quiet_NaN
12hr ago
This.
Some open-world-ish 1st and (close) 3rd person games:
- GTA 3: 2001
- Oblivion: 2006
- Assassin's Creed: 2007
- The Witcher: 2007
- Far Cry 2: 2008
- Fallout 3: 2008 (one week after FC2)
(Also, there were only four fricking years between Morrowind and Oblivion? Damn, video game progress was fast back then.)
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
Democrats and younger Republicans are turning neutral to anti-Israel.
I can not speak for the Republicans (or for the Americans at all, really), but while I was never a fan of Netanyahu, I was willing to give Israel a bit of slack to crush Hamas after Oct 7. Unfortunately, Netanyahu displayed a total indifference towards civilian lives. Personally, my attitude these days is that it is sad that the religious nutjobs in the ME want to murder each other, but we can't really prevent them from doing so and should just stay the hell away from them.
At least Israel will be relatively safer for a few years, at which point they will be stronger and possibly able to deal with Iran by themselves.
I think this is going to backfire badly for him. I would claim that the natural attitude of most Americans towards Israel and the ME in general is one of indifference. Sure, some might prefer Israel holding Jerusalem for end-time prophecy reasons, and others might really prefer a two-state solution (and even be in denial about what kind of murderous thugs Hamas are), but Israel has not been a dominant topic in US politics. This was a great environment for AIPAC to work in -- their support could certainly buy a candidate more votes than it cost him in die-hard Palestine supporters.
Trying to starve Gaza made a lot of people care more about Israel, but still not to the point of being unsalvagable. Trump's war on behalf of Israel will make Israel support a prime CW hotspot for the coming years.
Israel's strategic situation without Western support is not all that great. Sure, it is somewhat tolerated by the Sunni's because they have a common enemy, which is Shiite Iran, but my take is that most of the Sunni population does not like Israel very much, which for now does not matter because they can't really vote in another king. They have a population of 10M, e.g. roughly that of Cairo alone. Sure, they have by far the best tech in the ME, but even that depends on Western pipelines, they can hardly maintain a cutting edge weapons platform for anything from submarines to stealth bombers by themselves.
quiet_NaN
12hr ago
I think that you are oversimplifying things. The utility of chemical weapons depends a lot specific conditions. For example, they were used a lot on the Western Front in WW1 (though they did not lead to a military breakthrough), while they saw little to no combat use in WW2, not because Hitler was a nice guy who would never stoop so low, but because his blitzkrieg tactics did not require area denial.
So CW depend on doctrine, and doctrine is not something which you can just pick. The Reichswehr could not simply have invented the blitzkrieg, they lacked the vehicles to pull that off. The US military is very long on equipment and rather short on atrocities. They are highly mechanized (which means that CW for area denial are less useful to them), but any war they join is likely to be a voluntary overseas engagement, and they have an electorate back home which tends to get upset over atrocities. For Assad and his ilk, the calculation is different. He did not have the mobility to do blitzkrieg, but he also did not have to consider what his electorate could stomach.
If you are not trying to achieve a tactical objective, but the goal is to spread terror, then chemical weapons are probably 10x as effective per death than bombs are, and radiological weapons might be 100x as effective as plain old explosives. That Japanese cult could have achieved the same death toll of their infamous Sarin attack by throwing a few pipe bombs into a crowded subway car at a fraction of the operational complexity of synthesizing a nerve agent. But if they had done that, their attack might not even have made the top spot in international news, and would long have been forgotten outside Japan.
quiet_NaN
13hr ago
this thing that happened in early September of 2001
"Sunni terrorists under the guidance of a rogue Saudi noble (and likely backed by Saudi money) murdered a couple of thousand Americans, so obviously 25 years later we have to support Saudi Arabia against their Shiite enemies, otherwise how would we ever learn if Shiites are better at killing Americans on their own soil than Sunnis?"
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
I think that this is giving in to epistemic helplessness.
