sun_the_second
No bio...
User ID: 2725
sun_the_second
5mo ago
Why does it matter that it's isomorphic to you? There are 7 billion people as unique as you are. Of those, I would expect a non-zero number of them to have experiences and dispositions close enough to yours as to be negligible. If you don't value your continuity or your natal body, or genes, then I don't see what is there left for you other than some ephemeral idea of "thinking exactly the same" (which is over 0.01 seconds after you're copied and the copy diverges).
sun_the_second
2mo ago
It's not the self-awareness itself that is the big mystery, it's the qualia of self-awareness. The light might be on, but why does someone have to be looking out the window?
If you never found your tribe and home in USA, what makes you think Russia would be any different? I can tell you from experience there isn't any more magical sovl in Russian people than the Westerners. Not obvious, at least.
sun_the_second
1mo ago
The last time I recall a thought experiment based on global choices being discussed on the Motte, it got quite heated and divisive. Hopefully this one will be more fun, if y'all are willing to indulge in a bit of daydreaming and power fantasy.
Pic related. TLDR: you are one of a number of people given a choice between 10 sets of powers, with corresponding agenda that make them stronger when followed and taboos that make them disappear for a time when broken.
- Approximately 1 in a million people from those who live now, eligible from age 14 and upwards, are presented with the choice. This is a one-time event.
- Everyone is explained the choices in the language and terms they understand.
- Those who were not picked to participate in the choice do not know anything yet.
- Trying to abuse or bug-test the choice mechanic results in being assigned the 10th option.
- Everyone who's been picked knows those five stipulations.
What do you pick? What do you think the world will be like, and how do you intend to make it?
Personally,
sun_the_second
4mo ago
And none with Americans? Or is it that your rapport with Americans left you with the impression that they can't be your tribe?
From where I'm standing, one may convince themselves to think they're "fighting for the Russian tribe". They may even die happy. However, this worldview won't be aligned with reality.
I'm not in position to argue in favour of America's national idea. All I can say is that if you're looking for a country that won't give up on you, Russia would not be in my top list of suggestions. It is throwing men away to secure a meager buffer zone that I can't imagine actually being vital as we speak. I suppose you could achieve the authenticity of "fighting for your country" if you specifically immigrated to the newly occupied territories that are being fought for.
then why not just admit 'yes actually we want to screw your kids' or at the very least 'if somebody else did we're okay with it'?
Loaded question, they don't.
Anti-progressives keep acting as if "adults having sex with children is okay" must follow from "adults providing children with info about sex is okay" even as all trends point to high-and-increasing discomfort with the former idea among the modal progressive. It's motivated thinking. Meanwhile the most conservative societies on Earth generally appear to be very comfortable with adults fucking minors (child marriage in the open, child prostitution on the down low).
sun_the_second
4mo ago
The difference between what I know of how USA treats their soldiers and how Russia treats theirs is big enough that I wouldn't use the words "throw away" for both of them. This is without even going into the fact that Russia conscripts men against their will. US military recruiters might target the dumb and the hopeless, they might lie and embellish, but it's a choice.
Could justify it if "defending" meant "defending" as it did during WWII, but this? Hardly different from USA's "national interests securing" and "projecting influence". The only major difference is that USA's got oceans on both sides and Russia's only got one.
sun_the_second
23d ago
Recording a public assembly is harassment now? I am having serious trouble imagining you apply the same standard towards any situation where your sympathies are reversed.
sun_the_second
9d ago
Calling a specific subsection of women unrapeable is a pretty clear implication that you consider other subsections acceptable to rape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule#Proving_the_existence_of_the_rule
It's not rocket science. Sure, it would't hold up in a decent court, but "acktchyually I said I wouldn't even rape her, why are you upset" isn't fooling anyone.
sun_the_second
5mo ago
The argument is that all "natives" were immigrants once. At the very least anti-immigrationists should then clarify that they want the specific current shade of "native".
sun_the_second
27d ago
As always posts like this that equivocate "attraction to bloated corpses" and "making vidya game characters a bit more aggressively bland" leave me thinking that the gamergaters are not the ones with a normal scale of beauty.
The kind of people who unironically claim Zendaya is a 3/10 are the 1%ers.
sun_the_second
6mo ago
How much money would you torture a child to death for? Tradeoffs exist, right?
sun_the_second
1mo ago
I'm not in the habit of assuming the worst intentions in anyone who doesn't think like me. Some men also fake being progressive to pull alt girls, doesn't mean there aren't genuine ones.
