popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
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.
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.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Why did no one tell me about Obsidian before 2024? It's like Evernote but actually good. The one downside seems to be you'll have to pony up $8/month for sync if you don't know how to use git or some other VC for the plaintext files.
Other lifechanging programs or apps? Anki is another one for me, for specific types of memorization and study.
Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
- It makes you angry, but ninety percent of searchers don't notice. The sculpting works.
- It's very stupid, but a culture of fear inside the company prevents anyone from dialing back. The sculpting is counterproductive.
- The purpose of propaganda is not convincing people but demoralizing them, etc. The sculpting works.
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Are you a member?
I wouldn't provide value to the group, nor do I think the group would provide value to me (I'm not much of a cancel target). If one of these two variables changed I'd consider giving it a shot.
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.
The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)
The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.
Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.
If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.
Males typically enjoy competition provided they have some chance of winning. I've never met a male who continues to enjoy a competitive activity in which they consistently lose. (For footraces this means near last-place finishes.)
To find meaning it's important to find a competition within an arm's length of your competency. See: eudaimonia, or flow state.
So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.
The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)
Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Since we're on the topic of peer pressure against small rules violations
Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?
Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not
in the thrallof your particular sect?There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.
There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece
your credulous buttyou would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead.
The only difference between these two sentence pairs is the insertion of scorn. Would it be so bad to tone this down please? If you're modded you might feel vindicated for proving The Motte is too soft for ingroup criticism, well done, but if so this will be the reason. While your instinct now is probably to go hunting for examples of scornful language elsewhere on the Motte, you're delivering scorn here in distilled juice concentrate.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
@bfslndr @curious_straight_ca Guys I figured it out, it's the old reddit link conversion. Just copy+paste 'reddit.com/r/196/s/Qimfce7wOf' into your URL bar.
As for the link, one of my favorite genres of internet content is "Smart autists derive social rules even social butterflies don't know except on an instinctual level". Yes, friend groups are status alliances, and you endanger your own position by trying to bring a low value add into the mix. Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid though, can't say whether the character descriptions are accurate.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".
Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?
Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?
Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.
You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.
Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.
A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.
Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.
High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.
More likely is at least another century or two continuing the current trend of slow, grinding defeat, combined with slow decay increasingly held at bay by the consumption of the civilizational "seed-corn" that would be essential to rebuilding.
The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. A good analogy to watch is South Africa, which got a late start on multicultural technocracy but then speedran tribal spoils and the competency crisis well ahead of us. The analogy isn't perfect (and leans more heavily into ethnic conflict than I think a fair assessment of our predicament would), but by SA's timeline the USA and Europe aren't even close to a breaking point. But this does assume a closed system.
If you want to be more optimistic, you can imagine the situation is more like 1848, where the geopolitical order everywhere is being propped up by a few Metternichs, and if they lose power, all the creaky structures in the periphery will collapse all at once. Once the hegemony of one ideology falls, we enter a Warring States-like period and some pragmatic, ruthless Qin(s) (or Prussia if we hold to the analogy) will sweep up all the statelets running insane inefficient systems.
Of course, this Qin/Prussia probably won't be running a system you like. Just not our current one.
Did something about this discussion make you like Merry from LOTR less? That's a steep handle downgrade.
Or in the armor of Divine Command Theory, or in the armor of your understanding of salvation.
Let me quote C.S. Lewis:
"When Christianity says that God loves man it means that God LOVES man: not that He has some 'disinterested'; because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory, not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring"
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all". If someone offers me a version of Christianity that doesn't talk about God in terms of this extreme love, then I will address that religion and their theodicies in another way.
It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials.
Texas can have their own state run teacher's training programs separate from the research universities. They probably do. Nearby states do, along with alternative licensure that doesn't require a teaching degree. Community colleges aren't even all that leftist for the most part, just kind of pragmatic.
I contend that if Texas made serious strides towards a parallel credentialing infrastructure, it would come under attack by selective enforcement of disparate impact — disparate impacts in the existing mainstream universities notwithstanding. If it didn't succumb to entryists first. Outright conservative credentialers for knowledge jobs are tolerated so long as they remain in the JV league (eg Liberty University).
We respect each others' beliefs regarding the supernatural (including the beliefs "It exists" and "It doesn't exist"), even when we know Our Beliefs are Objectively Correct and Their Beliefs are Objectively Wrong, because when we don't, Bad Things tend to happen.
Who is "we"? This is a thread about Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism, which is hard to talk about because no one agrees what it means, is hardly guaranteed to impinge on Westphalian tolerance. The Peace of Westphalia enshrined cuius regio, eius religio (in other words, a state religion) but prohibited ius reformandi (the ability of the state to regulate religious observance).
In other words, the principle of Westphalian tolerance is fine with the state being overtly pastafarian and funneling tax dollars to pastafarian temples; it just can't punish people for converting to baptism, building baptist churches, or saying the church of the flying spaghetti monster is hogwash in their capacity as private citizens.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace. This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy, because Christians' omnipotent benevolent God did not lift a finger to give 100s AD Malaysians even a shot at accepting grace — they could not have heard Christ's ministry. Nor, indeed, does God give us moderns the benefit he was willing to extend to 20s AD Near Easterners, who saw tangible miracles to guide them to God's kingdom.
This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. [...] But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
Examples? I've written and seen written posts that treat Christian beliefs with the same rough treatment as "I think [X] are just delusional, and [Y] are just confused and mentally ill", and none of them ran afoul of the mods. This thread has some examples of posters (including me) saying in passing that 'yup, the factual claims of the bible are unsupported and faintly ridiculous on their face, and I think bible-thumpers are just [insert euphemism for confused simpleton'].
I can say from 30 years of living here with a fair amount of certainty that, regardless of tribal sympathies, the entire Northeast US would need to be pacified as that region would never consent to permanent rule by "the worthless hick scum" south of the Mason Dixson.
You're describing the attitude of southerners towards yankees before reconstruction. One amusing thread in Colin Woodward's American Nations was the apparent universal revulsion of each USA regional culture toward the northeast puritan-descendants; everyone hated the yankees, everyone wanted to avoid being ruled by them. It's a powerful demonstration of how total conviction in one's cause beats virtually any other advantage: economic, strategic, or diplomatic. The Christians in the late classical period are another.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
"Pelton was tried and convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus ten years. He was also fined $100." Real life continues to beat comedy skits.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
It all goes back to the universities. All methods of recruiting skilled workers except credentialism were made de facto illegal in the 60s, and then the left took over the institution that issues credentials. What more do they need? Personnel will always be in their favor. Everything in American history since has been an endgame where checkmate is guaranteed for the right unless the left bungles its moves, allowing a stalemate; in other words, an ending where both sides lose.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
I'm surprised at this reponse, register me as thinking "lurch" is a neutral word for "unexpected change in direction/acceleration".
I don't think that's comparable; they're wielding machetes as slashing weapons (rather like bats actually, and doing a terrible job aiming at vitals), while a hunter's knife would be used in thrusting stabs.
The other difference is, unlike machetes, once fighters are within fistfight range, bats cease to be very powerful because of leverage, while the wild flurry of a stabbing knife remains devastating.
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