Sure, the people in the intelligence community might have a better idea of what is going on, but they are not an alien superintelligence way beyond what an ordinary thoughtful person might notice.
If I go to the zoo and see a giant striped big cat in an enclosure, I will call it a tiger, instead of saying "that is probably some kind of animal, certainly a life form, but as a layman I should not have an opinion on its species when there are experts with PhD's in zoology who are much more qualified, and we should await the verdict of an expert panel and not make any assumptions about what kind of cat it is -- perhaps the zoo has painted stripes on a pony."
GWB's wars have certainly taught the world that a successful invasion can still be a disaster in terms of grand strategy. The reverse is not true, so we can certainly place upper bounds on the success of Trump's adventure from his lack of strategic success despite tactical dominance. As another analogy, if I observe a chef preparing a meal and it seems to go well, that does not mean that the meal will be tasty. But if I observe a chef yelling at the dough to rise already and threatening to pour a pound of salt into it while also setting off the fire alarm, that will very probably not result in a great meal.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that neither qualify as a large evolutionary change.
If humans did not have the ability to digest milk and recently acquired it, that would be amazing. What happened instead is that all viable humans in the ancestral environment had the genes for the ability to digest milk, but it was advantageous not to waste any energy on producing the enzymes after you were weaned. I suppose that in lactose tolerant humans, the configuration to turn off lactase was broken. (WP confirms that is it simply two single-nucleotide polymorphism -- exactly the opposite of a large evolutionary change!)
Skin color is the same. Almost all humans in the ancestral environment were able to produce melanin. Obviously the trade-offs between getting less skin cancer and producing less vitamin D depend on the amount of sunlight you are exposed to.
More interesting recent changes (though arguably also not a large one) might be the Ashkenazi intelligence gains, or perhaps the acclimation of some peoples to great heights. Still not on a 'new proteins' level, but a bit broader than just the two SNP changes of lactose tolerance or a few dialing down the melanin.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
There are countless government insiders that have told their stories.
I do not doubt it. The problem is, I did not trust the USG's scientific rigor even before it loudly announced that paracetamol causes autism.
The fact that there are credible reports (I think) of the spooks investigating extrasensory perception in the cold war does not imply that ESP exists, the better explanation is that the USG wasted a few millions investigating a dead end (possibly well aware of the odds, just covering their base in case the Soviets got their first, but possibly also because they had true believers advocating for it, it would not have been the first time the USG wasted money).
NASA astronauts reporting and confirming observations of very bright luminescent angular objects tumbling in the moons atmosphere.
For anything observed during the Apollo missions, if I believed unexplained a bunch of people saw, I would have a lot of believing to do. Space in mind-boggling big. The surface area of the Moon is larger than the area of the USSR was. If Apollo astronauts just saw an alien spacecraft by looking out of the window, then either the spacecraft was attracted by them or the Moon is abuzz with alien spacecrafts.
(Also, the Moon's atmosphere is famously even thinner than the evidence for aliens.)
I am skeptical on priors. The aliens would have to have some basic competence at staying hidden (otherwise we would have seen CNN reports of them landing their UFO in Paris and going on a sightseeing tour. But also not too much competence, because the USG caught wind of them. Unless the aliens are big fans of God's own country, this implies that other countries also have evidence. And yet they all formed conspiracies to keep the knowledge secret, but were not successful enough to destroy the belief in aliens.
Aliens who have interstellar travel probably also have to teach one or two other things to mankind -- think Keltham in Cheliax. You might argue that it is impossible to know which technologies are actually alien origin -- perhaps they literally gifted control of fire to mankind, or taught them to build pyramids -- but none of the recent stuff feels likely. LLMs are mostly a consequence of the advances in semiconductors which have been going on for 50 years. If the USG (or any other government) has controlled fusion, or room temperature superconductors, or material with the tensile strength required for space elevators, they surely spend a lot of time keeping their mouth shut. But if there is no technological advantage to be had, then why not tell the world? Actually, with the current US president, I doubt he could keep his mouth shut even if there was an advantage to keep the aliens secret. He would bask in the attention of showing off an alien origin room temperature superconductor as a lizard basks in the midday sun.
