popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Modernist entryists or Nietzschean reactionaries have an equal tendency to quote scripture out of context and not holistically. Let me suggest gently that you do not know scripture as well as Thomas Aquinas, other doctors of the church, or the great theologians of the middle ages. I am sure that if radical self-mutilation becomes a trend in the year 2500, similar people will be quoting Matthew 5:30 and saying Christians are being inconsistent for not cutting their hands off.
As for these specific errors, the meaning of Matthew 8:21-22 is that God comes before family in the order of charity (this is a part of Christian virtue theology I did not mention because it was irrelevant to the point at hand).
Luke 18:18-23 was a rich young man called to a vocation in the priesthood, but he rejected the call because of earthly attachment. Jesus does not demand self-penury of many other people who ask for salvation in the gospels; it was particular to the rich young man's circumstances. Every soul has need of its own mortifications. Some of Jesus's closest friends feast, drink wine, and anoint with three hundred denarii oils. To address your specific point, the "poor" in this instance that the rich young man would give to are members of his tribal ingroup; his family is ostensibly already well taken care of, thus obeying the order of charity.
You're discussing early in his ministry (Matthew 10:5-6). Later on Jesus has no problem healing Gentiles (e.g. Matthew 15) and ultimately he sent the disciples out to Save literally everyone (Matthew 28:19-20):
Yes, this is exactly my point. He went first to his in-group, and then to all nations. When a member of the out-group appeared in need before him (immediate neighbor), he ministered to them. But he observed the order of charity. In parable, first the Lord invites his family and friends to the wedding banquet, and when they refuse, he goes into the streets to summon others.
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
The observation that low-skilled people overestimate themselves and high-skilled people underestimate themselves survives this criticism. Yeah, that's trivial. It doesn't reveal the psychology of skilled vs unskilled, just that, like @rae says, misestimation by the worst will be on average an overestimate, while misestimation by the best will be an underestimate.
The reason Dunning-Kruger feels so real to us is that dilettants outnumber experts by a ludicrous margin. It feels like "history buffs" on the internet are always running their mouths with questionable takes on the Roman Empire. In reality, specialists talk a lot more. There just aren't that many of them.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.
He didn't make the connection explicitly, but transgenderism was surely on his mind when he wrote it. "Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. [...] He who has ears to hear, let him listen."
It's disappointing how chickenshit Scott has become in his ACX days. He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.
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
The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups?
Anecdotal thought. I've noticed that parasocial relationship shows for young losers — usually podcasts — emerge and grow wildly popular with all-male casts. At some point, the viewership numbers make them something of an institution, rather than a garage-band operation. They feel compelled to include a female co-host. The show then reaches cultural eclipse.
Prototypical example: Giant Bomb
There's some level of tension and inhibition that comes with mixed-sex groups. It's not universal and it's hard to prove, because no will admit "I'm afraid of saying something creepy in the presence of a female", but I'm convinced the dynamic is real.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Forcible transfer of populations is considered a crime against humanity, so expect any nation that does it to have all kinds of sanctions leveled against it.
Somehow the victors of WWII escaped this inevitable punishment for their forcible transfer of Eastern European germans.
If the populists actually win, they'll be in the same position to define the rules and carve out whatever Schmittian exception is necessary to do what they will.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
How have your predictions fared?
Decently. Graded:
- ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
- ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
- ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
- ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
- ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
- ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
- ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
- ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.
Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.
Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency.
Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?
Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.
Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
CK2 teaches many things — why the protestant reformation was a big deal (everyone gets a CB on heretics), why national identity didn't play an important role in politics until the 18th century (elites branch-swinging across Europe for different titles), why primogeniture was an improvement over the equal inheritance of the Franks despite the bad son problem (it keeps the dynasty strong and its holdings united).
When I first played CK2, it made me realize how the Marshall Plan mindset clouds my thinking, and that past governments were not "just stupid" for not focusing on infrastructure/tech. My first CK2 game was on Tutorial Island (regular people call this place Ireland), and I immediately sent my spy master to study technology from Al Andalus while saving money to buy an irrigation building. Economy, research, then conquest: the 4X order of operations. Twenty years later, I managed to improve my tech to best in Ireland, and I constructed a fancy new well to double my feudal dues. My neighbor country, meanwhile, had used his spymaster to fabricate a title on my lands, and instead of building infrastructure, he bought mercenaries. He conquered my county. Game over.
Sadly, the sequel CK3 is just a map-painting game. It doesn't have as many embedded historical lessons.
Isn't that why we're all here on this site though? My opinion of leftism is fairly set in stone, we're many years past the point where further "examples" could change my mind one way or the other.
Personally, I'm here because I like reading fresh ideas, or fresh reframings of old ideas — "insight porn" as it were. Fresh ideas do not usually come from leftists, because it seems to me that one of leftism's greatest underlying personality traits, at least in our time, is conformity to group doctrine. (Perhaps this is correct doctrine, but it's not fresh. I can, almost without fail, predict not only a leftist's position on an issue, but exactly how they'll frame the argument.) Neither do fresh ideas come from offline conservatives, who are usually quite incurious and have stopped their ears to any new idea they did not learn by twenty.
