domain:cspicenter.com
Felagund
3m ago
broad appeal beyond conservatives because some of the core pieces of the message were generic enough for large parts of the liberal coalition to get behind
And not exclusively liberals either. I remember at least one person who's conservative reacting to Floyd dying after being restrained at his neck. Though he wasn't in favor of the riots, of course.
5434a
9m ago
might is sufficient unto itself.
But quantity has a quality all its own. And with quantity you need coordination, and then we're back where we are only now it's wolves quoting contract law.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
13m ago
I choose 1.
It's like you have sex technically to pass on your genes, but you don't consciously think as much. Same with children. You might not pass on your genes, but it's a life better lived.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
32m ago
Because you can never know this I don't even let it cross my mind. Common sense suggests that if you are good to your children and take care of them when young, they will at the very least visit you when you're decrepit (In a way I proved myself wrong in my own life, for while my (now late) parents were good to me I made the choice to live 8,000 miles away from them. Which was in a way unavoidable but the guilt of this still nags at me.)
My own boys are young--teenagers. I can't project to the day they will have children of their own, though it is true of my own age-mates are grandparents now, having married considerably younger than I.
As for why we stopped at two--we were both raised in households of two children--my wife had a sister, I had a brother. It seemed a normal, replacement-level family size. I was getting older by the time she would have been ready for a third--and though she probably would have been game (and I would have liked to have had a daughter) various life difficulties got in the way and we just didn't go there, and I can't imagine us going there now. Plus although I am not sure the science of it I have read there is some correlation in father-age and autism of children. I am not sure how accurate this is. Having said that I can't imagine not loving my child regardless of how neurodivergent they may have been. My kids are the biggest joy of my life--and I say that with reverence, with no desire to tempt the fates.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
37m ago
Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?
I truly don't understand why one would consume like, 90% of popular YouTube content. To the point where people who extravagantly complain about the ads confuse me, because I'm just like ok stop using it?
But clearly there's a market for Mr Beast to the point where his chocolate bars wind up at the local grocery store? So there must be millions of people out there who like stuff so totally orthogonal to what I consume on YouTube that of course the stuff I consume is going to be kinda hidden.
I don’t think it’s dissonance, I think many legitimately believe both are true and that’s what @yofuckreddit is saying. That is to say they have some racial animus towards the majority but also believe the only solution is going to be discipline and self-government from within the community. They may want reparations but they don’t expect they’ll get them.
zeke5123a
49m ago
Ehh the best way is high five figure speaking fees. Do twenty speaking engagements a year. Do that for 15 years. Couple that with underpriced investments and you are pretty rich.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
58m ago
Question for mainly parents of motte but anyone can answer.
Would you have more or less children if you knew for sure that:
- Your children will be very good to you when they grow up but they won’t have offspring of their own.
- Your children will be awful to you when they grow you but they will have many offspring of their own.
I am wondering what motivates people when choosing how many children to have. If neither of these would affect your decision but you have another important factor in mind, please share as well
aichanuwu
1hr ago
You can't Buy Large Mansions through self-reflexive introspection. I am curious on the difference in updoots saying 'we need to clean our own house' vs 'whitey is to blame and we need them to compensate us in cash'. At what point a grifter hijacks a legit community activist is difficult to pin down, but my guess is 'the moment white people notice'.
Harlequin5942
1hr ago
My point is simply that it's mathematically coherent, though I'd add that when preferences are involved (such as sexual attractiveness) then human traits are often more Pareto distributed, e.g. wealth, income, popular success of people in creative fields, cities vs. towns, and movie profits. There are also human traits, such as incurring healthcare costs, which are not normally distributed.
Ratings of sexual attractiveness ARE "amorphous feelings", so the main challenge of justifying their existence would be to evince their existence. I suppose it's possible that women understate their ratings of men's appearances, e.g. to avoid seeming slutty.
Felagund
1hr ago
Right, it's probably more of a balance combining what they actually want to happen with seeking votes.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
the wolf is absolutely right
Might may not make right
I think there are multiple meanings of "right" in here, and that we have to be pretty careful with the concepts we're using for this topic.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
Few things fill me with such irrational rage as the websites that want to harvest your contact data instead of putting the info up on their website.
Especially if they make you answer a bunch of questions to "choose the right offer" and then ask you for your phone number.
At least they all use the same widget that comes from the same CRM and I've learned to recognize it on sight.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there)
If you follow a hyper-black social media page you'll see plenty of highly upvoted calls for ownership of problems and despair at intraracial violence.
