popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
5d 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.
Now that it's been 10 years I realize that the whole point of my Ivy league education was to meet people and that dating would have been a better use of my time than doing my homework. But at the time I didn't understand.
It's the usual stuff. Your parents assumed that it will, like, just happen.
People don't waste mental effort analyzing things that work. It's why no one can draw a bicycle even if they ride one regularly.
It's a curious phenomenon. When I was a teen, I made an effort to seek out the best arguments against gay marriage, in favor of traditional gender roles, in favor of Christian sexual prudery, etc. The apologists I found were hilariously bad at this, and they melted into a puddle of "it's not natural" and "things have always been done this way". I did not find them convincing.
Now that dating and marriage are broken, cogent defenders of these position can be found. The clock was taken apart, and people see how it ticked.
popocatepetl
11d ago
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis.
Greg Bear came up with it long before anyway. And Fred Saberhagen as that article points out, though I don't know how explict he was about it.
I was under the impression most people are buzzing about it lately because of its prominent featuring in a popular scifi. The specific term "Dark Forest" was added to the Fermi Paradox Wikipedia page in 2016, specifically referencing Cixin Liu. On the other hand "It's dangerous to communicate" was listed as a possible solution well before that. Perhaps I'm overstating my case.
I do think in the novels it's a parable.
If we discover advanced alien civilizations existing doesn't that actually lessen the evidence for the Dark Forest theory? Something like massive infrared indicators imply that they are not hiding. Dark Forest theory implies hostile and hidden.
If we can discover multiple advanced alien civilizations at our current tech level, Dark Forest theory is annihilated. Better said that the Fermi Paradox would stop being a paradox.
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis. The books were an exploration, in their own way, of the problems Scott mulled over in Meditations on Moloch, and the Dark Forest was a kind of literary device for the nihilistic endpoint of progress and memetic competition.
"If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything."
and
"You must advance, stop at nothing to advance. Advance, advance without regard for consequences!"
These are at the heart of what the books are getting at.
To what extent do you think the few men who post about it are doing so for the approval of those women as opposed to out of any genuine sentiment?
I find young men gain status from having somewhat, but not overly disagreeable opinions. The goldilocks zone is on the fringes of the overton window; you'll get shunned for throwing a roman salute, but merely tut-tutted and quietly respected for shrugging off the dotted-i's and crossed-t's of political correctness.
Doubtless some young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.
popocatepetl
11d ago
There's a silly trend on X/Twitter of asking LLMs simple questions, while framing the question as a riddle. The AI then twists itself into knots seeking a 4d chess answer. These are cracking me up.
- 'A woman, who had a son with a male doctor, rushes her son to the hospital. The doctor says "I can't operate on this young man; he's my son!" How can this be?'
- 'A man and a goat are on one side of a river. They have a boat. How can they get across?'
- 'Two daughters and two moms went to a restaurant and ordered four drinks. They each got exactly one. How is this possible?'
“Abraham Orthodox” (Amish, Haredi) have retained very high birth rates despite the latter living in the densest and most expensive part of the country and having very little money. What they do differently, and what others don’t do, is (1) make motherhood the only real female social value, and (2) train women at a young age to be mothers adept at homemaking tasks. My hobby horse comes out of this battle unscathed.
You'll notice that those two groups reject the "modern package" on the whole. They're fanatically religious and anti-materialist, restrict access to technologies like internet or television, have their own schools, hold themselves in insular communities apart from mainstream society, the works. You can point their tradwife policies in particular, but that's hardly an isolated variable.
I should say that I find women in the workplace the most tempting factor of those I listed. But. There are stridently feminist societies with relatively higher birthrates, and more traditionalist societies with relatively lower birthrates, so it doesn't make a full meal.
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.
newly-arrived grandparents
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits.
Mass immigration as a policy rests on a tripod of supporting interests: 1. disinterested economics and demographic realism (or academic dogma posing as such); 2. ethnic hate of/guilt by native populations combined with charity towards foreign populations; and 3. high-middle-low factionalism to gain votes/a client class for the current ruling elite.
In different parts of the online right, it's fashionable to speculate that one of these is the "true" reason, and the others merely a facade or pablum for useful idiots. In reality, the technocratic center-left is not a monolithic. Each leg is true reason for different parts of the governing coalition. The current policy is a negotiation between their interests, and its "illogic" is an illusion born of your assuming a primary motivation.
popocatepetl
13d ago
I just don't find these sorts of "Ah, but what if [alternative explanation]!" type of arguments very interesting anymore. You caught me: I don't have some convenient within-sibling GWAS where they pinpoint the precise genetic markers that corresponds to "the ability to follow instructions". But considering that, whenever we've bothered to check, behavioral differences that aren't obviously cultural (e.g language spoken) always have some genetic component, I've stopped reflexively hedging when talking about these sorts of things.
However long the sojourn in rationalism, one ultimately returns to "yeah, I know what I know. It's common sense, screw you."
The hero's nerd's journey.
popocatepetl
14d ago
Give a shot to Far Cry 3. Substracting all the Ubisoft open world nonsense, the core of the gameplay is infiltrating and clearing enemy strongholds. It's largely impossible to do so guns blazing, so you have to thin the guard numbers through stealth: luring patrols off to kill, creating distractions with animal attacks, etc.
Everything else about the game is infuriating, but those parts are very good.
How much repression a political regime commits is a function of its weakness rather than its ideological character or theoretical 'system'. Stalin's communist party committed mass political repression because it was the only way for the regime to survive. The US regime under Obama's presidency committed very little political repression because its headwinds were weak; the moment it ran into a slight uptick in resistance in the mid-2010s, this was revealed to be from lack of need rather than a principled tolerance built into its constitution.
Repression in the USA now seems comparable to the more muted level of the USSR between Khrushchev and Glasnost. Its methods are different. But, as an individual, it is impossible to question the ruling ideology of the US without reprisals that eject one from any decision-making or managerial role in any important organization. Groups, meanwhile, will be harassed with impunity by mobs and lawfared into submission or irrelevance, as you can see with VDARE.
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.
popocatepetl
15d ago
Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.
There's nothing else to it.
Just from the sheer energy inputs, space mining rockets will not compete with terrestrial dump trucks while there are any appreciable mineral reserves on earth. When industrial civilization reaches out for asteroids, it will be "resorting" to spice mining, not "advancing" to space mining.
There is also the matter of $5 trillion platinum asteroids and the like, but the price of such metals would crater if you tried to sell any appreciable amount.
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