sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.
Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:
Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.
Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.
Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.
Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.
Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.
Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.
Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.
Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack
I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I don't know of a single piece of animated media for kids that is not anymore.
Keep in mind that the old Disney films kept selling VHS/DVD copies long after their release, and today are available on Disney+, so it's unclear how well new releases correlate with their media consumption.
Putting that aside, any anime for kids would be the obvious exception. It's just that, other than a few examples like the Pokemon anime and the subset of Studio Ghibli films that are child-friendly, they are mostly only watched by children in Japan. The reasons for this are pretty obvious - young children aren't seeking out their own media, aren't good with subtitles, etc. I think it used to be more common for (dubbed and often heavily edited) anime to air on children's cartoon television networks, though even then the target audience was older than the stuff for really young children that stayed in Japan.
Even western 2D animated series are invariably actually animated in various asian countries (and Japan itself often outsources some of the animation work to Korea or China). The grunt-work of animation also gets subsidized by the fact that a career in anime is a dream for many in Japan, people put up with horrendous hours and wages trying to make it. In western countries that doesn't happen, there's no native 2D animation industry so nobody tries to get into it and there's no pipeline teaching new animators.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
"Bowdlerize" has had strongly negative connotations for more than a century. And that's despite the fact that Bowlder's editions were meant for children, rather than trying to push them on everyone or replace the original.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
I believe the past few years have demonstrated he was more than half right.
Yes, I remembered that passage because it seemed prophetic. But of course both denying citizenship based on race and his later discussion of the black-white intelligence gap are now outside the mainstream overton window, something to be cited as proof of generic racism and justification for tearing down statues but not actually engaged with. Including by those who simultaneously find it obvious that Israel can't give palestinians citizenship. The point is that resorting to the "obvious" lets incongruous views pass by completely unexamined. The intent of anti-zionists in comparing Israel to other ethno-nationalist projects is that Israel should be opposed, but other outcomes of taking that idea seriously would include becoming more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism in general or thinking more rigorously about what you think separates Israel from the others. It's not that those views can't be reconciled, it's that people should have to at least realize they're doing so. And perhaps become more understanding of the views that they currently view as cartoon villainy, whether those views are "racism" or the people who think there is a moral mandate for Israel to give up on being a jewish state and give citizenship to the palestinians in the hope that this will result in living together in peace.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
It's not about giving credit, it's about understanding and engaging with what people actually believe. Saying they want to ethnically cleanse the jews just gets denial because it's not true, arguing that a one-state solution would inevitably result in ethnic cleansing might result in an actual conversation.
Furthermore unthinkingly dismissing "obvious impossibilities" is lazy thinking that tends to just make people slaves to their local overton window. There are plenty of people to whom it is obvious that historical opponents of racial integration were just racist villains with no motive besides hate, while simultaneously dismissing palestinian citizenship as an impossibility and never even considering that those historical figures might have had their own well-thought-out reasons. Take Thomas Jefferson's reasons for calling for slaves to emancipated but also deported:
It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others...
The point isn't that the situation with the palestinians is necessarily the same as those historical analogues. It is that actually considering the matter leads to understanding and perspective based on something better than what your social environment considers "obvious". If the anti-zionists win and Israel becomes yet another failed post-colonial state but doesn't have actual ethnic cleansing besides largely voluntary "jewish flight", "the zionists were right" could easily become the unthinkable opinion even as events validate some of their concerns.
For an unrelated example, take the following question. Which of the following exist as "real" distinct and inborn traits and which are just social phenomenon: transgender, non-binary, demisexual, otherkin, plurality? (And of the ones that exist, are the "real" cases currently outnumbered by the social ones?) It can be very frustrating to watch someone act like the answer is obvious based on an overton window popularized in their community a handful of years ago when I saw how the sausage got made.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category.
Off the top of my head some of the public statements about the race-motivated prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine would seem to contradict this. Not to mention it actually becoming U.S. government policy and killing many thousands of people. There are probably closer analogues, but I remember that particular one well and wrote this post about it at the time:
The most overt quote mentioned in that post would be this one:
The New York Times: The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?
Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
Or from the same article a quote from a member of the ACIP committee (the people responsible for writing the CDC's recommended prioritization):
Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan. “To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”
I think even the dry language of ACIP itself would be beyond the pale, like when they list "Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65" in red as a reason to not prioritize them. If it was instead "Whites under-represented" or "Jews over-represented" I do not think they would have remained in charge of writing the CDC's recommendations, nor do I think states would have adopted those recommendations.
You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated. That is the main reason I said the analogy is not particularly close. But at the same time saying "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." is less extreme than actually saying that loss of life is a good thing, let alone using your position in the U.S. government bureaucracy to deliberately cause that loss of life and being permitted to do so.