But then depending on the day you'll also see glee at black-on-white violence or calls to "free X" regardless of who they victimized.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
The progressive explanation #1 is not police, it's guns.
It's masterful stroke of 2-birds and 1-stone positions that leftists wield. I think when you boil down my disagreements this is what's left in the pot.
- It's yet another dismissal of the moral precept of agency, already constantly under attack
- It's trivially false (gun control laws or ownership rates aren't even correlated with BoB murders)
- And of course as this whole series illuminates, attacking the right to own firearms is such a blatantly obvious predecessor to unimaginable horrors
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
FCfromSSC already covered much of what I would want to - that what you take as obvious is not actually obvious. It may seem clear to you that the universe is merely a physical system, but that's actually a potentially contentious judgement, based on priors that you learned and assimilated when you were a small child. Part of the value of philosophy, not to mention theology, is that it teaches you to identify and question some of those priors. Is the universe a physical system, construed such as to eliminate any possibility of the existence of God? (Also, define 'physical', 'system', and 'God'.) The answer to that question is not obvious. Not as much as you suggest. And considering that a very large number of undeniably intelligent people have taken different views to you on it, I think it would be appropriate to take a more humble approach here. Again, you might be right, but you're not obviously right, in a way that admits of no rational questioning.
Two other side points, I think.
Firstly, I think you rely too much on a kind of appeal to incredulity here. This person hypothetically raised in ignorance of major religions wouldn't believe in 'all kinds of crazy magic'? That doesn't seem obvious to me. People often idiosyncratically come to believe all sorts of strange things. If someone were raised in the absence of any existing religious dogma, that doesn't necessarily mean they would become a hard-headed atheist. They might embrace all sorts of superstitions. Lots of people are plenty superstitious as it is, even people who aren't particularly religious.
Of course, you might mean that this hypothetical person was raised with some kind of specific education against superstition of religion (maybe they were taught rationality, critical thinking, the scientific method, etc.), but what that basically rounds to is "if someone were taught my point-of-view as a child they would agree with me". Quite possibly so! But how is that different to someone who was taught a different point-of-view, such as a religious one? The argument-from-childhood-indoctrination proves too much.
Secondly, I'm not sure what the relevance of aliens here is? Evangelising aliens might be an interesting question, but what makes it in principle different to the first contact between representatives of a religious tradition and people unfamiliar with it? Matteo Ricci or Francis Xavier had to explain Christianity to people who had never heard of it before, and the Chinese or Japanese did not automatically laugh their heads off. The ideas were taken seriously, and some people converted. Aliens don't seem any different. I'm sure any actually-existing aliens would be quite unusual and religious dialogue with them would require us to do a lot to try to understand their nature, biology, culture, mode of thought, any existing religious or spiritual beliefs, and so on. I do not see any reasonable justification for assuming that aliens would all be Dawkins-like atheists. I have no idea what aliens would believe, if anything, and neither do you, or even whether or not aliens might exist. I do not think we can draw any conclusions from the hypothetical beliefs of hypothetical beings.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
3hr ago
The issue is the way we’ve set up the system. The absurd amounts of money required to win and the connections required to gain access to enough funding to win things like large city offices, statewide offices, and obviously Congress itself. The activist path you mentioned isn’t exactly “I helped in a soup kitchen.” Most that I’m aware of came to prominence in what I call the “professional protest” charities. Advocates for popular causes among the elite and they’re generally high up in those organizations. The professional paths that lead to candidacy are generally the kind that run through getting to know movers and shakers. Working a campaign, professional advocacy, being a lawyer or other elite professional, one does not simply run for office above dog catcher or local school board.
So of course this tends to weed out the altruist fairly quickly. An altruist wants to actually help people, so his charity work would be less about “professional protest organizations” than building or fixing things, feeding hungry people, educating kids, and so on. The kind of work that gets things done other than legislation. But that sort of charity is highly unlikely to get you into the social network that allows you to be a viable candidate for serious leadership roles. You also have to spend a lot of time being vetted by those elites for acceptance both ideologically and socially. You have to start early enough to have introductions to local [party of choice] leaders, and thus be fairly well off before you start. This is why most of our current political leaders are lawyers and mostly from elite schools.
