popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
1yr ago
We anti-transhumanists need a schelling fence of some kind or other... why not erect it attempts to tinker with the reproductive process? Even if it's not an entirely rational line in the sand, neither is setting 18 years as the exact line for age of consent. Would you be open to getting salami sliced on that issue? One year, we agree 20 is okay. Next year, the debate goes, if 20 is okay, why not 19? Then, if 19 is okay, why not 18? If 18 is okay, why not 17? 16? We've been through this enough times that you'll have to define pedophilia.
Maintaining a line is important.
I'll echo @JarJarJedi here. What is the problem BLM might have reasonably addressed with reasonable methods? That two digits of unarmed people are killed per year by US police? That blacks have worse social outcomes than whites?
Those issue are unsolvable without ripping up the basic social constitution. And to be fair to progressives, that's what they've been trying. They've been trying to gut the 2nd and disarm the populace, decreasing violent crime and making police-civilian interactions safer. They've been trying to decrease the number and funding of the militarized police. They've been try to enact DEI to give status and wealth to blacks regardless of meritocratic outcome. They've been trying keep blacks out of jail by non-prosecution.
Of course, the costs they'd inflict on society to achieve their ends is unconscionable, and their methods wildly contradict my personal values. But what is the approach you'd recommend that's not "bizarre" or "crazy" but would actually put a dent in these problems?
I do not believe any of your complaints are relevant because they not only apply, but apply much harder, in countries with high fertility rates.
If anything, a blind adherance to the data would show that the exact opposite of your prescriptions would be useful, if increasing fertility is the only value we're optimizing for. Make people poorer, more conservative and intolerant, add corrupt and dysfunctional governments, remove welfare and social comforts, etc.
EDIT: I should clarify that your complaints may be valid for other reasons, but in terms of increasing fertility, the variables you're suggesting tweaking not only are unrelated but inversely correlated with the desired effect.
EDIT 2: Actually, to avoid being guilty of the same thing I suspect you of, I should clarify that I think you're playing dumb and are putting forth spurious arguments to passive-aggressively poke the bear here.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Ashkenazim seem pretty similar, group IQ-wise, to Japanese. Are they similarly overrepresented among powerful positions, or moreso?
Japan's National IQ is about 105; European jews are 115. Additionally, there are five times as many jews as japanese in the US, and European jews had a dramatically lower cultural and linquistic hurdle to clear on immigrating.
I'd say those factors can plausibly explain the gap.
Predictions:
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95%: Reddit does not back down, defined as offering free API to Apollo and RiF
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80%: After two weeks, no top 100 subreddit is still blacked out. (99% no more than two are)
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60%: At least one case of admins stripping modding privileges from blackouters occurs
Bonus:
- 70%: Assuming my preferred app stops working, I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
As much as I'd like to make an Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte joke, I don't think this is a case of an earnest nerd space getting coopted by trend-chasers. Most of those comments don't read to me as saying "Like, yikes. NERD", but rather, they want his arguments taken seriously and wish he'd present himself better for the normies.
Devout believers in the Bible as literally written are the fargroup. The threat that such people pose to, say, end banking like Jesus clearly said we should, or stop accumulating wealth and live like the birds and beasts of the field like he also said we should, are so remote it's not worth debunking their kooky beliefs.
On the other hand, the beliefs of the group that rallies around the label "Christian" and uses Bible scripture for mostly signalling purposes are cross-examined for their day in court. They rarely actually make a fuss about implementing literal Christian doctrine. The "prayer in school" crowd and "teach young earth rather than evolution" crowd have been driven pretty well underground.
I think a good analogy is if there was a tiny branch of woke people also believed in a magical pink space elephant who says we must build a great tower of mozzarella.
Culture wars are about taking someone's rights away, whether positive rights or negative rights.
A firecracker and a 5000 lb bomb are identical by this logic.
No, unless you're a nihilist, the difference is that some rights are "privileges" that one side is falsely characterizing as a natural right.
As for bombs and firecrackers. The outcome of every culture war has been an existentially threatening 5000 lb bomb to at least some people. There is, for example, the dumpy fourth natural son of a plantation owner who would have been happily married if slavery continued, who instead died penniless with no issue. Or there is a sect that a community considered the true word of god that went defunct because a German town legalized adult re-baptisms in the 1500s.
For you to characterize culture wars as firecrackers is only because you consider the casualties of lost culture wars worthless. Future people will consider the death of things you consider holy and the people who defended them likewise worthless.
There are no culture wars being fought in the west with the stakes being "one group of people essentially returns to being chattel".
You edited this in, so I'll edit this in. Don't look down. The ground is made out of skulls.
