site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 244 results for

domain:mattlakeman.org

Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.

People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.

It's kids. It's always been kids.

Having kids is really hard: your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.

And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.

More to the point, I personally think it's more possible female jurors are more likely to agree to be interviewed than men than any big disparity in selection, though I'm not quite certain why that would be.

The thing that bugs me about Nixon is one of the things he often gets a ton of credit for, a rapprochement with China, we can see with retrospect totally screwed us over. Why didn't we actually resolve the Taiwan issue? Because Nixon wasn't actually negotiating from a position of strength. He wanted the electoral glory of a deal.

And now, like 50 years later, we are really, really regretting not figuring out the Taiwan issue back when we actually had leverage (a seat at the UN security council is a big deal)

It's actually pretty complicated and involved with the long fought jurisprudence over obscenity and prurient interest, because despite what the law says, the US has a bill of rights so you can't blanket ban speech categorically.

I think the question of AI art is wholly novel and while making porn of public figures is probably not illegal and up in the air, it very likely is illegal to use it to make CP, whether or not that bear the likeness of real minors.

Moreover, if Congress or the States passed a law to make deepfakes illegal, I think SCOTUS would very likely uphold it substantially, at least insofar as the work is obscene by the Miller test. And most deepfakes of a sexual nature are.

The distinction is that of goal, not necessarily of the inherent properties of the nuke. A tactical nuke has the paradigm of being a normal battlefield bomb, just bigger and more effective. A strategic nuke has the paradigm of wiping out an entire city, base, or resource. They both can serve both purposes but yield often does differ significantly when explicitly designed as one particular category of nuke.

I really want to like that podcast but holy hell does Stavy's laugh grate on my ears.

I actually do not think that the Middle East is a big danger because a lot of the countries there are actually at least somewhat rational and clear-eyed about fallout afterward (pardon the pun). Ukraine is unlikely because the kind of tactical nukes Russia has been talking about are most effective against massed battlefield formations, of which none really exist. Pakistan and India are unlikely because neither actually wants the other dead, they "merely" hate each other. There's no win condition.

Personally China and Taiwan seems the largest threat to me. The US does not have a no-first-strike policy and I could envision the US dropping a nuke on a Chinese fleet, coastal city, or military base if they first suffered significant battlefield losses. As an additional factor, plausible mass Chinese hacking of US communications might distort the information landscape and cause a premature and make a knee-jerk, low-information response by a trigger-happy president more likely. On the other end, but less likely, the Chinese are demonstrably irrational about bringing Taiwan into the flock (dropping the issue would very obviously be much more in their national interest) due to some ideological prison they've constructed for themselves. Taiwan I would argue is NOT a core Chinese interest, but they treat it like one, and so might be more likely to defend it as if it were their own sovereign territory, causing a massive miscalculation in escalation.

North Korea is an ongoing concern almost for the reverse of the above: NK is irrationally paranoid of being invaded or wiped out, and has low communication resiliency and transparency, making an overreaction to some unpredictable provocation more likely than you'd expect.

Basically, the ingredients for a nuke are simply: significant irrationality, massive disparity in understanding mutual goals, possibility of low availability of information in a crisis, possibility of incorrect information in a crisis, and chain of command issues.

My bet is never, but I place a 20% chance of a nuke within 30 years.

No, I meant when I get some (usually not as many as I get upvotes, but some). As I said, about half my posts do get at least some downvotes. Sorry for the confusion.

I dunno, while you could certainly make an argument that simply creating the images is fine, I think distributing them is, though probably incorrectly categorized as CSAM, still something that should carry punishment. Regular teen horniness fundamentally sexualizes a lot of stuff, but stuff that looks realistic and is shown to others is pretty much a stronger version of classic bullying and should be in the same category, more or less (that is, maybe a misdemeanor).

For context, here is a list (at least in my state, Utah, so might vary) of possible misdemeanors a minor student could commit, what level each is, and whether the school would refer it to court or not. "Accessing pornographic material on school property" is a Misdemeanor B, referable. Public Urination/Defecation is an Infraction, default non-referable. Disorderly conduct or other disruption stuff ranges from Infraction through Misdemeanor B. So not a whole lot of directly comparable things, but a misdemeanor seems about on the level.

Though bullying IS classified as a crime, it does not seem to have a specific associated criminal penalty (not sure how that all works). FYI, they in the law define: "Bullying" means a school employee or student intentionally committing a written, verbal, or physical act against a school employee or student that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know or reasonably foresee will have the effect of: causing physical or emotional harm to the school employee or student... [or] placing the school employee or student in reasonable fear of: harm to the school employee's or student's physical or emotional well-being... [or] creating a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive educational environment due to: the pervasiveness, persistence, or severity of the actions. (Irrelevant bits omitted). So clearly seems to fit.