The real question is if this is supposed to distract the voters from the Epstein files, or from how the Iran war is going.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
For example, two lesbians end up on the birth certificate and that's affirming and cute under the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). There seems to be a trend towards "intended parents" over genetic parent.
Presumably, none of the parents there are under any illusions that they are both genetic parents. Likewise, there are likely plenty of cases where one partner is infertile and is happy to raise a kid created without their genetic contribution. This is all fine, as long as there is informed consent of all the parties involved, a lot of things are fine which would not be so otherwise, after all.
You are probably right that things are unlikely to move in the 'more testing' direction; there are likely some blue tribers around who would claim that if a woman was in a relationship with a guy while she got pregnant, any kids are spiritually his (unless she denies it, of course) and he should just pay up. And so far changing any family legislation which advantages women has not been much of a priority for MAGA either, so I doubt this is going to change.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think spousal infidelity either appeared with the neolithic revolution, or did already happen in the ancestral environment.
At least as long as men have gone to war, they had the opportunity to fuck around, at least if the brother of their wife is not in their unit keeping an eye on them.
For women, cheating was probably a bit harder in the ancestral environment, but I personally do not envision it like there were sabre-tooth tigers constantly circling around the tribe just waiting for their chance to eat a lone woman lagging a bit behind to meet her lover. Basically, as soon as you have cities which are safe enough to traverse unarmed, most societies will evolve norms to allow lone women to do so. This opens up the opportunity for a booty call on the way back from the market or whatever. Even in the countryside, a woman bringing her peasant husband his lunch could probably arrange a date in the woods on her way back.
I mean, sure, capitalism made it much more convenient, now There Is An App For That. But the only men in history who could really be reasonably sure that their kids were really theirs were men living in societies which were rather strict about policing women.
So my read of your argument is "what is bad about modernity is that it allows for more female infidelity than Saudi Arabia".
I think there is a common pattern where technological progress fixed a problem, which in turn created another problem, which was again fixed through technology. For example, in the good old days, child mortality was sky high. A woman might bury half of her kids or more. Modern medicine fixed that, which in turn might have meant that the population would double every generation. So we invented another ungodly modernist workaround: birth control. That in turn created some problems down the line, etc. Still, very few suggest that we should just go back to letting half the kids die of dysentery or whatever Just Like God Intended.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
One way to fix this would be to just normalize genetic testing after birth for everyone. Compared to all the other healthcare costs of giving birth, a 23-and-me style genetic test is an utterly trivial expense. It is certainly good for the parents to know if their new baby has any genetic disease, especially if they can obtain the info without ending up in a government or industry database.
And it is trivial for the father to also verify that he is indeed the father.
After all, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by it.
--
Another aspect is that in the age of IVF, women can become victims of parentage fraud just as well. Of course, it would require the fertility clinic to be in on it.
I think it would not be very hard to bodymod a man so that instead of sperm, he is squirting a fertilized egg of his preferred genetic partner. I doubt that this would lead to implantation very often, though, fertilized eggs are not very mobile. One would need a microscopic robot bringing the payload where it needs to go. Still, not something which seems out of reach for this century.
Once women can no longer be certain of their genetic motherhood, I am sure their attitude towards genetic testing will change.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
There are societies in which a man a man owns his wife (or daughter) and her sexuality (or lack thereof) in pretty much the same way a man in the Western world can own a car. In such societies, the analogy would make a bit of sense, we might say "well, you were the prison warden of your wife, if anyone else had sex with her you were clearly in on it or negligent in your duties as a husband."
