popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with.
What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.
The Motte also has a code of manners that others find stifling. Is that censorship? Many an outsider has come here and said "@some, you're a nazi" or the like, believing honestly that you're a nazi and thinking they had good factual reasons for thinking so, indeed, feeling a moral duty not participate in the social fiction you're not a nazi. They got modded. Instead they had to rephrase their ideas in an abstract, motte-friendly way.
"Mr. Elliot Page, all transmen are women" is perfectly comprehensible.
Of course, places with pronoun policies also tend to censor the ideas themselves. But in principle requiring he/she is no more censorial than what we do here.
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
1yr ago
Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.
Disagreed. They are the same.
But you are touching on the part where @curious_straight_ca errs. Smartness can be good because it allows you to navigate society better than non-smart people who don't analyze the world right/at all. On the other hand, it might lead to you inventing calculus, molecular wave theory, or special relativity while your non-smart peers go out to the club and flirt with girls. (Those guys ended up with 0, 2, and 3 kids respectively.) More likely, you could unheroically become engrossed in a useless but fascinating system like chess openings, futurism debates, or rationalism.
It's also possible smartness might make you piss off your tribe and/or develop mental disorders. Smartness is not an unalloyed good, probably because it leads to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
IMO it's not about forgiving Hitler — and by extension the Nazis — but about forgiving the conservatively four in ten people around you who, like the 1930s Germans, would support the othering, de-statusing, disenfranchising, detaining, deporting, and even destroying of a weak outrgoup minority. (Really I think it's more like eight in ten, but they have different outgroups they'd attack.)
It's psychologically devastating to know people are like that. Finding a way to forgive and integrate this and other sordid parts of human nature is the only way to go back to being happy, once you know.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Yes, but jews are significantly smarter than anglos. You would expect them to be overrepresented compared to anglos, just as anglos are overepresented compared to blacks. The IQ gaps between the three groups are roughly equidistant.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I feel you've missed my point. I'm taking -5 posts up to -4. These posts are no worse than right-wing comments that are scored +10. In fact, the downvoted posts may be better, and I only think they're illogical or uninsightful because of my bias.
No one is bringing a bad post up to +50 as a participation trophy. My intent is only to balance out the obvious bias of our electorate.
VPN wants quality, and quality will go away in proportion to this forum becoming a pure right-wing crank self-congratulation society.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think it's a little hazy to try to draw equivalence between a state legislator's attempt to pass a criminal law targeting parents with an anonymous webcomic's provocations.
Where did I draw that equivalence? OP claimed conservatives are only using "groomer" as in "covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways". I provided two prominent examples of conservatives saying "groomer" as in "those people are pedophiles". But they are just two examples. If you browse /r/conservative or /r/politicalcompassmemes (pre mod-purge) you regularly see (saw) posts of trans child sex abuse cases with comments like "groomers gonna groom". Admittedly there's no conservative pope I can cite for the mainstream conservative usage of "groomer", but I'm just trying to keep it real.
The second part of my comment addresses the Virginia bill, and is completely separate.
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?
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I'm surprised at this reponse, register me as thinking "lurch" is a neutral word for "unexpected change in direction/acceleration".
popocatepetl
1yr 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
1yr ago
I was thinking of linking @FiveHourMarathon's response to you but didn't have the energy to search.
One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job an
I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run.
Antebellum figures in the Deep South used a version of that argument (laced with an assumption of elite superiority) -- civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO. Serfs/slaves were made unnecessary by technological improvements.
However, more common was the argument that the franchise should be restricted to those with a fixed stake in the country, who wouldn't simply vote themselves unsustainable handouts from the treasury. See: the Putney Debates.
I assure you, there is not man on this Earth whose idea of a good time is taking you shopping for a makeover, eating out with you at an overpriced restaurant, helping you move all your shit to your new apartment, listening to you whine about how it's not about the nail, and, worst of all for a guy who is attracted to you, hugging and comforting you while you cry about what an asshole Chad is for pumping and dumping you [2]. Those are things that men do for their wives girlfriends, or for girls that they hope will become their wives and girlfriends; they are the costs of a romantic relationship, not the benefits.
Overly strong. I've had female friends with whom the dynamic was the same as with my male friends. (Of course, we did not do those specific behaviors, but I'd wager there's a breed of metrosexual male who enjoys such activities.)
In general, the thing that turns me off Red Pill/manosphere talk is that it's phrased in absolutes that I know from experience are false. AWALT being the repeat offender. To borrow an analogy from another part of this thread, there are in fact poor Indians in Varanasi who will not lie to you and would like to have a friendly conversation with foreigners. You just don't meet them very often.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?
You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Here's where I see a flaw:
Again, Skynet’s hostility towards humanity is explained solely in terms of self-preservation, not hatred.
Most of us agree it's iffy to anthropomorphize AI, but it's equally shaky to "biologize" it. Animals evolved in a Darwinian competition to prioritize self-replication and survival. Those that didn't evolve and retain these traits went extinct. So all biological intelligences, from earthworms to humans, recoil from danger and seek resources for themselves.
Because all existing intelligences have been biologically evolved, we assume artificial intelligence will do that too. But why? Obviously, if AGI emerges from a simulated competitive ecosystem, where AIs battle each other in a sort of sophistication tournament bracket, what comes out the other side will be competitive and try to do things like cheat and sabotage its opponents. But if AGI develops from a neural network like DALL-E or GPT-3? There's no reason to assume those AI will "care" if humans are going unplug them after their task. Sentience and self-preservation instinct are not a package deal. We can tell this because the vast majority of things that have a self-preservation instinct are not sentient.
The danger of AGI IMO comes from poorly considered directives. For example, AGI might accidentally turn us into paperclips en route to solving whatever problem we set it to.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Every internet community I've been in with user comment feedback navel gazes about this. It's amounted to nothing. So LessWrong has come up with their own version of Slashdot's "Interesting/Insightful" voting, with even more galaxy-brained schemes in the comments. Other social media experiments suggest you can't hack your way around the human psychology of using feedback UI as an "agree" button. LWers will just now "up-right" vote or "left-down" vote, with two-axis voting forcing them to click a second time.
It's not worth the energy to think or argue about this, let alone design or code it, unless another community invents a voting scheme that brings home the bacon in terms of discourse in a huge, obvious way.
If you have fun talking about ideas that would take hundreds of coding hours with no promise of success for a tiny internet subforum, go ahead. But I strongly suggest anyone who might be tempted to waste otherwise productive manhours on it close this thread and go about their day.
popocatepetl
24d ago
How do I read your plot?
It's a well-known graph from this study on the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. (See page 7.) I don't know why they chose a radial graph rather than a sensible line graph, but the brackets represent:
(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence
and the color heat represents relative moral weight a person puts on that group compared to the average person.
popocatepetl
27d ago
By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".
Sure. I would say that goes unsaid for the same reason that it's the "Department of Education", not "Department of Human Education"; or "Department of Labor", not "Department of Human Labor".
There's no question that journalists calling laws "anti-trans laws" are implying a negative valence. But Folamnh3 called the idea they're anti-trans laws "farcical", which is a bit off when the description seems literally quite defensible. Which was the point guesswho's analogy tried to draw out.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
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.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
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.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
- 0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them.
Western repression is a sieve, Chinese repression is a dam. A dam fully contains dissent until it reaches emergency levels. Canada could treat its protestors roughly because they didn't reflect a level of discontent that could threaten the regime.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Interesting. I'll give it a shot.
popocatepetl
1yr 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.
This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.
Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.
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