popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
1yr ago
This is naive. "Normal" is when disgraced politicians and high-ranking bureacrats golden-parachute their way out of power, like they always have. Sometimes, when a foreign invader or violent revolution dismantles a government, they may hold a few responsible. Sometimes. But in "normal" circumstances, governments do not hold themselves responsible.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Surely 90% of people there know about here, and 90% of people here know about there?
The blue ocean of prospective mottizens is the comment sections of various substacks and blogs, but it's quite difficult to reach those people without naked shilling.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I also find the idea of a post-scarcity society ludicrous. Look around. The outcome of genetic and memetic evolution is that systems fill whatever resource budget is allotted to them. Since the early modern period the world GDP has grown by three orders of magnitude while population growth has grown by only one order of magnitude, and yet we still see fierce competition for resources within rich countries. If tomorrow we invented the technology to make us a Kardashev Type II civilization, within a few decades the elites would invent a status competition like redirecting planets for sport, and you'd see socialist politicians growing red in the face demanding a celestial body thruster subsidy for middle class, who deserve to be able to play with Ganymede for at least a minute per year. Within a century, some quintillionaire would use the zero point energy generator to clone themselves a trillion times and we'd be back to resource wars.
The darker possibility of the post scarcity society is this: Political structures follow economic power. (The ideas from this video are from The Dictator’s Handbook but I like the way CGP Gray lays it out.) If you create an economy where labor is 100% irrelevant to the economic production of a polity, political power will devolve from workers to whatever entity controls the power generators, AI farms, and fabricators. I think your prediction of "living in pods and eating bugs" is a very rosy prediction of what will happen to the average man in this new order.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I'd love to get daily dispatches from themotte about foreign politics, war, energy, and economics. Unfortunately those things take expertise to talk about. Running your mouth about the teacher wearing giant prosthetic breasts to shop does not.
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown?
70% prediction: Italy is slapped on the wrist with some sort of minor bureaucratic penalty by the EU, at most.
How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe?
The fact Europe has bigger fish to fry is part of why the above is the most likely outcome.
Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions?
The US is keeping Ukraine in the field.
90% prediction: Sweden and Finland process to join NATO continues. 99% prediction: Italian politics aren't cited mentioned as a major factor if these talks derail.
Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard?
I really am speaking from ignorance here, but based purely on my priors of the way these sort of politicians play out:
80%: Italy sees lower immigration while her government is in power.
99%: The fertility rate of native Italian women remains below replacement rate while her government is in power.
Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.
You have it. In the US, the NFL/NBA is reality TV for guys, and they memorize all the names like fantasy nerds will know that Tyrion's squire Podrick is of House Payne in Game of Thrones.
Quite a lot of the audience consumes the NBA through highlights and headlines, and even with the NFL, they tend to spend more time gossiping about it and listening to sports talk shows. The games are secondary. An alien could infer a lot about humans from this. Reality TV shows with the most female audience tend to be about relationships, secrets, and betrayal, while sports on the other hand are about competition, dominance, the sweetness of victory and the agony of defeat — really engaging to dudes.
NFL gameplay is, fundamentally, a slot machine. You watch the reels spin (the players line up, the quarterback is accepting the snap), they begin to slow, suggesting a possible outcome (a receiver breaks open, the pass rush is closing in), and finally you experience either euphoria, mild pleasure, or annoyance depending on the outcome. (Touchdown, the pass is complete, interception.) This tickles the lizard brain pleasantly enough, but it wouldn't command the spare attention of guys for five straight months without the drama.
What excites sports fans most is when a famous player wildly underperforms or overperforms expectations. Probably the three most energizing sporting events of the last twenty years were when Eli Manning and Nick Foles (two mediocre quarterbacks) beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Two of those games were quite tedious slogs to watch, but they sent the sports talk world and watercoolers across the nation into a frenzy. Guys just love the narratives, the basking in glory or wallowing in humiliation.
