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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:


print 'Eat the rich'  # or some other lefty slogan

I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

I don’t think it is ideologically extreme for billionaires’ wealth to be forcefully taken from them. They violate the spirit of society (as well as capitalism) by lobbying Congress to bring in millions of laborers to strip Americans from high wages. Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects. They are vermin and I believe it would be better if they were eaten than allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. They are the single class most responsible for the destruction of the West because the artificial deflation of white collar wages reduces entrepreneurialism (risk-taking and business creation increases with wages/employment to fall back on), and thus they are responsible for reduced development of technology, in addition to reduced fertility and lowered happiness. You violate no ethical principle by wanting to take their wealth forcefully, but violate many by submitting to what they do.

Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos:

Since 2021, Blue Origin has been making solar cells and transmission wire from regolith simulants.

To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon.

Using regolith simulants, our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct.

Our process purifies silicon to more than 99.999%. This level of purity is required to make efficient solar cells. While typical silicon purification methods on Earth use large amounts of toxic and explosive chemicals, our process uses just sunlight and the silicon from our reactor.

For protection from the harsh lunar environment, solar cells need cover glass; without it, they would only last for days. Our technique uses only molten regolith electrolysis byproducts to make cover glass that enables lunar lifetimes exceeding a decade.

Learning to live off the land – on the Moon and on Mars – will require extensive collaboration across the ISRU community. We are ready.

Of course we could redistribute the wealth Bezos wastes on this frivolous nonsense to ehh... Education (more money and power to cruel and/or inept single women lording over children), Healthcare (but only non-disruptive sort, we need more obese elderly adults in agony, for longer, for many decades!) and of course National Security (alien balloons ain't gonna shoot themselves). Also splurging on financial stimulus for those same corporations we have just looted.

I realize this is an uncharitable reading of public spending. Hopefully you realize that so is your critique of billionaires.

Also splurging on financial stimulus for those same corporations we have just looted.

But with the understanding that they must do obesiance in the right ways and to the right people.

The idea is not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, but robbing Peter to pay Peter or Paul, depending on which maximises the probability of re-election.

Yep, A dollar in the hand of a modern tech billionaire does a lot more good for the world than that dollar in the hand of a government.

Yup..up to a point, coordination problems, blah blah . Tech CEOs cannot create a military to defend themselves.

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