Regardless of exactly where the line is for anti-white statements and (more importantly) anti-white policies, it is obvious that they would not and could not have done something like this in the name of increasing black or jewish deaths instead. It is the product of explicit institutional racial bias. (Note that their policy actually did kill more black people because of how much more vulnerable the elderly are, it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. And naturally it killed more jewish people as well.) Of course, that doesn't prove anything about the ordering of favored groups against each other like the OP was arguing. It just shows that social justice disfavors white people and is influential enough to shape the decisions of institutions like the CDC/ACIP and the states that followed their recommendations or prioritized by race outright.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.
This would only follow if, for instance, there was a massacre of black people and jews could make similar remarks about the massacre without being fired. Obviously white people are lower, but that doesn't tell us anything about the ordering of the favored groups, or whether they are ordered in any sort of consistent way to begin with.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Given that this transition would be pretty expensive and the main benefit is getting to invest in the private market, the counter is: why not just let the government invest in the private market?
I'm not an economist, but doesn't this just amount to increasing the money supply in a way that makes the government responsible for more direct investment decisions? The government (and Federal Reserve) already control the size of the money supply, what makes it better than increasing investment some other way like lowering interest rates or qualitative easing? The linked article talks about higher returns, but money doesn't create wealth, investment of actual resources creates wealth and money decides where those resources go. Right now the money is forcibly invested in government treasuries, which seems identical to the money ceasing to exist for a period of some decades. Since the money is simultaneously collected and paid out, and the amount paid is currently larger, this represents money creation, as well as obviously trasfer to the elderly. If in between it was also invested, this would constitute a lot more money creation, which in general can be done in other ways and right now does not seem like what the economy needs. I guess the main other thing it would do is change the ratio of investment and consumer spending, is that currently desirable in the U.S.? The linked article doesn't say, instead it talks about monetary "returns" to the entity that already prints the money.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
How many music videos actually have written or scripted reviews? Reaction videos have a lower barrier to entry than a blog post or scripted video, since you just have to watch and say what you're thinking, but a higher barrier and probably more detail than a Youtube comment. So if someone wants to hear what someone else thinks of a particular music video, they might be pretty much the only choice available. Also if a youtuber or streamer already has an audience they might be interested in what he has to say about something, even if they aren't very interested in the actual subject matter and it's low-effort content.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Seeing what other people think of a work of media can be interesting and entertaining if you're interested in the work, in commentary from those people, or both. People read reviews and analysis of works they have already seen. Sites like Reddit and 4chan have discussion threads when an episode/movie/etc. comes out, and people read those threads even if they have no interest in commenting themselves or long after the thread is dead (for 4chan the threads expire but there's sites like desuarchive.org).
It's not that weird that people like reading Scott's review of One Thousand And One Nights, right? You could say that it is "parasocial", in some sense it is playing the same role as a two-way conversation on the subject with an entertaining friend, but that isn't normally how you would describe the appeal. Well, Scott isn't going to write a review for the latest episode of anime you watched, likely no writer of his ability will, but it might still be interesting to see what people have to say on /a/ or /r/anime or one of the few surviving anime blogs. Reaction videos are another variant of the same thing - generally more in-depth than an internet comment, with the moment-to-moment commentary of a live-watch thread or chatroom, but generally without the more thorough analysis of someone writing about the work in retrospect. (Though there are reaction videos that will spend over an hour going back over and talking about the work after it's finished, like an impromptu blog post or review.)
That isn't to say the low-status reputation of reaction videos doesn't have justification. Unlike earlier psuedo-reaction videos like MST3K, they have a very low barrier to entry and are unscripted, so naturally quality is typically low. (However the combination of the low barrier to entry and more detail than a typical internet comment may mean they are the most detailed commentary that exists for a particular piece of obscure media.) They appeal to people who prefer video to text, and while there are various reasons for such a preference one is that some people struggle to read, so when they appeal to the lowest common denominator that is often lower than the lowest common denominator for writing. Video is much less time-efficient than text (mitigated by running concurrently with the original work, so it also functions as a rewatch). Less time to think than reviews or literary criticism means commentary is often more shallow. (Though it can be more detailed and unfiltered, watching someone play a videogame can tell you a lot more than some 3-minute scripted GameStop video review.) Of course high-status media commentary is no guarantee of quality either, academics at English departments or writers for magazines like the London Review of Books churn out plenty of garbage. The very element of status often makes this worse, such as by incentivizing viewing everything through the lens of a currently high-status ideology. This is especially bad for professional writing about pop-culture, like video-game reviewers, which often aims for the ideology and pretentiousness of academic writing with less intelligence or knowledge. In any case, the point is that reaction videos are just another subset of media and cultural commentary with various advantages and disadvantages over the other kinds, rather than some alien psychological phenomenon.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.