Three possibilities, not mutually exclusively. I'd imagine at least two apply to most straight white cis male supporters of this candidate:
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Genuine belief in social justice ethics and analysis. Social justice offers an energizing moral narrative, which conservatism often struggles to provide. Voting for a good cause causes good feels. Even if, much like donating to charity or helping a neighbor, it goes against your superficial self-interest.
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Seeing slogans as tribal signals. They may consider conservatives their outgroup. All the formulaic nods to BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ rights may not be seen as policy forecasts as such, but ritual ablutions to esoterically say "I am NOT a member of the conservative tribe. Conservatives are no good people. If elected, I will fight that tribe and help your tribe." They do not expect Democrats to pursue policies that would seriously transfer resources from democrat-voting white guys to minorities to an extent that would harm them, but instead harass conservative cake shops and crack down on right wing radicalization, etc.
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Broadcasting luxury beliefs. This idea was popularized by Rob Henderson. Supporting policies that harm low class white people conveys, indirectly, that you are not one of those people. Straight white cis male voters for Daniela may, for example, be educated workers who live in rich neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools; as such, they never have to "pay the price" for people of different immigration status, such as drug violence, multilingual classrooms, uninsured drivers doing hit-and-runs, or depressed wages for low-skills jobs. Alternatively, they may aspire to that class, and so imitate its manners.
This is all well worn territory on the motte, but like @f3zinker I'm think you might be new here? Welcome aboard.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
popocatepetl
1yr ago
For your own mental health, I suggest you employ the old trick of flipping a coin, then do whatever option you find yourself hoping for.
That said, I think it is the duty of those who are insulated from formal reprisal for non-conformity to non-conform. You are a teacher; you don't even need to fear being passed up for promotion. Of course, I am assuming you are an upstanding citizen in the non-culture war parts of your life. If you are a callous, uncharitable, self-absorbed, or god-forbid criminal person in other areas, non-conformity will not make you a saint, and I'd prefer you restrain your non-conformist streak, lest other non-conformists be so tarred.
The major price you'll pay is the scorn of peers who have already elliptically disclosed you have a low opinion of, and maybe being pilloried by activist students. Being pilloried with dignity is, likewise, a duty. There will be no reward.
During the height of the pandemic, a fairly well-known IDW figure tweeted something to the effect of "To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be autistic or an asshole." I agree with a weaker version of her sentiment. I'd say: To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be the sort who processes society's rules intellectually, not intuitively, or you must hate society and not find its opinion relevant.
This set of people obviously includes sociopaths, assholes, disagreeable misanthropes, and socially illiterate nitwits. But I don't agree that it's the entire set. Jesus Christ, MLK, and Buddha were in that set. They may have been "criminals" but only in a non-central way.
@gog should boycott if they are a non-central non-conformist. (AKA not criminal, self-absorbed, or an asshole.) That is the only sort of non-conformist who can set a positive example and start a preference cascade towards the end of moral panic. If they are a "central" non-conformist, they should not boycott, but will ignore moral advice in any case.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I yut renaming Columbus Day on the condition it's renamed "William Penn Day" or something. Unfortunately, it will either stay Columbus Day or we see an identarian victory and it's Indigenous Peoples day.
While I strongly endorse the observation Columbus was a terrible human being and have wanted to "cancel" him, so to speak, since before it was cool, I reject the submarine message of the identarians: that settling the Americas was our original sin as a nation. That the USA, Canada etc should be ashamed of their past. I don't agree.
I think the English, Dutch, and French settlement of the New World was conducted with a reasonable amount of virtue given the day and age, and cannot be reasonably characterized as genocide, or even "land theft" in most cases, unless you believe the natives had some sort of spirtual claim to hegemony over the Appalachias because they happened to be there circa 1600. (If you want to see a genocide, look to the Iroquois were doing to the Hurons around them.) And even the Spanish colonization, which was spearheaded by bloodthirsty sociopaths whose basic goal was to enslave the natives, eventually transitioned to more humanitarian-ish administration under Jesuits and the Habsburg crown.