Note that without the distribution component, bullying doesn't fit. Even 40 years ago if someone started passing around those magazine rips, they could probably be on the hook for harassment or something like that.

Ok, I guess don't trust me about the law, either. I half-remembered some story that cartoon pornography was legal in the US, contrasted against its illegality in Australia. But this is just a bad law. What makes CSAM bad is the abuse of children, not the bits on a computer.

There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.

Let’s check 18 U.S. Code § 2256(8)

(8) “child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— (A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; (B) such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (C) such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

I think that definition is way too expansive, but that’s the definition that our elected representatives came up with. As written, it is definitely a federal crime to create deepfakes of Stacy from English class getting railed and texting them to your bros. Some of these provisions are oddly specific. I don’t have time do dig into the legislative history right now, but I suspect they were added recently in order to cover this exact thing.

We accept marginal risk increases and marginal decreases in quantifiable outcomes for otherwise beneficial results or moral principles all the time. For children this is no different. To conclude otherwise about kids is emotional, not logical, reasoning.

These other beneficial results, which are not always easily quantifiable, are often still important. There are more values in play than simple material prosperity. For example, I'd trade a .1 decrease in GPA for my child any day of the week if it means they turn out to be a better-quality, more tolerant, open-minded person. Something I think your claim of "much better outcomes" fails to capture. While sending them to a school with significant minority presence isn't a perfect way of acquiring this mindset, there are some perspectives only lived experience can provide, no matter how good a parent or lecturer you are. That's partly why I illustrated the point about wealth and expected vacations -- she was living in a bubble that no amount of verbal expression could pop.

I also believe that some vague sense of diversity exposure (beyond simple racial categories too, as mentioned) is long-term beneficial. Researchers have found, for example, that increased corporate diversity probably leads to higher profits (this is debated) but much more certainly leads to better decision-making, job satisfaction, and higher quality work -- see here as an example from Harvard Business Review that talks about how diversity is no panacea but in the proper context definitely does help corporations.

Plus, though I don't buy into it to the extent some people do (the whole performative white guilt thing is bullshit), there IS certainly a moral evil in saying "oh my particular in-group is happy and prosperous" and thus let's not do anything to help other, suffering groups. Especially when, you know, broadly speaking your in-group was directly responsible for those poor outcomes of other groups. That's literally dystopian. When it comes to education, to some extent there's a zero-sum pot of resources available. To say "oh well it's working out for my group personally so it's fine" is not a holistic nor accurate way of viewing the situation. You want to talk evil? That's pretty close!

There are plenty of mechanisms for which Black kids can have better outcomes other than some vague notion of proximity or magic, you are correct. I haven't listed them explicitly, but I could if you doubt they exist. Put briefly, part of the problem with US primary and secondary education has to do with the funding and geographical schemes used.

Overall, though, it's still so bizarre to me that you outright accuse me of racism. You blocked out a quote of mine and I fail to see anything racist there.

New York Times’ The Daily podcast ran an episode Real Teenagers, Fake Nudes: The Rise of Deepfakes in American Schools. The premise is contained in the title — AI image generation apps can remove the clothing from photos, and teenage boys are using these en masse to make faked nude images of their classmates.

The overt message that the NYT hits repeatedly in the piece is that the girls in question are victims and that the boys have committed a crime. It’s stated repeated, implicitly and explicitly, without any justification. At one point a police officer opines that the images are CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (By the way, never trust a police officer to tell you the law; it’s not their area of expertise.)

No, no, just all of it no. There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.

This is the moral equivalent of weirdos 40 years ago who would cut the heads off photos and paste them on pornographic images. Creepy? Yes! Deserving of social shunning? You betcha! But not a crime. Everyone in these girls’ lives who is catastrophizing this is doing them psychological harm.

Sailer isn't exclusively pro-Jewish: https://www.unz.com/isteve/jewish-advantage/

https://isteve.blogspot.com/search?q=jew

He has a nuanced position. Yes, Jews did do well in the sciences. Yes, Jews showed up and enthusiastically implement a bunch of extremely dangerous ideas. He criticizes a bunch of them for behaving obnoxiously, Sacha baron-cohen for instance. Anyone who links that infamous LA Times article where Joel Stein rejoices in Jewish control of Hollywood and concludes with this paragraph isn't exactly a conniving crypto:

It's funny how history gets written. Back in Golden Age Hollywood, eight major studios were nepotistically run by Jewish moguls who hired their relatives and in-laws as executives, and the other studio was owned by Walt Disney, who nepotistically hired his relatives as executives. For decades now, a controversy has raged over whether Walt Disney was anti-Semitic. No comparable controversy exists over whether the other eight studios were anti-Gentilic. In fact, the term "anti-Gentilic" doesn't even exist. (As I recall, George Orwell had some insights into the political usefulness of the nonexistence of words.)