I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
I understand the analogy between teacher/parent trans activists and child groomers, but it's also the case that conservatives are "kidding in the square" here. Many are also darkly hinting that trans activists are pedophiles. For example, the Stonetoss comic about predators hiding in plain sight or the "Don't overcomplicate things, they're evil and want to fuck kids" meme. I don't have the data to evalute the truth value of this claim but it's definitely being made.
Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex
You're misreading this one IMO.
Democrats, America's party for social engineering, have naturally come into conflict with families over gender ideology, vaccines, school curriculum, you name it. This isn't a naked attack on the Red Tribe (though they do do that) but on the right of family — any family — to inculclate its children in values contrary to the state.
The family is the most enduring relic of pre-state humanity. How things work in your extended family is a good approximation of how a band or small tribe worked thirty thousand years ago. The family has long been the thorn in the side of states trying to engage in social engineering. Do I need examples? Attempts to fight civil servants and non-ruling class citizens from funneling resources to their family is, boldy, the entire project of the state.
About the bill, then. There was an interesting podcast over at Bennett's Phylactery about the relationship between Christianity and hierarchy. I link it (a) because it's a good response to Guzman's "The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are" quote, but also (b) in one part, he makes a good case for why preserving parents' arbitrary rights to discipline and educate their children is good, even if they may in fringe cases abuse it.
I think it's a good response to Guzman's attempt to impose gender ideology in the houshold, even if she can come up with one or two horrifying anecdotes. If our standard for abolishing rights and local institutions is "something horrifying was done" we will have no rights or local institutions in short order.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The problem is cultural. Around here, when someone makes an 80% prediction of a specific event, we know they're publicly stating their priors to make themselves clear and so they can check / other people can check their rationality later. To general internet-goers, making a quantitative prediction that specific sounds ludicrously overconfident. (Not only will it happen, but you know down to the percentage point how likely it is? Mind showing your math, Mr. Silver?)
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
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
1yr ago
cyborgs
No brain modifications is the clear schelling fence there.
life extension
No obvious schelling fence with this one
swapping genders
As long as the resulting persons remain infertile, otherwise it's interfering with the normal reproductive process. No making babies from bone marrow either.
popocatepetl
1yr 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 tend to see feminism as a logical outgrowth of classical liberalism. Most ideologies since 1789 seem to involve people building off the ideas the French Revolution set loose from the salons to their natural conclusions. Once the Declaration of the Rights of Man became the civic religion, abolitionism was inevitable, as was universal male suffrage, as were nationstates, and then eventually female suffrage and the end of the patriarchy, whatever that means. Plus socialism. The whole thing has just taken centuries to play out. We are still adapting to the adaptations to the adaptations to the adaptations, with no one sure when we will settle into a new equilibrium.
I suspect we have knocked down a few very important Chesterson's fences along the way, and the manosphere will write your ear off on all the ways modern gender roles are making people dysfunctional and unhappy. Naively speaking, if you look at the fertility rates, where things end up in 2100 is a race between memetic feminism and genetic traditionalism. Personally? I'd say we will probably reinvent the social contract in a way no one can yet expect, as the dominoes continue to tumble.
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.
That's just what mainstream democrats believe is happening. Search "Rosa Parks" on Reddit, where a story is making the rounds that textbooks in Florida are scrubbing all references to race in the Rosa Parks story. (Some side-by-side examples are included in this article.)
The real story is that the editors on the textbook publisher's staff went way overboard in interpreting the law (I suspect intentionally), which only forbids teaching that "any group is inherently racist, implies a person can be considered oppressed because of their race, or infers that one should feel guilty because of actions committed by members of their same race." This sort of nuance does not make the main articles, let alone the headlines, so most people will never see it.
end banking like Jesus clearly said we should, or stop accumulating wealth and live like the birds and beasts of the field like he also said we should
It never ceases to amaze me how utterly poor people's reasoning becomes when they're trying to make their opponents sound bad. This is, like, woke-twitter-level atrocious.
End banking: Deutoronomy explicitly forbids lending money for interest, but that's Old Testament, not Jesus. The Catholic Church did forbid lending money for interest as ipso facto usury for most of its history, so I'm not alone in my interpretation. The Catholic Church was not trying to make Chrisians look bad. I guess I will retract "clearly" as he does not explicitly forbid interest like I thought.
Stop accumulating weath and live like the birds and beasts of the field: This is something Jesus did pretty specifically say, in the sermon of the mount no less.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
[...]
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Of course, you can say "He didn't mean what he was saying literally!" but I resent the implication I'm contorting Jesus's words. He seems to be saying you should not create and store wealth.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Yeah, that was the point. None of the serious issues involving "who are people" were settled by talking.