Compared to leftist spaces or conservative spaces, online rightist spaces (as The Motte de facto is) are rent with interesting controversy. I suspect that's because there are many ways to be a heretic, but only one way to be catholic. The austrian economist and the populist, the fascist and the burkean, the vitalist and the christian, the hoppean and the neoreactionary, the sexual degeneracy watchdog and men-should-marry-teenagers poster: are able to discuss politely at present, but they're bound purely by the friend-enemy distinction, and their 'side' would burst into a million fragments the moment it sniffed political relevance.
That said, some people in the leftist coalition do have fresh ideas. It's extremely unlikely they'll change my opinion on the fundamental correctness of leftism, but that's not really the point for me. If you can make me re-frame an old opinion with your hot take, that's great.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings?
Unless he's in cahoots with archive.org, they must be. And the content doesn't seem different from what I remember.
I guess he should be applauded for giving a link, at least, even if he refuses to put the arguments under his own name for some reason.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
This is yet another condemnation of GDP as a metric for prosperity, then. Whatever the numbers say, starvation was dramatically less common in the New World colonies than the old world. If an economist wants to quote numbers to me, that tells you what an economist is worth.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Thoughts about the last two episodes. (Great show by the way!)
There is a story that comes up a lot on the topic of superstimuli. It goes something like this. 40th percentile person Joaquim Expemplar uses media and drugs in his formative years. Because games, porn, and weed satisfy Joaquim's basic needs, he feels okay about his life and is unmotivated to pursue achievements and authentic relationships. Over time, by indulging himself in peace, Joaquim stagnates into becoming a 20th percentile person, then a 10th percentile person, and then one day he wakes up and finds he's a big failure who is compulsively using superstimuli to distract himself from the squalor of his life.
This story makes a lot of sense. But recently, I think the causal chain is getting reversed here. Mine isn't an original hypothesis, but it's worth restating.
People who are living even mediocre lives don't fall into the trap by playing more and more videogames, taking harder and harder drugs, and watching more and more porn. Every teenage boy is trying drugs and playing videogames and watching porn a lot. Nine out of ten times, this behavior decreases to a healthy(er) equilibrium after the boy grows up, gets in an LTR, joins the workforce, etc. Now, it could be that the other boy was genetically predisposed to get wrecked by superstimulus. But it seems to me the only people who ultimately became addicted are those whose lives were already decisively moving in the direction of FUBAR before they started dosing.
n=1 sample. I spent five years in a pit after college. The need to write an 100 page capstone threw me into an anxiety crisis that spiraled out of control. I just barely finished the required task a year after graduation. I was too afraid to interview, so I ended up staying at a dreary dead end job as an on-call substitute teacher. I actually inbox-ignored a good job offer from a professor because I found myself too humiliated for him to learn what happened to me. I couldn't bring myself to go out and socialize, visit family, etc. After work I would religiously play Europa Univeralis III (for the sense of an interesting job), then watch a slice of life anime (for a sense of friendship and going outside to do fun things), and of course masturbate to porn afterwards.
You can say that, if I hadn't had access to these things, I would have been more motivated to get out of the pit. That doesn't seem right to me. I have reflected on this and I'm convinced that, all those years ago, had there been a fitocratc revolution in the late 00s and a public health inquisition shut down all the porn sites, arrested the hosts of Nyaa Torrents, and installed firmware in my computer to block eu3.exe from loading, I doubt I would have formed healthy habits to fill the vacuum.
I was like a mouse caught in the airbubble of an upside-down cup. The mouse treads water without knowing which way to swim to reach the big blue sky again. Sometimes, the mouse may try treading water even harder, elevating its body momentarily out of the water. But this can't work, so the mouse eventually tires and collapses, back to bobbing its nose to breathe.
Realistically, I was in the pit because I was terrified, not because I was unmotivated. Without these replacements I likely would have exited stage left.
That is my personal experience. But I also think I pretty sensitive to changes in people I've known in life longitudinally, and I can't think of any cases of people who were doing okay in life, and then went off the deep end into a superstimulus rabbit hole. For example, a second cousin I know who's been in and out of rehab for years was a marginalized weirdo, friendless, and withdrawn when he was eight. You can't tell me drugs ruined him. He was already ruined.
Superstimulus, in this story, is just bread and circuses for the broken-hearted. Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality. This puts people in a position where porn and pizza really are their best option.
Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k.
Happiness is a function of relative status, not absolute economic utility.
For the billions around the world, $16/hour in an unglamorous job would increase their status relative to their neighbors. For an American, $16/hour in an unglamorous job feels perilously low status compared to one's (fictional, learned from advertisements and social media) neighbors. You criticize them harshly as wanting special privileges, but in their mind they are mainly seeking to clear to a respectability threshold.
The problem underlying a great many problems in society — education, purchasing decisions, family formation — is the dangerous gap between the popular perception of average and the reality of average.