And his thesis has its virtues. Wokeness didn't start in Poland or Belarus where the Jews were mostly present. Only when they got to Britain and the US did things start happening. Clearly there were structural weaknesses in Western European and especially Anglo society that let such a domineering leviathan erode and decay. I can't imagine that people like Noel Ignatiev would ever prosper in another society. Imagine going to China and making a living out of trying to abolish the Chinese race, founding journals and getting university professorships that undermined their national identity. He'd have an absolutely miserable time if they even let him live. Even Israel would suppress this guy, they hated his criticism of Zionism. Only nigh-limitless Anglo tolerance allows this kind of behaviour.

On the other hand, Protestantism was also a big supporter of white supremacy. You had the Nazi Party doing very well electorally in all Protestant Germany but flickering out like a candle in Catholic Germany. All the Protestant eugenicists you listed too.

It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)

So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?

The biography of Marx and Engels would be useless, but if you aspire to large-scale denazification or decommunization then the intellectual and mythological inspirations for the collective consciousness are at the forefront of relevancy. This is an all hands on deck audit and I wouldn't spare anything from scrutiny, not Christianity or the American mythos itself. I give a critical eye even towards those things I have held dear in my life. But I'm certainly not going to lie to myself about what is an obvious ethnopolitical undercurrent to Jewish political and cultural influence in the 20th century either.

Understanding the malady that haunts us absolutely requires us to understand these forces, including the means and motives. We need to be able to detect them, decode them, countersignal them. This is not historical trivia, these same forces I've described are at the absolute forefront of censorship, lawfare, lobbying, and culture-creation across the entire world. It's a present-day conflict that confronts you whenever you turn on the TV. It's not biographical trivia.

It should be noted that the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway was a back up plan. The group’s original plan was to detonate a nuclear device in Tokyo. They had put together a working group of ex-Soviet scientists to build one. They didn’t get that far, but they got a hell of a lot further along than any Islamic terrorist group ever has.

Do you think that Jews ought to compromise themselves at all in regards to Jewish identity politics that can be anti christian and anti european? Or is it only on the other side to be tolerant?

For example, they should oppose laws that enforce a story of Jews as oppressed and European Christians as oppressors, and in fact support institutions promoting a narrative that does include some criticism of Jews for their contributions to far left extremism, and antiwhite movement.

It isn't really a complicated issue. There are Jews who are an asset to the right like Stephen Miller who tend to have an identity that encompasess more than the Jewish one. And Jews who do have resentment towards right wingers and Europeans and strong Jewish identity, do exist aplenty, and are not caused by insufficient appeasement, since there is ever abudance of the appeasing right.

Only a minority of Jews are such in their ideology and behavior that it would be wise to accept them. Neocons for example are a subversive force on the right. However, this can theoretically change.

Ironically, Jews would have assimiliated more, if organizations like ADL, WJC, etc, etc were banned. And in fact, Jewish support of multiculturalism and anti-european identity politics and intersectionality is in part related to the more radical Jews wanting the Jews not to assimiliate to whiteness.

Anyway, both Jews as a pattern and non Jewish pro Jewish types, are not even handed people only opposing antisemitism, but are highly biased to an extend that could be described as Jewish supremacist. And paint as antisemitism things through that lense. It would be both moral in general from a more unviersalist point of view, but also good in regards to the right and European-Jewish relations, and more friendship, for Jews and those promoting pro jewish narratives, to water down their wine. To compromise. To accept their own sins, instead of doing the narcisist manifesto.

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

Avoiding the narcisist manifesto, does not make them self hating.

When Amy Wax claimed that her father was unduly too critical towards Christians, that wasn't self hateful.

And on much of the right they will find people who are going to accomodate them and aren't going to be promoting some demand of maximalist self hating dogma. The Jews who enjoy a positive reputation among the kind of right that doesn't like Shaprio aren't just Unz, but plenty of non self hating Jews but who have compromised on level of seperate jewish identity politics and do see the interests of europeans as legitimate and identify with a broader category rather than seeing them as a hostile other.

Of course, the issue is that laws currently promoted are Jewish supremacist in nature. And those who support that.

Another issue, is that if you got some hateful Jewish supremacists pushing their agenda, that is going to inflame the passions and anger on the other side. Just like Jews who have compromised and are more moderate and friendly towarsd the right incentivize a more positive reactions.

One's ideology in regards to nativism, immigration, AA and such issues is of course fundamental. And whether a Jew in a european country identifies as being part of that group and sees them as his people.