In the Western world, this is very much not the case. Both husband and wife commonly have plenty of opportunity to cheat without their spouse catching them.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Personally as a guy, I have a mild preference for no makeup and no painted nails, but mostly I don't care either way. Body shape and boobs and anything which signals willingness to engage in sexual behavior (to some limit, at least) all play a much larger role.
Have you considered the possibility that women striving to appear beautiful are not trying to be attractive to men but competing in the female status hierarchy, where men are mostly spectators?
What men find hot is not much of a mystery. I think that the median woman is well able to visit onlyfans, find that most of the top view performers have not elaborately painted fingernails, and conclude that she should probably spend her money on tops with a larger cleavage rather than manicure if her problem is that too few guys are hitting on her in a bar.
The thing is, 'to few guys are hitting on me' is probably not a problem women have, generally. If you are somewhat female presenting, guys will ask you out (I assume), no matter if you are wearing a burka or a see-though top with a lace bra underneath.
For people generally, working on their appearance goes way beyond trying to look hot, it is a form of self-expression for many. Kids often have preferred clothes, and painting your fingernails seems a straightforward continuation from that rather than anything sexual.
There are certainly class dynamics involved, with piercings, tattoos, makeup, skincare, waxing etc signifying which class you belong to or strive to belong to. I also think that dressing overtly slutty is seen as a defection by other women, and punished, so there is no arm race towards dressing like a hooker in most social settings.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Thanks for the link, this is enlightening in a not very joyful way.
Frankly, this reads like a description from an industry insider who tries to be neutral and cover the viewpoints of many sides. I will provisionally update on it, it seems unlikely that someone would spend that amount of time on spinning a counterfactual narrative with that little potential for mass attention. It also feels plausible given what little I know from the finance industry and what my guess of SJ aims and methods are.
Nor is it AI, not with:
The statement explained its concern was that failing to censor Trump, in a non-partisan manner of course, would result in voter suppression, via a causational pathway that the margin of the statement may have been too small to contain.
Color of Change’s Robinson was interviewed by Hillary Clinton on her podcast You and Me Both in March 2021. You and Me Both is available on major podcast platforms through iHeartRadio. Readers may recognize Clinton from other work.
Believing the 2016 election had been tainted due to Russian interference was a left-coalition signifier—much as believing Trump actually won 2020 became a right-coalition signifier later. Neither of these views has the evidentiary strength the coalitions claim for them. But they aren’t claims advanced to achieve understanding; they are advanced to achieve alignment and, through it, power.
Amen.
More of McKenzie's dry, subtle humor:
The term of art in industry for the person responsible for the interpretation of a document is the “owner” of that document. Accepting this term of art, many professionals in the industry would agree that if the coalition doesn’t understand themselves to own the policies, it’s tough to guess where they think they should be on the stakeholder-analysis form. “Consulted” doesn’t get to say the owner has blood on their hands after a decision.
On the SPLC ironically lobbying for laws forcing banks to report on NGOs:
Given that this reporting regime is mandatory, on the face of it, if a respected civil rights organization makes a payment to an individual responsible for violence, harassment, and/or terrorism, facilitators would have an immediate reporting requirement. That seems to carry the risk of reporting on the actions of an NGO to a potentially hostile government. That government could be the current one or a future one, because governments have been known to keep written records and employ personnel who serve across generations.
Personally, I hate pretty much everything about the system he describes.
Allowing private businesses discretion over whom to conduct business with is good only if the market is working well enough to compensate individual decisions, and there is no systemic force which provides incentives not to work with some groups. If you have (for whatever reason) a monopoly on some good people need, like shoes or air transport or internet access, then I prefer if the state mitigates the impact of that monopoly by limiting your discretion in choosing customers.
Of course, the banking system is even worse than that, because it is tightly regulated by the USG, and the regulators have a lot of leeway:
If “get on their good side” converges with “not get one’s license to do business revoked” then there is not much daylight between that model and tech’s own.