That is to say, I don't need to "get to know her in order to be attracted", personally. If someone comes here and says he does, will you disbelieve him?
sun_the_second
6mo ago
What is the difference that's meaningful to the poster who conflates them?
sun_the_second
22d ago
HBD explains this far better than socioeconomic factors.
HBD doesn't, in fact, explain why high IQ black people do worse than high/mid IQ white people. To my knowledge most HBD theory proposes that IQ is fully general, and higher average IQ should correlate with more pro-social, civilized behaviour in general - I've seen no theory for a separate "criminality gene" being fleshed out.
"Identifying with a criminal culture", on the other hand, does explain rather well why high-IQ black people are disproportionately likely to go to prison, for me at least. (I know that criminal culture exists. I know that if you act according to criminal culture, you're more likely to go to prison than if you acted according to prosocial culture, IQ being the same. I do not, however, know if there is a criminality gene orthogonal to IQ.) This is without going into the anti-black racism theory.
sun_the_second
6mo ago
Who determines whether "it's got anything to do with them"? If you say shooting your own mother has a tradeoff of infinity because of your personal selfishness, why can't others put a tradeoff of infinity on "allowing openly purchasing sex from children"?
sun_the_second
2d ago
What kind of rituals do you think were there for confirming "eligibility", and what was the cutoff point? Are we talking "bullet ant mittens"?
It is my impression that many obviously "ineligible" (by modern and premodern standards) men successfully reproduced in the premodern era, because opportunities for women to be anyone but a wife were either incredibly scarce or worse than a subpar husband.
sun_the_second
1mo ago
It's apparently on Substack now. Do other Substack blogs cause you trouble?
sun_the_second
2mo ago
I'm not convinced that elections with Navalny dead a month before are going to be a substantially calmer affair than elections with Navalny alive. Nor that Putin would think yet another "sudden" death of someone who was already imprisoned would be a deterrent. He'd be throwing a spark into the crowd, not cowing them.
I give it about 50% "unintentional negligence", 50% "intentional negligence".
sun_the_second
4mo ago
The only reason why there's any pretense otherwise in the US is because we've barely been able to get by staffing the military on a purely voluntary basis. If we couldn't, there would be conscription.
And why does the US go at length to keep its military purely voluntary? If conscription is cheaper, then the answer can't be just "because it can", it could free up resources by grabbing more near-free manpower.
I really don't want to seem like I'm insulting you here because I'm honestly not trying to, but are you really this dense? Even the foremost western scholars on the matter like Richard Sakwa fault the west for Russia taking drastic measures in securing its own national security interests.
As a matter of fact, I haven't read all those books by "the foremost Western scholars", no, so if that's what it takes to be dense today, I'll cop to that. I have, however, heard of a significant bias Western scholars have when it comes to determining the agency of the west in world matters. It is always either the west's mission or the west's fault. I happen to think, based on data I didn't need a hundred politological books to learn, that there ain't anything the West did that "forced Russia's hand". Russia has enough agency to have culpability in this bloodshed it covers up with figleafs of "denazification" and "restoration of historical lands", and it does have culpability as much as one can ascribe common morality to machinations of state powers. All the scholars in the world are unlikely to convince me that TPTB can't go fuck themselves.
Russia could do better than that, too. It managed with Crimea.
sun_the_second
4mo ago
Why would the Americans resist the Canadians if the situation was reversed?
sun_the_second
4mo ago
If I wanted to see memes of aichads owning artcels, where would I go? It’s really important for my mental health.
Generate some?
sun_the_second
6mo ago
So you're going to use society's opinion as a reference for what is or isn't moral busybodying? I am confused then. In the West society certainly does consider it their business to prohibit children under 16 (18 in practice, higher than that depending on how old the other guy is and who you ask) having sex with adults.
Other arguments for why we shouldn't allow 14 year olds to have sex have similar glaring loopholes where that same argument applies to different groups where we are absolutely fine with them having sex.
In practice the attempts to equivocate such situations are sorely lacking. They fail to account for all aspects of child/adult disparity and/or make quite dubious reaches, such as "most black people are less capable than an unspecified percentage of white teenagers". I remain unconvinced.
What you might want to consider is what kind of relationships are currently deterred, in practice, by the age of consent laws as they are now. I do not believe these are the same kind of relationships as would be prevented by "consistent" consent laws that are supposed to match the rest of society to how we treat children.
(I'm also aware you probably think blacks /poors having unprotected sex is worse than children having sex, so no need to restate that unless you're going to deny it.)
Only if you believe there's a finite supply of "racial purity" (when did it appear, by the way? The Neanderthals?) and brown immigrants permanently dilute it. Otherwise, it's just cultural change. That is no less reversible than communism.
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