The pattern of North American settlement seems to be that European settlers arrived, settled unused land, and were tolerated and traded with. Eventually the colonies grew to a point to cause border friction with the natives, putting land native used intermittently at a low level of intensity under cultivation. If the tribes were peacable, they would simply be marginalized. If the tribes were aggressive they would eventually attack, be defeated and destroyed or forced to migrate west. This kind of dog-eat-dog geopolitics was no different from the situation before the colonists arrived; the colonists simply had much better economic practices and military technology, so they won the game.
As usual they're gerrymandering the claim so they can get the sticker result they want. Pfizer "were hopeful in spring/early summer 2021 that vaccines would be effective against transmission" but "transmission was not a study endpoint". "Prevention of transmission (and asymptomatic COVID) were not primary endpoints of these trials and were never a claim of the pharmaceutical companies in developing these vaccines"
So the vaccines were developed and tested for preventing severe disease. Fair enough. But the "point" of this story is that vaccine mandates were sold politically as preventing transmission, while that was never actually the aim of these vaccines and was not scientifically demonstrated, as admitted by the FDA in their emergency use authorization. Whether Pfizer technically collected some data on transmission while researching symptom reduction is besides the point.
@Skylab's argument stands completely.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this)
They controlled for age and locations, which are the two most obvious confounders. I'd be interested in seeing the 2022 data when it comes out, since you could still argue the April-December 2021 die-off is going to end up being mortality displacement, much like anti-lockdown Sweden having higher excess deaths in the early pandemic but lower excess deaths later.
Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
It seems to me the origins of the Republican anti-vaccine turn is coterminous with their anti-lockdown turn: June 2020 and the "racism is the real virus" BLM riots. The seeds were there before, but the real resistance started when it became clear Covid rules didn't apply to public events that benefit the left.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Covid measures are very much the equivalent of TSA, the Patriot Act, Shock and Awe, and terror threat levels for people born after 1999 or so. A wakeup call that "respectable" organs of society are often (a) incompetent, run by gladhanding careerists who are trying to implement policies that make themselves look useful while filling the political checkboxes they've been handed (b) cynically trying to push through unpopular reforms by not letting a good crisis go to waste.
Reflecting on Covid (or the War on Terror) is useful. There's a good saying that goes something like "Who you are in adversity is who you always were." Well, the government you see in a crisis is the government you always have.
Thanks for the specific quotes. I'll save this one to reference it.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Is this Markov generated or did you compose that epic yourself?
How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level.
Among woke-lite groups, AKA the gestalt that creates the Reddit frontpage, you're forgetting that they don't have the information you do. There's a lot of organic social infrastructure to prevent people from learning about group differences and the heritability of behavioural traits; you have to learn about them separately and then correlate the two sets of knowledge on your own. When I first read an internet comment saying the average black american's IQ was one standard deviation below average, my reaction was "Who did the study, the Klu Klux Klan?" For any academic who speaks about the topic openly, their reputations get dragged through the mud. Who wastes time investigating the claims of flat earthers?
Well, me. I investigated flat earth. I also investigated racist pseudoscience. And I didn't bail off any spurious offramps like iron deficiency in childhood or IQ tests being a measure of cultural knowledge that late aughts Google was eager to throw in my face.
For those who never investigate the problem to begin with, or get off one of the offramps, they "reconcile" it because there's nothing to reconcile. There's a reason why your side tends to be much better at passing ideological turing tests then theirs. They just don't know.
Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research. Could there be group differences? Maybe. Is there a genetic component? Maybe. Did Islam propogate through the world because it justified systemic violence against non-muslims, unlike other religions? Maybe.
But the impressionable average idiot has to be protected from fascists preaching radical ideology with oversimplified and deceptive statistics.