Basically, if someone were to found a bank specifically for debanked people (excepting the OFAC list), like Nazi orgs or porn producers (though I think there the problem is more credit cards, specifically), they would not get rich by filling a niche left open by the system. Instead, the regulator would crack down on them hard at the first opportunity, and the executives would be lucky to escape with their freedom. "How could I have known that this porn producer would pay an underage porn actor with a fake ID from the bank account" -- "You could just have refused their account proactively, like the rest of the industry".
In a free society, it should be possible for the CEO of a non-criminal business to insult the president without the president shutting down their business in retaliation.
Of course, the potential for selective enforcement is not just to retaliate against banks which allow outgroups to have accounts. Consider:
“By the way, lying to a bank is a crime. It doesn’t matter what you think while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter why you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sinner or a saint. It doesn’t matter if it is a big lie or a little lie. It doesn’t matter if the bank believes you. Lying to a bank is a crime. And everything you say to a bank will be recorded for decades. It will be routinely forwarded directly to law enforcement if the forward-deployed intelligence analysts we force the bank to hire believe there is even a tiny chance law enforcement will find it useful.”
This seems completely fucked up. If your lie is material in gaining a loan from a bank which you then default on, then I agree that it is reasonable to criminally prosecute you for defrauding the bank. In most cases, this will probably involve forged documents (so you are on the hook for that, which should carry a higher penalty), because when you e.g. apply for a mortgage, the bank is hardly going to take your word when you claim you own some property.
I do not particularly like money laundering, and agree that it is useful to have laws on the books against it to make it harder for criminals to spend their ill-gotten gains. However, McKenzie certainly makes it sound like 18 USC 1344 also applies to people using banking services normally while lying to a bank:
They incorporated North Dimension, a shell entity. Some shells have legitimate business purposes; this one existed only to deceive. North Dimension filled out a due diligence questionnaire. SBF signed it. It said North Dimension traded on its own account and did not handle customer funds.
You need two bits of evidence to convict SBF of bank fraud. The first fits on one page of paper held by one bank. The second is the answer to a single question: “Did at least one dollar of customer funds flow into the North Dimension account?”
Crazy if true (which I have little reason to doubt). Reading the statue, it seems very plain that a dealer who parks his ill-gotten gains in a bank account (after having affirmed to the bank that it is not illegal funds) and later withdraws them again was not what the legislature had in mind when they wrote it. Heck, I would rather argue for either "2A only applies to its era's firearms" or "2A applies to nukes" than "1344 includes victimless fraud", because either of the first two seems much more solid than the last one.
The overall gist I get is the old 'everyone commits five felonies a day', and the USG gets to pick whom they prosecute.
Also, it seems like for the SPLC, they die by the very same sword they lived by.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
But even more importantly, consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels. And there is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all.
Seems exactly like the kind of argument a p-zombie would make </sarcasm>.
For me, this seems to be a silly argument akin to "how many needles can dance on a pinhead?" We have no way to test if Joe over there is a p-zombie or not, which would be a minimum requirement to include the concept of consciousness into a world model.
First, convince me that angels exist, then you can argue about their spin numbers and I might give a damn.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
make Germany great again
I will stand by this, actually, because while it was not a NSDAP slogan (they used "Deutschand Erwache", awaken Germany, I think), I think it is a fair summary of their platform in four words.
Take the endonym of the regime, 'Third Reich'. Its explanation supposes, simply enough, that there were three times in history were Germany was great. The first time was the thousand-year long Holy Roman Empire (ending with Napoleon), the second time was the Prussian German Empire (ending with Germany losing WW1, or in the mind of the Nazis with Germany getting stabbed in the back in the back by traitor Jews and Commies in alliance with evil foreign powers bent on keeping Germany down through the Versailles treaty), and the Nazi project was promised to be even greater than these two glorious periods of German history, lasting another thousand years or so.