The fertility problem continues to defy the desire to blame it on a political hobby horse. People try to draw correlation lines with feminism, secularism, diversity, urbanization, high cost of housing/education. To some extent, they succeed; those are all correlated with modernity. But look closely and you'll see outliers for your chosen culprit. Low fertility is hitting everyone regardless of regional particularities, just on a time lag of how deep they are in the boonies.
Had I seen the vote count sooner I would have deleted it. I feel bad about having posted it and regret it.
I agree with everyone saying you shouldn't do that, so please add my bullying to the campaign against you succumbing to bullying.
As for internally visible comment scores, I agree with @Primaprimaprima that the current system virtually guarantees I visit the motte the day after I make a comment. That's good slot machine design. However, when I make a comment on reddit, I still typically check back several times to see how the score plays out, so I'm not sure that benefit justifies the current approach.
The best argument against making self-scores visible is that it would change the behavior of posters themselves in a hot conversation. When underwater scorewise, one tends to adopt the embattled, passive-aggressive stance of a martyr being inquisitored. The people you're talking to respond in kind. I don't like that dynamic on reddit and wouldn't like it here.
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
6mo ago
It's also a fascinating little read on medieval daily life. The inquisition flipped over everyone's mattresses, so you get a lot of the seedy details on what (at least one) 13th century community was 'really like'.
I wonder if the priest sleeping with half the village's women and girls was typical, or if that was due to him being a weird gnostic heretic.
popocatepetl
6mo ago
Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
There's no hard reason. Christian ethics are the water we swim in, so people don't bother to provide counterarguments for things that are clearly wrong in the Christian tradition.
- "Outright race-hatred" - Christ commissioned his disciples to baptize all nations and commanded love of other peoples on the sermon on the mount.
- "Theocracy" - Ambiguous evidence. There is some scriptural evidence for separation of church and state, but on the other hand, the civil power of Pilate comes from God, and theocracy was tolerated for a least 1500 years in Christendom.
- "Monarchy" - Literally the default system of government commended. 'Christ is king.'
Was JP ever really a TRP influencer? My sense was that, when he had his brief moment of being a Person, he was just a vaguely conservativish ersatz dad figure not really associated with the broader manosphere,
Jordan Peterson was the closest thing to sensible moderate answer to TRP. When it comes to posture towards women and society, he told young men to be strong, honorable, responsible, and honest; while the TRP told them to be strong, crafty, mercenary, and cynical. Of course, very online progressives hated him, though IMO they never gave a coherent answer for why.
The fact Peterson had a mental break, became a drug addict, lost his daughter to Tate, and was cancelled from his job is a good, if anecdotal, rebuttal of his approach to modern problems. The boomer advice memes write themselves.
I never liked JP too much. He has the valuable academic skill of sounding erudite, but when you dissect what he's actually saying, full of literary allusions and digressions, it often doesn't amount to much. The anti-Scott.
There's nothing the military could really do. While tempting for my own biases, "recruitment is down because woke institutions alienated poor conservative whites and catered to effete progressives" doesn't eat like a full meal to me. The woke ads didn't help, sure. And it also doesn't help that the current ruling ideology of the USA skims close to condemning the USA's very history and existence.
But fundamentally, the nationstate is past its expiration date. People need to belong to a tribe. Historically, the local church, one's birth neighborhood, and the ethnic nation filled that void, but now the internet exists. Globalization happened. These forces have channeled people into particularist tribes which are divorced from their geographic location.
So today, you can find people who would be willing to fight and die for LGBT rights, the white race, or classical liberalism if such armies were recruiting. Not so many willing to die for their hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
I expect militaries to regress to a pre-Napoleonic model in the future: an elite professional core with mercenaries who are in it for the cash and prizes.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
My favorite model of politics is that, at least in the west, our primary axis of political division splits people who benefit status-wise from transnational managerialism (AKA the Globalist American Empire, GAE) and those who don't. That supporter class, which we can call the 'blue coalition', consists of people with cushy bureacratic jobs they got due to credentialism (blue tribe proper), unemployables who could never be respectable in any system, and migrants who would be in a favela without transnational open borders. The opposer class, which we can call the 'red coalition', consists of everyone else.
So blue-tribe-hates-red-tribe and red-tribe-hates-blue tribe is a cipher for class antagonism, much like the guelphs and ghibellines, the optimates and populares, the federalists and anti-federalists, and a million other disputes that seem impenentrable to the modern eye because the contours of their society's class landscape didn't come down to us in detail.
I don't understand this. We had this system for nearly two hundred years and nobody called it a coup when the old guy's people got cleaned out and the new guy's people got installed.
And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.
We cross 1000 posts virtually every week. From a quick search, there was a slow week in January with 929. Other than that, only the database crash week saw anything less than 1000.
I still think turnout from both sides will ebb from 2020 due to political exhaustion. There's barely a presidential campaign going on five months from election day. I also suspect that it's impossible for Republicans to retaliate with lawfare of their own, since the legal profession is strongly blue tribe.
The long term consequences of recent lawfare is that, if another Trump-like president ever gets elected in the teeth of the regime, they will not give up power as easily. Escalation from Tiberius to Gaius. Many such cases. This assumes the current red tribe remains politically relevant long enough for such an opportunity to arise.
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