Two explanations. One: elites of every age and culture have engaged in a healthy dose of noble lying as it served them. (Sometimes noble, usually self-interested.) Two: divine command as an ethical framework has fallen off a cliff. A hundred years ago good christians took the Ninth Commandment rather seriously. Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.
I'd guess it's a mix. Explanation one is true for decision-makers at the top, who have always been mercenary liars; but the conflict theorification of the lower ruling class like Klein feels new. Using the Gervais Principle and Straussian language respectively, the sociopaths/wise are the same as always. The clueless/gentlemen have lost scripture and only hear from their God through prayer, and sometimes he tells them to lie, or importantly, to not seek that fruit.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I don't find it uncanny at all. In ecosystems, one species tends to dominate a given niche. The internet created a giant shared memetic ecosystem that almost all young westerners inhabit together, and wokeness is the perfect meme to dominate its given niche -- the group this blog describes, more or less. It either outcompeted or absorbed rival memes like internet atheism, internet stoicism, internet communism, etc etc.
A similar process is taking place on the right for underemployed undersexed downward mobile males, outcompeting or absorbing rival memes like internet collapse, internet reaction, internet men's rights, internet trumpism, internet gaming fandom, etc etc. But it doesn't have a name yet.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
In his traditional biography Mohammed pissed off the elites of Mecca so much he had to leave to save his life.
A pretty straight putt modification to @Gdanning's conjecture should be "successful religions (eventually) deliver a message that isn't threatening to (their) elites." Christianity was also extremely threatening the status quo at the start, which is why Diocletion and other Roman emperors tried so hard to stamp it out. But when a revolutionary new Christian elite under Constatine took their place, we get the Council of Niceaea, and all the inconvenient or threatening parts of the religion get sandpapered over. Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Fuzzy political movements are almost named for their opponents' sneer term. In the English Civil War, "Roundhead", "Cavalier", "Leveller" were all insults. To themselves, they were sensible people acting rightly. Fortunately, in that case we can depoliticize it with different labels (eg Parliamentarian, Monarchist, Proto-Republican). But there's not enough clarity on what our modern groups are. I think "Identarian" is a solid first stab for the group people call 'woke'.
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?)
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The cost rate needs a caveat. Paradox games are podcast/audiobook games. You use them to engage a mechanical part of your brain while leaving the verbal and contemplative parts open. Not while learning to play them, certainly, but after the hundred hour mark.
Outer Wilds is much more expensive by rate (maybe $1.20/hour), but while you're playing it, it is the only thing you're doing and commands your attention. EU4 on the other hand becomes a glorified stress ball.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I realize this is the response this post was likely designed to elicit but:
Our system, including institutions both public and private, formal and informal, hard and soft, is configured such that the misbehavior of favored groups is tolerated, while the misbehavior of disfavored groups is punished to maximum extent the decision-makers feel they can get away with.
What more is there to say? At this point the people on the winning side should continue doing what they're doing even if they disagree with it; if they ever stop or fail to keep the boot on their own foot, the future is not pretty for them.
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.
The quality of a diet, in terms of only weight loss, is a tripod of calorie deficit, satiation, and motivation. The calories are what actually make it work, the satiation and motivation aspects help people follow it.
The "twinkie diet" is a low-satiation low-motivation diet. It totally works, thermodynamically speaking — just eat TDEE - 500 calories worth of twinkies and you'll reliably lose one pound per week — but no human being is going to stick with it.
The keto diet is a high-satiation high-motivation diet. "Meat-based" diets like this have enjoyed wide popularity because people love eating chicken and steak, they're filling, and as a result most dieters stict to it.
This Levels diet seems like a high-satiation low-motivation diet. It will work very well for a few weeks, since unprocessed foods are filling and stop you from pigging out, but eventually people will (a) rebel against preparing and flavoring all their food from scratch (b) actually want to eat some dopamine-triggering processed foods, at least in moderation.
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