All of this is basically like the old Roman system. Find Patrons, do high level high visibility things that powerful people like. Then once you’ve been accepted as one of them, you can help out on high visibility campaigns and eventually get to run for office yourself. None of which actually solve real world problems, and in fact are a pretty strong headwind against people who want to work on real world problems. If you want to fix infrastructure, get into construction and fix potholes. But it’s not glamorous enough to be the kind of thing that makes you a potential candidate for elected office.
Of course because of this, I think it would be highly unusual for someone to run and win because he wants to fix things in the way you and I would think about it. The system effectively weeds those people out quickly, especially if you’re talking about the federal government. They have to care about the opinions of their sponsors, the opinions of the people attending very expensive dinners, and the opinions of the tastemakers in the media. None of whom care about blue-collar Americans or potholes on main street.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
I'm just talking number of steps here.
And I guess what I'm saying is that this is a flawed way of looking at it. People don't get convinced in steps, and no one makes this sort of calculus when reacting to someone's views.
Assuming the same level of ideological commitment in both then one of those will be easier than the other.
This has not been true either in my direct experience, or from observing others.
2rafa
3hr ago
being really good at this.
I’m sorry I don’t follow, really good at what?
FYI no one converts to happy clappy guitar liberal Catholicism, white or otherwise
I’ve known a reasonable number of GenX Filipinos/Hispanics who have tbh, although of course I presume they were raised Catholic so it’s not really ‘conversion’.
ulyssessword
4hr ago
One interesting distinction I've heard is "being ambitious" vs. "having an ambition".
A person who is being ambitious might do well in school, put together a good college application, do well in college, put together a good job application, do well at their job, put together a good promotion application, etc. then end up as a multimillionaire CEO/partner/senator/other-0.01%er. They follow the predefined "ambitious" path, reach elite status, and kind of just do normal stuff.
A person who has an ambition starts with an audacious goal (develop a martian colony, change society on a constitutionally-relevant level, break an Olympic record, etc), organizes their life to achieve that goal, and blasts past obstacles that would stop any reasonable person.
Under that framing, a politician who is running on ambition alone ("being ambitious") would be a person who follows the straight line to power/money/status and ends up in government.
somedude
4hr ago
while surely some strong parallels exist, you can't seriously tell me with a straight face that literal slavery vs heavy Jim Crow vs segregation and redlining vs our modern setup are at all similar states of being. Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US.
And yet they remain a squalid and hopeless underclass that performs vastly worse than any other ethnic group by almost every conceivable metric. So much "progress" yet so little improvement. This is what I mean when I say it never gets better.
The low-hanging fruit has all been picked and it's accomplished virtually nothing. There isn't anything left on the tree in 2024 that's going to bring black SAT scores up to par, or bring their homicide rate down to less than 500% above average, or anything else you wish could be accomplished.
The idea that we're just waiting for the right high-minded idealist to come up with the right twee little plan and then suddenly we'll finally start seeing all the real progress that's been missing this whole time is a bad joke. I can't imagine taking it seriously.
On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context.
I'm not starting an entire HBD tangent deep in the guts of a thread one day from expiry, but you're flatly wrong here. For now I'll just leave you with this NYT article written by a Harvard professor of genetics.
"I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."
I think there's at least a significant number of people who want to, you know, just be kind. Is that so bad? Is that so evil? Is that so nefarious? Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream? Jesus fucking christ dude, get some perspective.
If you want to be an altruist, do it with your own fucking kids.
sliders1234
4hr ago
It seems like common sense to suppress the manifesto. Same reason you don’t publicize suicides. These things all have a huge amount of social contagion.
I agree there is nothing where releasing it interferes with the investigation, but that is a good reason to declare as the reason not to release. She was a crazy person who did crazy person things. It was unlikely she had co-conspirators.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
The more you know.
Option 2 for me. I want my kids to have kids, and grandkids, and so on till the stars go cold.
Then again, I expect the future to be so different from "business as usual" that I don't particularly care about this hypothetical, prosaically, I intend my spouse and I to be entire self sufficient regardless of our kids (my parents and grandparents managed that, not that I can ever claim anyone treated anyone awfully, it's nice to come from a good family). That means that other than the emotional damage from raising kids with best intentions who don't reciprocate (how the hell did it end up that way?), I can bear it.
And in the latter case? Fuck them, time for round 2, let's see if these lot turn out alright, especially when I fully expect things like gene editing and the like to be an option. And I can at least pray the grandchildren come out better, you don't have to get along with your kids to get along with grandkids after all.
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