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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3514 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Who will replace us?

History is the story of societies being replaced by more competitive societies. The Sumerians were replaced by Semites and the Beaker people by Indo-Europeans. The Diadochoi states' apartheid societies were replaced by Rome's more assimilative state. Roman paganism was replaced by Christianity. Feudalism was replaced by absolutism, which was replaced by republicanism. What is best for society is often not best for the individuals within it, molochian competition is like that. Stalin built a superpower but he paid the price in destruction of Russian lives- but he turned a backwards society one generation removed from functional chattel slavery into a superpower that dominated half the world. The Roman Empire solved the stability problems of the late republic- at a cost that contemporary sources note, but don't let us check.

Who will replace today's liberalism? Christian communities are still hanging on, of course. But their numbers are dwarfed by blacks and Muslims, and despite their paltry human capital Quantity has a Quality all its own. And of course there's AI(I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters). East Asian societies have low fertility now, but their collectivism might give them a leg up in the future- would Koreans or Chinese accept whatever measures to raise the fertility rate, unacceptable in Europe and the Anglosphere? Or will it be a crude, bombastic secular conservatism- popcountry style?

a backwards society one generation removed from functional chattel slavery into a superpower that dominated half the world

By bringing the slavery back, only on the state level (what do you think people were doing it Gulag, knitting?). And that society barely lasted 3 generations.

I expect AI to never figure out how to do maintenance on its own datacenters

They'd just hire humans though a shell company for now.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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