popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It was a great surprise to me the first time I realized that certain societies could be literate for centuries with relatively little to show for it in terms of great works. The literary output of classical Athens in a single century was easily better than the previous three thousand years of Egyptian writing combined.
When I first read the Bible, I noticed the Old Testament got way more interesting at Job, Ecclesiastes, and Songs. You can read and love these even as an Atheist. They're great. Later, I discovered these books were probably written during the Hellenistic period. There was something uniquely awesome and fertile about Greek culture at that particular moment.
Should this be surprising? Calculus might have been invented by many algebraically literate cultures for hundreds of years. Then, two separate Western Europeans invented it within a twelve year period. Along with a million other discoveries, dug up in a frenzy during the Enlightenment. It takes a special combo of cultural forces to produce amazing intellectual advancements.
When your chief executive fears nothing, period, there’s no telling what can happen.
Not really. When powers are separated, the executive can rattle around in its little box, hemmed in on all sides, and then leave power, frustrated but not existentially threatened.
Whereas here, we have a pretty good idea of what can happen. He’s not going to get executed or even go to prison for a campaign finance crime.
As I said, it's an escalation. The Biden adminsistration has apparently made prosecuting Trump on something, anything, a major goal. And now for the first time in history a president has been indicted. Don't you think this will be returned with interest if the faction Trump represents gets back in power?
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I tend not to blame Ford for pardoning Nixon. When your chief executive fears legal annihilation if he ever transfers power to enemies, there's no telling what can happen. For one, it's the proximate cause of the death of the Roman Republic. Caesar knew he would have charges brought against him once his proconsulship in Gaul ended, so the price of crossing the Rubicon and of letting his term expire were the same.
This is a stupid escalation of precedent.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
You think Russia and China like their odds in an AI arms race? If USG made a credible offer of “AI non-proliferation,” how do we know it wouldn’t be accepted?
Credible means enforceable. Isn't this Dark Forest situation where malicious signatories can continue to build AI in secret? If so, even non-malicious signatories will feel compelled to develop AI in secret to avoid getting shivved in the back.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
A penis is a sexual organ. Is there a context where you wouldn't regard a representation of a penis as sexual content?
Equivocation fallacies are a dirty trick.
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"Sexual content" = "Pornographic content"
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"Sexual organ" = "Reproductive organ"
popocatepetl
2yr ago
For anyone who's reading this, I'm about to push a big change
Is it that uncensored search engine with results as good as 2010 Google I suggested? Fantastic.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
"Don't tell your parents."
Feels like this could easily be an off-hand gag in the genre of the chemistry teacher telling her class "We're going to be playing with fire today. Don't rat me out!" Such quotes, said every day, can look monstrous in print when a personnel decision needs to be justified.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.
* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")
It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino
I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.
It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.
Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.
This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I will point out that on /r/nfl there have been a surprising (and, to me, refreshing) number of comments about how Lamar Jackson is basically a complete moron, that everyone has known for a while that he’s very low-IQ
I was heartened by the exasperated response of most fans when there was some scuttlebutt about Lamar Jackson feeling racially-marginalized because Daniel Jones (a dead-average and whiter-than-white young quarterback for the New York Giants) got a contract and Jackson didn’t.
He has no constituency. Usually, fans of the QB's team would go through threads downvoting critical opinions and making things unpleasant for anyone commenting on the emperor's clothes. But Ravens fans have emotionally detached from Lamar at this point.
/r/nfl threads don't reflect average opinion, but who can turn out the most passionate mob of slactivists at a given time. If Lamar had an energized base of fans, they'd probably be out in force playing the race card.
I personally much prefer a nation which organizes along a shared ethic, not ethnic line.
The two may not be separable, at least not sustainably so. Large multiethnic states in history were run autocratically and left cultural enclaves alone within reason. Enforcing and maintaining an ethical union over diverse peoples, as the late Roman or Russians discovered, is a divisive and purge-filled affair that possibly leads to your state shattering into a million little pieces. Some believed liberalism was the master-ethic to would coordinate a state with multiple ethnicities. And yet it's only really worked in quite homogenous countries, with the possible, interesting exception of India. You introduce liberalism to country with tribes, and democracy become a mechanism for tribal looting.
Visible ethnic diversity in the USA has been increasing. What do we see? Reparations and DEI (looting) and an increasing number of people fracturing ideologically. How's our ethical union going?
Either (a) Hispanics and Asians dissolve with the American "whites" like Italians and Germans did with the WASPs, forming a spliced ethnicity where no one really knows what tribe they belong to — "I'm 50% English, 30% French, 15% Irish, 5% German" — or (b) the whole thing is going to segfault.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The perfectly tuned manifesto might trigger toxoplasma. I can see "Desparate cry for help from trans youth* brutally abused by religious fanatics" to split the public on whether we should blame the shooter or transphobia more.
* Not actually very young
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I agree with @ThenElection. You can weight the Male:FtM mass shooting rate against the Cis:Trans mass shooting rate to isolate how much is due to their intrinsic "maleness" vs how much is FtMs just being mentally ill. The math will be complicated by the need to control for the ratio of MtFs:FtMs, but it can be done.
So, a few scenarios that match with different hypotheses assuming Males and Females + MtFs and FtMs are both equally prevalent to avoid said complicated math.
A. "FtMs are male brains in female bodies", "trans people are not mentally ill"
Male:FtM mass shooting rate should be 1:1.
