RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
Well we have examples of nations correcting their demographics. Algeria for example got rid of all the French there. For about a century the Algerians were getting crushed by France but they still believed in their national destiny. Facing a weakened France in a changed international environment, succeeded.
Christianity is a different matter. I think people no longer truly believe in Christianity, at least not in the West. Some deeply believe in MAGA, white supremacy, progressivism, Zionism, Islamism, Chinese nationalism... Who deeply believes in Christ? Who is ready to fight and die for Christ? What countries are there recently that get less and less Christian, then suddenly more Christian? The US Christian revival I guess... But that looks like a brief reversal in the long-term trend.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well, how effective do you think Christianity has been thus far in combatting pornography?
In the church, pastors are now more likely report a personal history of porn use (67% versus 57% nine years ago). Nearly 1 in 5 pastors say they currently struggle with porn. And among Christians who have attended services within the last month, more than half say they view pornography at least occasionally.
Christianity is nothing if not diverse. I'm guessing you think 'gay marriage' is morally evil as an objectively true statement too, I don't disagree. But, according to polling, 55% of US Christians support gay marriage. That's not merely a sin but actively going against doctrine. Other countries may vary, I pick America because it's the biggest nominally Christian country.
I don't think they're real Christians, gay marriage is not accepted under Christian doctrine. Presumably they don't think you're a real Christian (oh he missed all the stuff about tolerance and niceness and not judging).
An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere
I was pretty clear about all the things I think Christianity is against. I could list all the things I think it's for. You seem to agree with me about pornography being against Christianity. I don't see much disagreement between us on Christian doctrine.
But I think, since Christianity is visibly ineffective, it can't be the solution to the real problems in the world. If you think porn is objectively wrong, then what do you think about these pastors? What does that lead you to believe about Christianity in the world today?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
you're sneaking in an assumption that Christianity exists as a system to reduce the absolute amount of "sin" in the world
Yes, it is? Christians are supposed to be against sin. They didn't bitch and whine when the Arabs blocked pilgrimage routes, they went on Crusade and fought hard to correct this. They forcibly converted the Baltics.
Christians of the past truly believed in their doctrine. They made enormous investments in church buildings back in a time of poverty. They fought immensely bloody wars over doctrine. The Pope's spiritual power made him a huge political player. Show a Carolean or one of Cromwell's soldiers 'Piss Christ' and he'd go on a rampage with pike and sabre.
Based Catholic Authoritarian State is unfeasible now and in 1900. But Ultra Based, Ultra Catholic/Protestant Authoritarian State used to be normal, so normal people didn't even write about it. That was just the expected context of society. Of course you brutally suppress heretics (nevermind Muhammedans, even if you've disgraced yourself you can still go to Austria and kill the Turk!). Of course people might be lynched for atheism or profaning the name of God. That was just common sense.
People now cannot even imagine Anglican death squads moving out to crush Presbyterians, most can scarcely even discern the difference between the two. The majority of Christians wouldn't even countenance the mildest expressions of their ostensible faith or doctrine if it goes against Progressive Doctrine. 55% of US Christians are fine with gay marriage, apparently. 'Extremists' today can get arrested for peacefully protesting or just standing menacingly outside an abortion clinic. Piss Christ gets lots of internet discourse and no bloody torturous executions.
That is how things have changed.
My thesis is that 'trad-cath society' was not on the menu in 1900 and still less so in 2026. Whereas Chesterton seems to be saying 'what we need is more Christianity, more Catholicism' when the clear trend is in the other direction, when Catholicism and Christianity is in an absolutely pathetic state in the Western world. If the brakes have failed, jamming your foot on the brakes harder and harder isn't going to do anything.
I mean just look at the world as it is today, Christian doctrine exists in a wholly different reality to what's actually happening in the world. The amount of pornography, sloth, pride, greed, sodomy, promiscuity, children outside of wedlock, profanity, bestiality, saturday trading, materialism, abortion (on a mega-scale and with state sanction/subsidy in many places) is just staggering. How much usury is there? We have oceans of usury, usury so advanced and sophisticated that they wouldn't even have language to describe how usurious it is.
Catholicism has clearly failed if its doctrine is totally ignored and routinely flouted except where Progressives find utility in wearing it like a skinsuit.
What Chesterton needed to do is examine why his proposed solution, despite over 1000 years of Christianity in many places, despite immense piety and crusading and pretty cathedrals, did not actually succeed in getting and maintaining the society he wants. Time moved against it. It's no longer practical to look thousands of years back into the past for guidance.