I concede that I would have been unlikely to pick exactly that phrasing if Trump had not used it before. I did so intentionally, because I claim that the most basic narrative -- our nation is destined for greatness but traitors and evil foreigners are keeping up from it, but now a strong man will clean up is pretty similar.
I think it is more than just combining a presidential campaign slogan with a bloodthirsty monster of history. If I tried "Lenin promised the masses Change They Can Believe In", I feel like the analogy would fall apart plenty of steps before the MAGA/MGGA one, as Lenin wanted to violently change the system, and Obama advocated working within the system.
I am also not claiming that Trump is Hitler or as bad as Hitler. I am pointing out a curious similarity (not unique to them, plenty of strongmen have campaigned on similar premises), which would be a deadly sin on LW ("how can you poison our minds by bringing politics into this"), but seems pretty standard for the motte.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Sure. I tend to forget about that because the Oder-Neisse line was reality for about four decades when I was born and had even been accepted by both Germanies for more than a decade. Perhaps 1 in 100 Germans today would seriously consider sending tanks to change our border with Poland to acquire lands which have not had a German population in 75 years.
And while driving out the Germans of lands which they had settled long before Hitler would definitely be a war crime by today's standard, the Germans had just done the same to the Polish and Russians (and a lot of other Slavic peoples) before with a much higher death toll. Basically my understanding is that if the Red Army wanted you gone from the lands, you had a decent change to escape with your life. If the Wehrmacht really wanted you gone from the lands, you would likely just end up as a civilian casualty to the siege of Leningrad.
We were actually rather lucky that despite Hitler betting all and losing, we did end up with a lot more than nothing after the war. Germany did not share the fate of the Carthage. We did not even get the Morgenthau plan, West Germany got the Marshall plan instead for geopolitical reasons. If I had to chose between living the life of either the modal 20-yo Sudentendeutscher making it to West Germany with the clothes on his back in 1945, or the life of the modal 20-yo Soviet citizen, then with the benefit of hindsight I would pick the life of the 20yo who starts from zero but gets the Wirtschaftswunder after a few years.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This is all a bit of theater.
As long as there is a die-hard group of pro-choice activists willing to both spend money and potentially break the law to enable women in red states to access abortion, you would need draconic customs inspections between US states to block that.
Both mifepristone and misoprostol are from the 1980s and in wide use all over the world. I would assume they can be sourced in bulk so cheap that most of the costs per abortion are actually the shipping costs. There are likely sufficient activists willing to enable abortions in red states that they are willing to do the logistics for free and pay the shipping costs. It will be next to impossible for a red state to track down the senders and secure a conviction against them if they are based in blue states and local law enforcement decides that this particular violation of FDA regulations is not worth their time.
From the anti-ICE protests, this would be exactly the sort of grassroot activism I would expect the blue tribe to excel at.
And the activists could certainly make the case that any woman can technically terminate her pregnancy, they are simply providing a safer alternative to coat hangers as a public health service.
Short of new federal legislation, I do not think this can easily be changed. Banning at-home pregnancy tests would not suffice, it would simply lead to abortions occurring later. I mean, the red states could try to introduce mandatory monthly pregnancy testing for all fertile women (so they can launch a homicide investigation whenever a woman who was previously pregnant becomes non-pregnant without a baby to show for it), but even the current SCOTUS might frown at that.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
To falsify it, I would have to find a single woman (a counterexample) who would never date a man with a given political opinion.
This is either trivial or impossible. To the degree that it is trivial, I pick Greta Thunberg as the woman and "build more coal plants" as the political opinion.
I suppose that @FtttG might say that this is merely because the candidates fail to "tick enough of her other boxes", and if god wanted, she could certainly create a man who is so perfect a partner for Ms Thunberg in every possible way from gender identity to kinks to lifestyle and everything that she would date him despite his fossil fuel opinions. And that would be impossible to falsify.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This is an incredibly bad top level post, even for a weekend.
First this seems 'boo outgroup'.