B. "FtMs are male brains in female bodies", "trans people are more mentally ill"
Male:FtM mass shooting rate = Cis:Trans mass shooting rate.
C. "FtMs are females passing themselves as male", "trans people are not mentally ill"
Male:FtM mass shooting rate = Male:Female mass shooting rate
D. "FtMs are females passing themselves as male", "trans people are more mentally ill"
Male:FtM mass shooting rate = Male:Female mass shooting rate * Cis:Trans mass shooting rate
Would this actually prove that point? I feel like it could just prove that masculinizing hormones actually masculinize people, which is hardly a revelation. Plenty of transmen already report anecdotally being quicker to anger, or needing to masturbate more after HRT.
It would definitely falsify something about my current position. I understand transitioning to change people at a fairly superficial level.
In fact, the inverse being true isn't even catastrophic to the LGBT position. If fewer FtM people are school shooters and violent criminals, then it could be evidence that socialization plays a stronger role in gendered behavior than biology, at least as concerns violent crime. FtM's who are socialized as girls through their early childhood end up less likely to commit crimes than cismen socialized as boys.
That doesn't follow. Lower FtM crime fits the biological explanation and the socialization one equally well, so it shouldn't update your priors on that point one way or the other.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.
(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".
popocatepetl
2yr ago
FtM, if this is anything to go by.
More FtM school shooters would be (with grim irony) excellent evidence in favor of the "trans people are X minds born in a Y body" framing of the trans phenomenon, as opposed to borderline personality and social contagion which is the more popular explanation here.
I'm not getting any quick google results I trust, but there must be at least 20x as many Gen Z biological males as FtMs. If the ratio of male mass shooters:FtM mass shooters ever converges with the ratio of Male:FtMs in society, that will shift my priors dramatically in favor the LGBT activist framing of the issue being the correct one.
(I'm not suggesting that this ratio will come to pass, but I am registering this in advance as evidence that would falsify my current position.)
I love it how our female commentariat is so easily identifiable.
Strongly disagree. Every long-time contributor who flames out and gets a lengthy ban follows a similar arc, male or female. They're fine discussing [X monstrous idea] and [Y monstrous idea] from a cool remove. Then one day, someone brings up [Z monstrous idea], and it hits a little too close to home. Suddenly, themotte.org playing nicey-nice with prevaricating evil is unacceptable.
It's a reaction for which I have negative respect. That said, no one has found my [Z] yet.
In many subs the mods have locked comments on threads about this story.
Can you link to those threads?
/r/kotor thread (I'll give these guys a pass actually, as they also locked discussion of the allegations when they first came out, too.)
/r/games thread got deleted
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It's still the weekend. If nothing pops up by the end of the workweek, I'll have been wrong and will be suitably embarrassed and nonplussed.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Anyway, my consciousness ceases and I am gone after any neural impulse alters a synaptic connection in my brain. Sweet dreams, everyone.
...are you really complaining that they didn't write out and evaluate the surface integral over the daylit hemisphere ∫∫S Isuncos θincidencedS? I assure you that it simplifies to Isunπr²
I appreciate putting someone in their place with the power of calculus, but a simpler demonstration would be a diagram of light hitting the earth. The portion of light captured by earth will be a circle, not the surface area of a half sphere, let alone the surface area of a full sphere.
The last (which is @Sky is assuming) would be attained if, with a paper earth, we cut earth open and lay it flat on the table to capture sunlight on all its surface.
I don’t think there’s anything “Shadowy” about the U.N. or their explicitly stated goals.
Yes, but "To achieve our stated goals, we will manipulate social media to amplify accusations of sexual misconduct, creating a chilling effect against casual sex that reduces fertility" is a strategy that, if it exists, exists in the shadows. As do whatever organs the UN is using to enact said strategy.
This approach would be dubious IMO, as casual sex rarely results in children these days, and the hypothetical blowback from the ploy being discovered is immense.
Unless you're suggesting the coordinators have such an iron grip that discovery or blowback are non-factors? In which case, why are they pussyfooting around the issue with sneaky psyops rather than just putting contraceptives in the water supply or something?
Every major liberal social movement of the past century has one goal in mind: sustainable development.
Your ideas suppose the elites are amazingly powerful and coordinated in pursuing this end, but at the same time, they've contented themselves with a 100 year policy of slowly changing gender roles through ad hoc puppeteered social movements, rather than just enacting the New World Order and having done with it.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
How would you prove they were lying beyond reasonable doubt?
Via a court case that the women decided they'd rather pay Chris million(s) of dollars in settlement rather than risk.
Although in civil cases "beyond a reasonable doubt" is unnecessary, admittedly.
March 25 2023, PCGamer - crickets
March 25 2023, Kotaku - crickets
This is a momentous enough retraction for a famous cancelled figure that they'll have to make some sort of article about it. 95% one will, 60% both will. 99% I will hate their framing of the story.
EDIT: By the by, I checked back on the cursed motherland. In many subs the mods have locked comments on threads about this story. Can't have people developing any unapproved inferences.
The most merciful thing about the human mind something something correlate all its contents something something.
It's unreasonable to expect day-to-day behavior to be completely in accord with abstract beliefs. He is still a monkey who wants higher status. Religious fanatics will still look at porn, and moral nihilists will still get outraged at someone who milkshakes their kid.
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