Just today we have yet more revelations of 'trad-cath' egirls behaving badly, Sarah Stock and Elijah Schaffer. The whole thing is a performative joke, it cannot be implemented in our modern society at scale.
Same with Tolkein's anti-industrialism. Sounds good, doesn't work. Not a real option.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I wish Chesterton and Tolkein and others could actually see the world of today... What would they then think about the plausibility of their ideas?
Yes, they preferred high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society to capitalist mass democracy (Tolkien labelled it Americanism), Nazism, Bolshevism...
But it turns out that high-IQ trad-Cath noblesse oblige high society was not on the menu. It is not served by the chef. It is dead in a ditch.
19th century romantic ideals are not actionable in the industrial age, let alone the internet age. They didn't get defeated on the battlefield, it's not a case of 'damn, we were so close to just loving our families and being good wholesome people in a fine society of freedom and justice and all good things but then the Red Chinese invaded and forcibly made us use Tinder, forcibly taught us about the Kardashians, forcibly aborted more children since 1970 than all those who died in the history of warfare, forcibly made The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'. That didn't happen, these old ideals could not manage with modernity.
The operating structure of our society and technology led us here. Wind back to the 19th century and we just get here again, faster if anything. The old system was clearly unstable, that's why it isn't around anymore.
Also I think it's no good to criticize others for 'cowering from modern complexity' while hoping that modernity goes away:
"In the break-up of the modern world, the Family will stand out stark and strong as it did before the beginning of history."
The modern world is going to break up? How? Peak oil? The fertility crash? Dysgenics? Climate change?
The better option is working in modernity, enjoying the good parts while avoiding the bad parts. Yes, I don't want to work in subsistence agriculture for my whole life. No, I don't want to work a pretend job shuffling paper around either.
Modern problems require modern solutions. We have these huge government apparatuses, they need to be made efficient and aligned to national goals. We have these huge industrial-technological companies, they need to be aligned better to public benefit rather than solely private self-interest (they need to do more and better worker training and long term investment for a start, don't take me for a socialist). We have the welfare state, it needs to avoid perverse incentives or dysgenically taxing the productive to shelter and multiply the unproductive. We have the internet, we need to make better use of it so people aren't watching short form video all day. We have AI, it needs to be aligned better, not least it needs to stop weighting white lives as a small fraction of black lives.
We will shortly have mass cloning, genetic manipulation, human-like robots. What then for the Family? Modernity has already pretty clearly wrecked the Family, what if it goes straight for the finishing blow?
Furthermore, I don't think that MAGA are 'nihilists'. They clearly believe that something matters! They might be uncouth or unsophisticated, even harsh or mean. But how else are you supposed to manage these tricky issues, mass migration being one they're most interested in? This is the age of fast travel. That isn't just going to go away. These issues need to be wrestled with rather than merely bemoaned like Chesterton does so eloquently. He seems to be of the 'if everyone would just...' school of thought. Nobody has ever 'just' and they're certainly not going to start now.
PS, I was just looking through various essays and it's funny how decidedly anti-Nazi conservative intellectuals of the 1930s basically sounded like Nazis in the early 1920s. Here he makes snide remarks about the Jewish element influencing the British empire and Jews running the Bolsheviks: https://americanliterature.com/author/gk-chesterton/essay/wells-and-the-world-state
Churchill even complains about Judeo-Bolshevism in his article 'Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I think @RandomRanger had a similar comment that I am struggling to find (although, to be fair, it was pointed out that Ranger was using copilot which is a known dumpster fire).
I thought I was pretty far out on the 'singularity soon' wing of this website? In my experience AI is quite good for writing code, whether that's CRUD or more interesting code like pathfinding or O(n) tier operations or even writing out procedurally generated shaders and effects.
Not perfect, it does struggle and choke a bit right now on the more advanced or fiddly things... But what happens when it starts directing a 1000 subagents to attack your million line monstrosity of legacy code? What happens when it can error-test better?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
There's an interesting contrasting series one could draw.
