domain:anarchonomicon.com
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21m ago
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
Lizzardspawn
27m ago
A brilliant stratagem in the culture war - if your hand is worth playing, then is it worth overplaying and then you look like a surprised pikachu when the pendulum start swinging in the other direction.
2rafa
36m ago
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Julliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
53m ago
That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.
Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine (which if it is a client state is a shared project of the EU and US). I am not sure if public opinion on this point is correct, but I am pretty certain the people fleeing Tehran see it that way, and would do even if it wasn't for pro-regime propaganda in Iran.
sun_the_second
53m ago
As if governments didn't collect taxes with brutal force for less noble causes than that for millenia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
56m ago
I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
57m ago
Nursing homes are containment areas.
Yes aging to death in there is horrible for everyone involved, but it involves fewer people and keeps the horror away from anyone who isn't professionally obliged to deal with it.
You degenerating in your home means neighbors, landlords and everyone nearby need to deal with your increasingly disagreeable behavior and appearance, if you still drive then you may also endanger other people in traffic, and even if not everyone around needs to be on their guard lest you burn the house down.
It's horrible either way, but making you die under controlled conditions is somewhat more pro-social. Except for you of course, but you aren't really part of society anymore by that point.
God, I hope I just die from lightning strike.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
57m ago
The most notorious one is Pottukoira ("Potato dog"). I don't actually actively watch this shit so I can't confirm the level of drunkenness right now, but he appears to currently be in Estonia, so it is likely to be extremely high.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 14m ago
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them.
I feel there's kind of a false dichotomy/definition debate going on here.
Let's talk about Newcomb's Paradox. There is and stubbornly remains some class of people who think the solution to the problem is to intend to one-box, but then to become a two-boxer after Omega has made its prediction. This solution is fatally flawed because, to misquote Minority Report, "Omega doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what you will do". If one will "become" a two-boxer before the decision is made, then one already is a two-boxer, because the definition of a two-boxer is "one who will pick both boxes", not "one who currently thinks he will pick both boxes". If I am programming Omega, and I want to make Omega as reliable as possible, I should count such people as two-boxers because they will two-box; their false consciousness of being a one-boxer, no matter how sincerely believed, is not actually relevant.
(I went looking for the exchange I had with one of these people, but I couldn't find it.)
The shape of the excluded third option should now be pretty clear. There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later. When talking about your ingroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "good faith", because they believe what they say and you sympathise with them. When talking about your outgroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "bad faith" because the natural context of analysing your outgroup is wanting to know whether deals will be kept or not.
Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith, because "your outgroup doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what your movement will do". It's not totally-irrefutable evidence - movements change, and not all deals are created equal - but it's relevant. Moreover, I think modelling social justice as unable to keep its bargains is actually fairly justified, because of two reasons:
-
Social justice is leaderless. Committees are bad at keeping their bargains absent specific effort, because committees tend to include people who wanted to reject the bargain, and turnover might lead to those people gaining control of the committee at some point (and "you should respect a bargain you never agreed to, because others in your movement did over your objection" is a much-tougher sell than "you should respect a bargain you agreed to"*).
-
Social justice is not very interested in keeping historical norms. "Dead old white men", and so forth. So that tough sell is even tougher.
I get that it's really awkward to respond to the claim "you can't make a believable compromise, because you will change your mind and/or others in your movement will overrule you". I sympathise. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean it's false.
*I'm reminded of the exchange at the end of the TNG episode "The Pegasus":
PICARD: In the Treaty of Algeron the Federation specifically agreed not to develop cloaking technology.
PRESSMAN: And that treaty is the biggest mistake we ever made! It's kept us from exploiting a vital area of defence.
PICARD: That treaty has kept us in peace for sixty years, and as a Starfleet officer, you're supposed to uphold it.
It's very, very easy to be a Pressman.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
My understanding is that Mamdani's rise has basically been achieved mostly by hammering the housing issue. His policies would be unlikely to fix the issue, but that's still there.
2rafa
1hr ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
Botond173
1hr ago
And even if you're healthy, what happens if you get Alzheimer's? You wouldn't even know it, and eventually you'd either freeze to death trying to walk to work or get in a car accident if you still drive.