There is a large difference between something being a bad idea that carries risk, and those risks being a good thing that the rest of society should make worse. There may be cases where it's better to leave people to their fates, but only when the actual costs of doing so are high enough, like if putting up more safety fences or warning labels is too costly compared to the benefit. The obvious topical comparison would be that, if a woman gets raped because of choosing to keep questionable company or choosing to date an abusive man or walking down a dark alley, we still put the rapist in jail if feasible. We certainly don't help domestic abusers on the basis of "you took that risk when you chose to date a crazy person, so society will punish you on the abuser's behalf". Not even feminists creating policies that help female abusers who use accusations of abuse/rape/etc. as weapons generally do so on purpose, they are just biased enough to genuinely think that such accusations from women must be true.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.
Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.
Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
The way you're grouping and valuing people seems fundamentally nonsensical. What does it even mean to talk about cleaners hypothetically vanishing? If you need a cleaner and don't have one then you put out a job ad, with the wage increasing as necessary until someone accepts, until you add cleaning duties to some other job and find someone willing to accept (perhaps yourself), or until you have to go out of business because you can't afford to get it done. People who have some job are not a fixed group with fixed properties, and they certainly don't have fixed wages, fixed value, or fixed levels of unnecessary employment across different societies.
The value of low-skill labor varies widely based on the opportunity cost of accomplishing it some other way in your society. If a job has a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling it tends to hire the less competent members of society, but that is relative competence. If there was a mass genetic-engineering/eugenics program such that the least-competent bottom 10% of society had an average IQ of 130, high conscientiousness, and low rate of mental or physical illness, and that society hadn't completely replaced cleaners with robots, then presumably you'd be hiring those people as janitors since that would be a lower opportunity cost than hiring from the other 90% (so they accept lower pay). The only differences are that they would do a somewhat better job (such as less incidents of janitors destroying cell samples, to reference a post linked here a while back) and you would have to pay them much more because the overall prosperity of society would have increased and even the bottom 10% would have better options you need to compete with. Of course, the overall prosperity of society increasing generally also means you can afford to pay them more. They're only going to vanish if there are alternatives preferable to the additional expense, like how personal servants have largely vanished in first-world countries.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
It is a short story rather than a novel, and regular alternate history rather than "Island in the Sea of Time", but The Last Article from Harry Turtledove.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Where have all the teen comedies gone? Twenty years ago, it seemed like there were at least several of these every summer to capitalise on the general debauchery and sexual exploits of modern day teenagers, but I can't remember a memorable teen movie in the last few years.
As I read this I thought you were going to go with "because social-justice sensibilities consider them Problematic and are influential among the people and companies that make movies". (The other big potential contributor would be the idea I've seen that comedies are declining because they struggle to justify getting people to come to the theater instead of streaming.)
Nearly all gay films deal with the uncomfortableness and trauma of coming out, but what makes this film unique is that the two main characters are simply gay without further explanation. That alone makes it worth watching in my opinion.
...which makes your actual followup puzzling to me. If that is the reason then of course one of the few teen comedies that makes it to release will be one that immunizes itself by trumpeting social-justice credentials as loudly as possible!
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
This rings rather hollow when both opponents and supporters of the transgender movement see the link to transhumanism.
People say a lot of things. There are people who will assure you that transgender ideology is either the culmination or feminism or incompatible with it. Spend any time reading SJW or transgender communities talk about fiction and you'll find them headcanoning tons of random stuff as actually about transgenderism. But if you read either prominent historical transhumanists or modern prominent transhumanists like Nick Bostrom (co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, now named Humanity+) there is little or no interest in transgenderism, except incidentally insofar as transhumanist technology might make body modification in general much easier.
By the logic of utilitarianism any change you make will be "improving your condition" because you wouldn't have done it otherwise.
I think that's more an economic/libertarian principle (rational choice theory?) rather than the logic of utilitarianism, utilitarianism doesn't say anything about whether people make good choices. Whichever principle says that because people are close to the consequences of their own choices and are self-interested they make better decisions for themselves than distant decision-makers like the government. But yes, providing more choices is generally an upgrade in the sense that it allows people to choose the better option, at least if the choice is easily reversible and provides rapid and clear feedback. ("Becoming a meth addict" is a choice enabled by modern technology, but having that option available is generally not an upgrade. Similarly grocery stores are much better than government meals when it comes to things like choosing food you like, but still struggle at tasks like increasing long-term health.) But the upgrade provided by having sidegrade choices available is much smaller than the upgrade provided by having the choice to continue living, or by granting objective capabilities such as higher intelligence, so it is those that transhumanists focus on.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Moving to Mars, space
This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.