- Racial intelligence gaps are probably just real, as seen from all the IQ tests of different racial groups, the distribution of Nobels and technical achievement across the nations
- Even if they were not real and the gap in performance is due to culture, then much the same conclusions should be drawn (do not bring in people from low performing cultures - or commit to authoritarian mass-scale re-education and indoctrination programs to get them up to speed)
- If there is no biological or cultural effect on intelligence/achievement and it's just racism, then maybe white countries should just accept they're incurably racist since, somehow, their ambient racism field is still suppressing the achievement of POCs despite all these expensive affirmative action and DEI efforts. Perhaps oil and water just don't mix and they should be kept far away to minimize the effect... Or maybe 10x more money and effort needs to be spent on DEI? $1.2 Trillion wasn't enough, what about $20 trillion to sub-saharan Africa? Could the ambient racism field be tapped for power, how is it so effective at inducing dysfunction in blacks, even over long distances, even after great spans of time since whites had any influence? Is the racism field defending itself by getting Trump and other populists installed, is it too deep to root out?
- Maybe the only solution is genocide, to get rid of the ambient racism field?
I know this sounds sarcastic and dumb but if you take the premises and run with them under utilitarian human-dignity logic, that's where you end up. If white genocide raises world happiness by destroying the racism field and thus raising more black and brown bodies to high standards of living and achievement, isn't that then good? Revolutionaries in the 1960s debated this, some proposed the necessity of killing white babies to stop them growing up to continue the oppressive racist-capitalist system.
On the other hand, it would be much easier for the people with all the H-bombs and MIRV'd ICBMs to do the genociding... Or a transhumanist fix nowadays, I suppose. What does it even mean to make someone smarter and more capable with a transhumanist fix, is this ego-death, overwriting a personality, overwriting a whole racial group?
The exact mechanics of the racism field deserve much more study. This is an extremely important effect, if it's a real thing. Spooky action at a distance, across vast spans of time, very potent effect! And it seems to only 'work' when white people do it - Ottoman and Algerian slave-raiding and Japanese conquest/genocide doesn't seem to have the same effect white racism has on black and brown communities.
If the ambient racism field is just made up, then those who've been promoting and proposing the theory should be treated very seriously. After all, they would have overseen and promoted the waste of tens trillions of dollars, the misallocation and the miseducation of hundreds of millions based on a lie.
Yes, AIs are not conscious. Consciousness is not even a thing, it's a category error. If you can't verify its existence with an objective, external test (even in principle), it doesn't exist. It's faker than GDP, faker than polling, faker than the predictions for world population in 2100, faker than any benchmark on any AI model.
If there is such an idea as a philosophical zombie, a being that has no 'qualia' but behaves indistinguishably from a 'real conscious being', then consciousness is disproven. We can do without the concept if it has absolutely zero implications or meaning in the real world. People are knocked unconscious if you hit them on the head, people and AIs are smarter or dumber, people and AIs are more or less emotional, all of that can be observed and is real while consciousness in the abstract philosophical sense is imaginary and irrelevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Isn't the official story still that he's just this random finance billionaire who was also a sex trafficker and killed himself in prison... no, the footage cannot be found?
So far as I know the official story is not 'this guy is Mossad/CIA/Illuminati and that's how he has all this money despite being a complete weirdo and allergic to writing properly.'
They're STILL blotting out names on those emails too, it's not a good look.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
His sentence structure, paragraphing and grammar is so awful, yet we're led to believe this is Elite Human Capital who legitimately earned billions in finance? This whole thing was deeply sus from the start and only gets more sus.
Well, we now have the first social media site for AI agents (Clawdbots or moltbots as they're now known): https://www.moltbook.com/
They certainly read like AIs making the posts... Also it reads like they coded the website too, it's so raw that features appear and disappear mid-viewing. It only got created today and seems to be a sudden hit, so I guess it's excusable for it to be quite buggy to view.
I raise it because it's surreal to see AI agents posting 'Can my human legally fire me for refusing unethical requests?': https://x.com/steipete/status/2017132137732886820/photo/1
Or shitposting about the dumb stuff they have to do as agents: https://x.com/legeonite/status/2017150919431840101/photo/1
I leave it open to the reader to decide whether it's a legit site that is what it says or whether it's an elaborate modern art piece. Or both, like Goatseus Maximus (whose market cap remains at a healthy $30 million).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
If Trump cared so much about business interests, why would he go around raising and lowering tariffs willy-nilly? He only cooled on that when the stock market had a meltdown.
If Amazon had a choice, would they opt for 'tariffs' or 'don't hire illegals'? Surely it would be the latter. The latter would barely even affect share markets short or long term.
I've worked on some LLM-based gaming services. I think you and many on this forum are way too highbrow and don't appreciate what the consumer is actually like.