Not true. Slavery was dismantled peacefully in many places. The US just happened to have a weird politial configuration that caused it to go out with a bang. In most places, those who did not benefit from the "right" to own slaves were persuaded by discourse such as we have in The Motte, and eventually those who did benefit were so politically isolated they surrendered and became skulls without a fight. The winning side usually granted a fig leaf that some portion of the losing side would not become skulls.
To give a contemporary example that's being discussed here of late, incels. In a Handmaid's Tale society, many incels might get the "right" to a goverment issued GF. So do all incels become revolutionaries to reimpose the patriarchy?
No. They know they've been outgunned by peaceful spread of feminism in the last 120 years. So instead 99% of them become skulls peacefully.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
"Recruiter" is nine letters.
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.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
A common, characteristic-of-our-time response is "Why should you care? You're an individual. If the portion of your tribe doesn't apply to you, what does it skin off your back?" This is @BurdensomeCount's answer. I think that's fine, but it only works for certain people. The reality is most people do care about their tribe. We're not atomized. The heat map of our moral concern goes from family, to self, to tribe, to confession/creed, to human. We care about tribal welfare only one degree less than ourselves. So it is with you.
So. Let's talk about me. While this may be a luxurious piggyback on your own problem, I'm also dour on my tribe recently. My tribe is a superset of the puritans in Albion's Seed — it doesn't include all 'whites', but neither is it just white americans who descended from those guys with buckles on their hats. It is the group on whom the terrible weight of God's judgement presses. I am talking about blood rather than confession to be clear; this feeling can and has been channeled to a million creeds. How do I know who's in my tribe, then? I just do.
My tribe is currently willing itself to subjugation. They want the destruction of our history, the destruction of our communities, and they're eager for genetic replacement: I don't think we're actually willing ourselves to extinction, as anti-progressives (usually cavalier or borderer white) accuse us. Rather, our tribe wants to place ourselves, we horrible fiends, under a yoke of penance to the fargroup. In practice, this might lead to tribal extinction, but that's just my prediction.
On the dissident right, there are attempts to blame this on (((a certain group of people))). And while it may be that jews are exploiting their curious situation as whites-allowed-to-be-racist to the hilt, on the whole, this explanation is just an offramp. The hard truth is puritan-adjacent whites have a will to self-destruction, and this is probably fundamental to who we are. It's not going away.
I could pray for God (or more effectively CRISPR) to remove this trait from my tribe. (This is what @campfireSmoresEaten just suggested.) But that would be genociding us beyond the wildest dreams of the activist holding an "Abolish Whiteness" sign. We are the people under God's weight. What's worse, the narcissism and greed one centimeter underneath that facade is also who we are.
For you: it may be your tribe's doom is to be a lekking species, wild, stupid, violent, and feral, and that you as a non-central member must watch them destroy themselves. Any attempt you might make to "fix" this problem would also be genocide.
A few thoughts on how to cope:
- Aim for better rather than perfect. Lots of people have noticed that black communities used to be more functional. At the very least, they had two parent households and much lower crime. What were the features of this world, and how can you get closer to it?
- Look for optimism in history. Your tribe exists for a game-theoretic reason. While it may be maladapted and flailing here, it thrives elsewhere. In this sense, doomerism is a counsel of hope; when the current system either eats itself alive or revolutionizes, there will be another chance for your tribe to flourish.
- Focus your mind on eternal or "spiritual" matters. I'm not a christian but this is what they mean when they talk about fallen man and the love of God.
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.
So others have written the obvious reactions to this poll (including pointing out that the stats are massaged). But to go a bit lateral: a common take I hear from the dissident right is that the West declined into tyranny as the franchise expanded. I often see tweet threads from @KulakRevolt implying that the cause of modern ills is that people without a fixed interest in the system started getting a say in its regulation. In other words, they side with the Grandees in the Putney Debates.
What the hell happened to European civilization? Getting rid of Aristocracy was a fatal mistake. Whether its democracy or communism the landless have no business in the governance of the land. (link)
This idea sounds plausible on its own, but it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense? For all its faults, this poll does expose a fundamental truth: ideas like racial/gender quotas and open borders are coming from the top of society, the "aristocrats", not the middle. If you were to limit the franchise to the modern equivalent of the Second Estate, a far-left social and economic planning program would be implemented by Thursday.
(EDIT: PDF version from ToaKraka for people with bad internet.)
Which of the following would you rather have? CYOA - In general, people pick Comfort or Power. But the Motte is built different (laughs). As a fun exercise, pick your option and predict what the Motte will choose.
Wrap this part in || to spoiler, please. (And try to pick your honest choice rather than the socially desirable one if at all possible)
More options
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