Changing sex
This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.
When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.
There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
That effect is strongly subject to genetic confounding, most child-abuse victims inherit the genes of a child abuser or at least the relative of a child abuser. Neither of your links take that into account, so they don't tell us anything about causation. I don't know if there's any studies on the "cycle of abuse" which account for genetic confounding, but here is one on a related factor:
Individuals exposed to childhood victimization had pervasive impairments in clinically relevant cognitive functions, including general intelligence, executive function, processing speed, memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension in adolescence and adulthood. However, the observed cognitive deficits in victimized individuals were largely explained by cognitive deficits that predated childhood victimization and by confounding genetic and environmental risks.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Speaking separately to reporters from The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations afterward, Shotwell said SpaceX has worked to restrict Ukraine’s use of Starlink for military purposes.
“There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that,” they quoted her as saying without offering details. “There are things that we can do, and have done.”
That quote was specifically about not allowing them to directly control drones via Starlink, not "use of Starlink for military purposes" in general. They're fine with allowing them to be used for military communication but apparently not with drones carrying Starlink terminals so that they can be controlled by satellite without worrying about range and with less concern about jamming.
Reuters: SpaceX curbed Ukraine's use of Starlink internet for drones -company president
Speaking later with reporters, Shotwell referred to reports that the Ukrainian military had used the Starlink service to control drones.
Ukraine has made effective use of unmanned aircraft for spotting enemy positions, targeting long-range fires and dropping bombs.
"There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that," she said, referring to Starlink's use with drones. "There are things that we can do, and have done."
Shotwell declined to say what measures SpaceX had taken.
Using Starlink with drones went beyond the scope of an agreement SpaceX has with the Ukrainian government, Shotwell said, adding the contract was intended for humanitarian purposes such as providing broadband internet to hospitals, banks and families affected by Russia's invasion.
"We know the military is using them for comms, and that's ok," she said. "But our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes."
Asked if SpaceX had anticipated Starlink's use for offensive purposes in Ukraine when deciding to ship terminals into conflict zones, Shotwell said: "We didn't think about it. I didn't think about it. Our starlink team may have, I don't know. But we learned pretty quickly."
The Economist: Ukraine is betting on drones to strike deep into Russia
At an early stage the Ukrainians appeared to pin hopes for controlling drones behind Russian lines on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, which work at frequencies and in numbers that Russian systems struggle to jam. A naval-drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet in October reportedly made good use of this gap. But Mr Musk, apparently worried about the escalatory effect of such moves, has stepped in where Russian technology proved unable to. Starlink now uses geofencing to block the use of its terminals—not only above Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine, but also, according to a Ukrainian military intelligence source, over water and when the receiver is moving at speeds above 100km per hour. “You put it on a boat at sea and it will simply stop working,” he says. So Ukraine’s drone developers now use a range of other, more expensive communication systems, with multiple systems often on the same vehicle. The success of the attack on February 28th in getting so close to Moscow suggests that Ukraine may be getting close to a solution that works.
Aside from Starlink's apparent desire to not directly serve as the command and control system for drones and Musk's stated fears about escalation, I wonder if the U.S. government played some part in that decision, like how the U.S. has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with long-range missile systems capable of striking inside Russia.
Washington Post: U.S. in no hurry to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles
Since last year, the administration has cited several reasons for holding back. Refusal initially centered on concerns that Ukraine might fire the long-range missiles into Russian territory, escalating the conflict into a U.S.-Russia confrontation. Even supplying the weapons, Moscow has said publicly, would cross a red line.
Whatever Moscow’s threats, those worries seem to have abated. The Biden administration has said it is satisfied with public statements and written pledges from Kyiv not to use U.S.-supplied weapons to target Russians beyond the border. Although officials privately concede there have been some breaches, Ukraine is said to have largely complied with those promises.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.
It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS
When hailing a network, a user outside the network contacts the network control station (NCS) on the cue frequency. In the active FH mode, the SINCGARS radio gives audible and visual signals to the operator that an external subscriber wants to communicate with the FH network. The SINCGARS operator must change to the cue frequency to communicate with the outside radio system. The network can be set to a manual frequency for initial network activation. The manual frequency provides a common frequency for all members of the network to verify that the equipment is operational.
But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Instead, he started messing around with the service itself
No he didn't.
By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.”
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.
alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable
The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.
He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.
During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the [Deus Ex protagonist], which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.
I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.
And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day
Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”
He might be thinking of polls like this Harvard-Harris poll:
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
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