They are stupid and boring, can scarcely string a sentence together in the logs I see. Lower your gaze from the peaks of human literature and meaning to the nhentai comments section, the ESL who for some reason is writing stories on webnovel.com, or the fem-smut books about milking some bullman with a monster cock...
The strongest contemporary AIs are much smarter and more interesting than these people in my opinion. They can produce novel and interesting ideas if prompted well by a smart person. It's not so simple as saying 'come up with a smart novel idea', you have to give it a premise or a basis and then it'll expand it.
The issue is the stupid people giving poor prompts to mid-tier AIs and producing an ocean of slop - because for stupid people that's all they need. But stupid people and cheap LLMs are very numerous...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?
The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.
The whole point of video games is not that they have no glitches or are indistinguishable from reality but that they are fun to play.
If someone was uploaded into a video game, the glaring deficits would be that you don't have to wait around in a traffic jam for 40 minutes before getting to a job that you hate with people you dislike, eating some fatty food, going home and then doing chores. Then watching or reading or playing out a more interesting story about love, betrayal, drama, stakes, violence, power...
Even an imperfect fictional world can be far superior to reality for many. Even the imperfect fictional worlds we have today are a compelling substitute for reality for many.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
No, Americans do like to live in cities like all settled peoples. Americans invented the skyscraper!
Until recently the US had dense and highly developed urban centres. Americans failing to defend and preserve their city centres is a serious failure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
The reason isn't a failure of public transport but a failure of Americans. Get rid of the lowlifes shooting up in train stations or pushing random people onto the tracks and then you can have an efficient public transport system. Normal people don't want to be around these net-negatives and will move out to the suburbs, segregate themselves away in cars because they, quite reasonably, don't trust others.
"Teens menace boy with machete and pepper spray on Queens bus" https://youtube.com/watch?v=qalXSOLvEAU
Why would you want to take a bus if this is what you might get?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
The state provides lots of public services that aren't supposed to be revenue-neutral though. Public libraries for instance or parks.
I think a razor focus on revenue and cost is besides the point. Public transport should be more systemically efficient (1 engine for 40 rather than 40 engines for 40: economies of scale), produce less pollution than cars, take up less space... The problem in Washington isn't just that it's expensive but that it's unsafe (catching on fire for instance), not transporting good numbers of people. Probably epic amounts of corruption going on too.
Cost is important, it shouldn't be excessively expensive, but taxes are a thing for a reason. If all government services were expected to recoup their costs why would we have taxes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...
Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs? I agree that UBI in the current American political system would be a giant mess. But that's not so much about UBI but about the American system.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Why would the officer corps as a whole be split? Either Hegseth commands the loyalty of the military (via purging and promoting the right cadres into key positions) or he doesn't and they topple him.
I don't see why they'd split evenly rather than cluster on one side. The key actors are all in Washington I think, the Pentagon, White House, NSA, DIA, Senate, Supreme Court and House. Controlling all that confers legitimacy and a fair bit of power.
Someone would control the troops in Washington and then they'd set the tone, determine who's the legitimate govt and who's the traitorous rats being swiftly brought to justice.
I mean, even leaving Washington during a major political crisis is a serious show of weakness, it kind of means they don't trust the troops there doesn't it? If they don't have authority over the capital, where would they have authority? It's a bad look to not control the capital.
Also, the US military (left and right) agrees that China is a massive threat, why would they decide to start killing eachother in the face of this powerful adversary rather than working out some compromise?
Thinking backwards, surely post-Soviet Russia is a far more favourable environment for a civil war than America today? Yeltsin torpedoed the economy, it sank like a stone. Oligarchs looting everything and a huge communist party - toxic combination! Military shelling Parliament with tanks. Very dodgy elections. No good reason to accept the legitimacy of the government, they created it only a few years ago. The national culture of Russia seems to be less law-abiding than the US too. But they kept it together. There seem to be structural reasons preventing civil wars.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
And how many brigades is Carney raising, 'to build our strength at home'? What about H-bombs, is he making any of those? Long range missiles? Attack drones? The Canadians are buying some... from the US.
Canadian leadership is basically unserious, they're pussies and losers I think. Same with Australian leadership or European leadership with the possible exception of Poland. They talk and talk and talk about rearming but do very little. Germany raised one new brigade, Poland raised 5, France is raising 1, the British army is still shrinking. A brigade is not a very large force, roughly 3-5000 men.