Second, liking Hitler is an extreme fringe position in Germany. Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe. As a rule of thumb, great leaders do not cause their countries to be ruined within a decade and change.
Or do you mean that the person you are talking about is not a German, and Hitler helped develop another nation, indirectly? The US? Israel? This would be much easier if you had bothered to proactively provide evidence, e.g. a link to a tweet or something.
Third, you can't chose what people admire you, and as a dig at Netanyahu it seems incredibly weak. I dislike his policies from the bottom of my heart, but "a fringe German Neonazi agrees with him" does not change at all how I feel about him.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
someone I think is a lesser human than me
That is a curious way to phrase it, and fails the ideological Turing test hard.
Most people have outpgroups whose members they like less than members of their ingroup. For example, they might consider the classes below them to be the unwashed masses and the classes above them to be entitled snobs who do not deserve their wealth and status. Even the most enlightened utilitarian will like some people more than others.
But to explicitly impose a total ordering of human worth is definitely Nazi-coded, and almost nobody does it these days. Even our resident immigration skeptics would rather speak of "low human capital people" than of "lesser races".
Now, you can certainly make the argument that SJ does impose a total ordering, but its proponents would say that this is merely conditional on the history of oppression, and that in the SJ utopia white cisgender MAGA-voting men would not be sent to the salt mines, but be convinced of the wrongness of their beliefs and then life in harmony with everyone else or something.
But to go from "oh, you don't like $outgroup" to "you think $outgroup are lesser humans, just like the Nazis!" seems a poor argument.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
No woman is going to turn up her nose at a man for having different political opinions from her, provided he ticks enough of her other boxes.
This seem almost unfalsifiable. I might as well say
No company will ever fire someone for being direct and outspoken, provided he is good enough at his job.
Partners and employees are package deals, and rational actors such as woman or companies often evaluate them using scores. Unfavorable traits like excessive outspokenness or an incompatible political foundation can certainly lower your score to the point where they decide that they can do better than you.
And political opinions covers a lot of territory from 'I voted for Trump' to 'I support the establishment of a Caliphate' or 'I am notorious for calling on twitter for the gassing of $outgroup'. If you are a famous and rich Hollywood actor, the median single woman is probably not going to file for divorce if she learns that you voted for Trump. If you are some rockstar programmer, a company might well decide that they will put up with your obnoxious behavior to a degree they would never tolerate from other employees. I am sure that a disfigured billionaire would be able to find a perfect wife who is willing to overlook his unfortunate appearance and see his lovable character instead, but that does not mean that looks don't matter.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
That is fair. If you ban shawls, turbans and neckties, (or even better, impose upper limits on the tensile strength of anything rope-y worn around above the belt line), I would call that very reasonable.
(Of course, for the SJ left, that is still disparate impact. And the fact that you are running a machine shop instead of an ad agency in the first place is just further evidence that you are in the enemy class.)
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Where did you read this? This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
Unfortunately, I do not recall, exactly. If I had to guess, I would say somewhere LW-adjacent, possible a blog from the SSC blogroll?
I found this on LW, which is probably not where I had read the idea originally (because I don't read most of LW). The comments there link to SSC post about obscure communications in general and an SA lifejournal article (Ctrl-F borscht).
I think that most civilian nuclear programs were subsidized by their government sponsors with more than a passing thought about the military implications. I am not a nuclear engineer, and it might be an urban legend, but I have heard the claim that nobody uses thorium reactors because they are less useful for weapon manufacturing.
It seems obvious that Iran wants to be in a situation where they can quickly switch from a civilian program to a weapons program.
And quite frankly, the Iranian regime would have to be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon. At the moment, they are in a situation where Israel and the US bomb them whenever they feel like it, and they have little ability to retaliate and cause similar damage in Israel (though interdicting Hormuz is working very well for them). They would fare much better under cold war rules, where both sides will use proxy forces to fight the other and avoid a direct confrontation.
More options
Context Copy link