As opposed to keeping to exist basically as a vegetable in the nursing home your children paid to let you in, which I suppose is much better.
Botond173
1hr ago
That’s a fair point and we need to consider the steps that need to be taken to avoid that fate.
• You need to have a happy, functioning marriage that preferably produces multiple children • Those children need to become well-adjusted working normies producing an economic surplus • Both you and at least one of the children need to organize your lives so that you live in relatively close vicinity • Your children need to be willing and able to help you with their time, effort, money etc. whether they are themselves married or not
You’ll avoid the sad fate you described when all four of those conditions are met.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape)
Are you serious?
Botond173
1hr ago
Your post reads like the blame lies somewhere with 'attractive' men not committing to the women who want them. But chances are there are simply not enough 'attractive' men for these women.
I’d say women in the past generally understood that they can elicit long-term commitment from the men they identified as desirable partners, and that this isn’t achieved by merely offering up their orifices for use. This knowledge is mostly lost at this point, which incentivizes women to fruitlessly try out-slutting one another in order to pander to the whims of the top men. In fact, even the simple idea that young women should learn how to become eligible long-term partners if they want a happy relationship is largely forgotten.
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.
With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.
At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.
But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.
This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
It's worth noting that a 90th percentile liar can lie much more effectively in high-context communications than in text. I agree that people are more inclined to trust a notorious lying liar who is a familiar face and can perform authenticity on camera, but they shouldn't be.
functor
1hr ago
The differnece between the anglosphere and continental Europe is the first past the post system.
In Germany there are young leftists and rightists. Old right leaning people vote CDU, young right leaning people vote AfD. Old leftists vote social democrat, young leftists vote Green. The first past the post system makes it hard for new parties to form and makes it hard to replace the local established politician. The issue is that boomers and their establishment policies are not exciting young people anywhere. Keir Starmer and whoever is leading the Tories this week don't appeal to the young.
For a system to last young people have to be able out maneuver the old. First past the post makes this hard.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Apparently, the UKGBNI is set to completely decriminalize abortion in England and Wales when performed by the woman (not when performed by a doctor). According to Reuters and BBC, under existing law abortion by a doctor is legal up to 24 weeks and a woman can perform an abortion on herself with prescribed pills up to 10 weeks. In contrast, the new law—approved by 73 percent of the House of Commons—appears to permit abortion right up to the point of birth when it is performed by the woman.
Text of the law (on pages 108–109 of the PDF; part of a much larger bill):
Tonia Antoniazzi, NC1
To move the following Clause—
Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion
For the purposes of the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.
Member's explanatory statement
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to abortion from women acting in relation to her own pregnancy at any gestation, removing the threat of investigation, arrest, prosecution, or imprisonment. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, telemedicine, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Just so I understand, are you saying that the Democratic Party of the United States is a criminal organisation which is sufficiently dangerous compared to, say, the Black Panthers or the Mafia that the US Department of Homeland Security (or Stasi, to use the original German) needs to break precedent and introduce the first secret police force in the history of the United States?
2rafa
2hr ago
Problem was that they started actually believing all of the universal spread of liberal democracy stuff because the Cold War involved an ideological component that 19th century European colonialism didn’t (“spreading Christian civilization” was a post-hoc thing). That meant that which side was supported was often determined more ideologically than it had been under the British or French, who were regularly willing to screw over fellow Christians, liberal reformers, or other more ideologically aligned factions if their opponents had better will to power.
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
I'd appreciate some name drops, I'm now intrigued to gawk at the shitshow
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
X/Bluesky I feel like you are underselling how dedicated that push was though. The fact it isn't higher than 2%, after every progressive I know or follow swore they were leaving for bluesky, is blowing my mind.
It shouldn't, the leftist media mandated memeplex was always paper thin. They had the news and institutions but they didn't have the base. I saw it first hand in the various shitstorms like Gamergate and the kerfufles around Trump's first election. The viewcounts and updoots alone were lopsided by a factor of 100 and more. Online, where the kids and young adults were the numbers were staggering.
I never seen somoeone get under your skin quite so much.
I understand the frustration, but you don't need the explicit hostility to make your point. Even if your every word was coated in pure sugar, it would be hard not to reach the same conclusion as you did.
More options
Context Copy link