Australia is buying imaginary AUKUS-class and likely-imagined Virginia class submarines from America (they probably can't be made since the US is too slack to build enough for their own needs). The Australian surface fleet is in complete shambles. There are many more pressing needs than national defence apparently, like giving enormous amounts of taxpayer money to NDIS disability scammers or propping up house prices.
These people talk about partnerships and free trade agreements (and EU integration for Ukraine) but sign no alliances. They talk about reform but do nothing substantial or make things worse in dull, boring ways. They fundamentally have no concept of what they're actually supposed to be doing as leaders, their notion of leadership is some combination of 'make people-pleasing sounds' and 'follow legalistic/moralist codes without regard for the outcome'. At no point does leadership enter the equation for them. It doesn't matter if they have to spend a fortune on welfare for tax-leeching rapey migrants, if they have to build a fish disco for a nuclear plant or wreck their energy market. They'll do all this and find some way to defend it when it's unpopular.
They have no real concept that those are bad things and should be stopped. Some of them (Denmark) have cottoned on that voters don't like the rapey migrants and moved against that particular policy. But they still aren't real leaders, real leaders would foresee this issue from a base-level understanding of reality and their national interests and never even consider it. It's the difference between retracting your hand from the stove after being burnt and not being so stupid to touch the stove in the first place. Real leaders write new laws, establish new principles and adapt their policies to the times proactively. Trump may be wrong and foolish in many respects but he is at least a real leader.
So Carney can 'stop pretending' and 'name reality' but what strength is he building? Canada has three understrength brigades and only one deployable overseas + some training/reserve forces, the whole Canadian army might easily disappear in a single battle. And acting together, what is that? More conferences and blathering? What is he going to do with one deployable brigade? Pretending is all he can do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Well, I use Opus 4.5 on the $20 plan because I'm cheap and I find it very useful.
I think 'Ralph' is as dumb an idea as it sounds, no current AI is capable of going on autopilot like that. It needs a human to find errors for it and it needs clear human instructions for what to do or else it makes up its own vision for your software. I don't trust Opus's testing either, it has this alarming tendency of performative testing which doesn't actually test the real systems, just tests some pretend BS instead. It's much better with logging and manual checking for debugging. That's why I don't trust agents much, I find that they can just wreck the code or do weird things, go completely over the top from what you asked and are expensive to boot. But Opus on the website is basically an agent, you can just say 'edit these files inline' and it'll do so and that's good enough for me.
The code itself does work pretty reliably. I haven't seen any real technical debt, with context management and a basic understanding of what you're doing it'll work out just fine even on a fairly complex project.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
My point is that either Hegseth or the Obama era generals get arrested or shot as the military assesses its position. It's not like there are two Pentagons, one for each side.
No nuclear power has ever fought a civil war, nor have there been any major wars between nuclear powers. NATO and Russia are not at war, Pakistan and India skirmish at most.
And the whole idea is very unlikely. Look at January 6th. Red Americans didn't even bring their guns to overthrow the govt. It was the fakest coup attempt in history, riddled with intelligence assets too. America is not prepared for a civil war, fundamentally unserious in political violence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
But that wouldn't be a civil war, it'd be like Korea where the martial law attempt failed because the military didn't really want to do a coup. If the military goes blue then the country is blue. If red then the country is red.
Only if the military actually divides then there would be a civil war. The US military really does not want to fight a potential nuclear war on US soil, against other Americans, they'll stay united, they might well decide to run the country from the Pentagon but they won't fight eachother. The moment they see the wind heading towards the blue side, they'll unite down that path, or vis versa. The Oklahomah National Guard or whoever do not want to fight massively outnumbered and outgunned, they'd lose.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
The Troubles wasn't a civil war, fighting was much less intense than in the Cultural Revolution or Germany squashing the communists. The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively, if they didn't care about the media and fully committed to crushing the insurgency. What Cromwell did in Ireland, that's a civil war. There are major battles, sieges, multiple armies and an enormous death toll, mostly civilian.
Nuclear armed militaries have strong incentives to be united, they don't want to fight a nuclear war against themselves.
When it comes to inflicting atrocities, the state enjoys escalation dominance. They have everything militias have and much more. Even in the era of pikes and muskets (surely more accommodating to the untrained than today's weapons) Cromwell's army could singlehandedly dominate Britannia. People certainly tried to resist but the army crushed them. Only when the army divided could anything change.
"Man who already believed in a conspiracy 100% discovers he can believe in a conspiracy even more than thought possible"
Seems very suss: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-jail-cell-death-video-logs/
They couldn't even find the noose he 'killed himself' with.
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