
I'm honestly shocked believe its almost certainly an indictment of the American right there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
That would only build political capital for the other side. Regardless, if the only correct response to the government/society doing something horrible were a terrorist attack, no decent man would yet survive. Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.
This is what we're talking about. this is what the American right believes. And the boomercons are so poisoned by "tolerance" they're actually letting it happen.
And people here believe AI apocalypse is three years away. Why aren't they bombing Nvidia factories and sabotaging electrical converters?
popocatepetl
1mo ago
A conservative man can go to a pride parade, just like in the blog post you linked, and not be threatened.
Uh... I strongly disagree with this analysis. Go to your next pride parade in a MAGA hat and see what happens.
However, there is a sense that certain factions or cultures of conservative men (of varying races and ethnicities) have created defensive silos of culture against the encroachment of gender non-conforming men. These places could be certain gyms, certain sales teams, certain blue collar unions, or certain bars. The shared sentiment is that there's enough spaces for gay or trans people (these men can't tell the difference) and so they need to batten down the hatches and keep their exclusionary spaces free from the taint of homo (no pun intended).
Then the conservative men start literally shooting cases of beer, and it becomes apparent that it's not really about protecting women and children, it's about establishing cultural silos of hatred towards gay and trans people.
Consider that there are semiotics to LGBT representation on a Bud Light can that go beyond the semantic meaning. Gay rites are civil rites. The red tribe can recognize a blue tribe religious ablution when they see one. Why do you think the red tribe failed to raise a stink about Milo Yiannopoulos, when he was a gay invading their "silo"?
Democrats used to get quite surly about Americana imagery and music in sports, brands, and media back during the War On Terror. This isn't because they "hated America" or "hated freedom". They correctly perceived extreme displays of the Stars and Stripes as a gang marker for the red tribe.
I'm willing to entertain the notion Alissa Heinerscheid didn't know what she was doing, but it looks a hell of a lot from the outside like a triumphalist blue tribe elite planting their flag on the reddest of red tribe territory. Imagine conservatives buying the largest mosque in Portland and erecting a big George W Bush statue on top of it. Are they doing anything wrong? What do you think will happen to the statue?
I think @motteposter is misidentifying his grievence with women to empathy. Mencius Moldbug wrote something like "Democracy is rule by who controls the media". I do not think this is universally the case. But women have a higher degree of conformity then men, and so are susceptible towards propaganda that portrays a minority viewpoint as consensus. I recall a study where researchers showed girls social media posts with randomly generated numbers of likes; their subjective rating of these posts matched the forged community opinion. You can steer the overton window in this way.
In pictures I see of the third reich, the ones most enthusiastically waving the swatztika flags and doing the Hitler salute at rallies are young women. Is that them being "empathetic"? No, it's social contagion. The media tells them that Nazism is socially desirable and good, and liberalism is unthinkable. And so they wave their flags. This makes democracies with female franchise singularly unstable and vulnerable to the most passionate power-seeking minority in its meme ecosystem. We are currently being driven off a cliff by such a one.
This leaves me in a bind, because I still feel myself a liberal in my bones, and female equality is a natural and inevitable derived principle of liberalism. I have said before (maybe joking) that extra votes to parents for their children might be a workable approach.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Replacing Bud Light with Yuengling as the schlitz of the red tribe would be the smallest W one could characterize as a W. On the level of "throw a tantrum to force Mom to stop at McDonalds on the way to get your shots". But if you can manage it, sure. Draping Bud Light in the colors seemed like a particularly cruel low blow. So I'll cheer.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
At the Mountains of Madness is probably to the Cthulhu fanbase as the Extended Directors Cuts are to the Lord of the Rings movie fanbase. Yeah, some other Lovecraft stories were better edited, suggestive-by-subtraction, and well-paced jewels of horror (Innsmouth or Call). But at a certain point you're a super-fan and want a buffet.
I don't see the connection. Whatever the truth is, when you're in a war, you're in a war. Perhaps stripping boxing gloves and picking up a bowie knife isn't a good tactic for the right — there may be social dynamics at play that allow the prog left to use slander but call for an asymmetric response from the right. However, there's nothing inconsistant between personal good faith truth-seeking and publicly using slander against opponents who are trying to destroy you. An anti-militarist can take up arms when the homeland is invaded. A person who seeks cooperate-cooperate can defect when playing against a defectbot.
Viral social media shaming leading to getting fired is like being struck by lightning. It shouldn't much effect your evaluation of quality of life in the USA, any more than mass school shootings should.
More options
Context Copy link