Jews claiming to be right wing who still retain sufficiently strong liberal views on such issues and are motivated by seperate ethnic identity are going to be treated with more suspicion. And even if their liberal views are somehow unrelated to their Jewish identity, they are a problem. Like I said, neocons should be reasonably excluded because of having sufficiently different and hostile ideology, and have a history of cancelling actual right wingers and conservatives for being insuficiently liberal on racial, and other issues. And more so especially for being insufficiently subservient to Jews and making any criticisms.

Sailer also wrote a short post after the issue discussed critical of the Israel lobby that the uncomrpomising Jewish identitarians wouldn't have promoted. So I wouldn't consider him the same as those types. More of a positive force than a negative. https://www.unz.com/isteve/not-getting-the-joke-2/

Which doesn't make this good article https://keithwoods.pub/p/protestantism-jews-and-wokeness arguing against his thesis a bad thing. Even those who are sufficiently a positive force to not gatekeep them out can promote bad ideas, which would be good to debate and counter.

Anyway, excessive compromise in pro female, pro jewish, pro black, etc direction is a key part of our current situation. This isn't to say purity spiralling in the opposite direction is correct, but appeasement is the wrong move and having those who are excessive pro jewish, pro female, etc, etc compromise is correct in general, but especially for the right. The right will become indistinquishable with the left in fundamental issues, if it listens to women and Jews and LGBT Republicans and pro migration types and pro black types arguing for more appeasement. More compromise. Laws giving their favorite groups preferential treatment. And there is a connection with appeasement to one, leading to appeasement to all and the same intersectional story. While painting anything but that as antisemitic, misogynistic, anti black, racist, etc, etc.

The right has compromised too much in these directions, is losing its own identity as a right and moving too far to the left in the process and needs to fix this overreach and not increase it.

Jews wanting to be a part of the right have an even bigger moral obligation than Jews in general to water down their wine, and compromise from the more extreme positions typical in Jewish community that are part of a progressive Jewish nationalist narrative of Jews as always oppressed, always in the right against especially a European Christian historical, present, and possibly future oppressor. Some level of admitting fault is not only accurate but necessary because if Jews are progressive as a pattern, and as Prager says "the consicence of humanity" why oppose the ADL, and the activities of those Jews who do see with hostility european christian civilization? Since Jews didn't do nothing wrong, then they were correct to be leftists under this perspective and only reacting to "antisemitism" under this false narrative. So why oppose the current leftist trajectory? That compromise I mentioned towards a more moderate position and having a stronger broader identity that sees European rightists as your people would also make it justifiable for European rightists to accept such Jews.

"To me, it seems obvious that he bought far out of the money GME calls, then posted on Twitter to pump the stock, then closed those positions for others. The alternative: that he 7x'd his money in 3 years seems unlikely. Naturally, he hasn't posted his trade logs so we can only speculate.

In my opinion, DFV should have stayed out of the spotlight. As a "regular person", not an insider, I think there's a good chance he ends up in jail."

Agreed. The original boom was a nice story- average* Joe (not really that average, he was a CFA and a registered securities broker, but he wasn't rich) finds a massively undervalued stock, puts all his money into it, tells the world, and a bunch of average people make money. Great story.

This though- this just seems like market manipulation. There's no fundamental analysis going on, it's just pure speculation and market manipulation. People tuned into his live stream hoping to get some transparency, but he didn't give that at all, just some crazy rambling and dumb memes. At this point he's doing market manipulation aimed at teenagers and crazy desparate people.

I've been making a lot of money selling far out of the money calls against it whenever the price bubbles. I'll take the easy money but I feel bad for the idiots losing their life savings in this.

if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat)

But wouldn't the South Koreans come to some kind of negotiated deal with China before it got to that point? If they see that the Chinese blockade won't be broken quickly enough to avoid hunger and malnutrition, wouldn't they come to terms? Maybe there'd be some phoney federal agreement with North Korea that looks good on paper but does nothing IRL, maybe they have to share technology with China and give up some air or naval bases.

That seems like a much better deal than a nuclear war or starvation.

Well thats because most people are not hard consequentialists. So doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a bad thing for bad reasons are seen as different.

If instead of trying to murder Jews, the Nazis were trying to save them from a disease and ended up killing them by mistake, then most people would see those Nazis as morally better than our actual historical Nazis. Even if they were warned it was a risk.

So most people would not see it as being just as bad. They just fundamentally disagree with you there. Someone honestly trying to alleviate suffering is simply better than someone trying to cause suffering, even if in the end they both end up causing it. Motivations are an important part of judging moral behaviour.

And if you think about that makes sense. If i just want to honestly help Jews then there is some set of information that can persuade me I am not helping. If i mean to kill the Jews then that avenue is closed. You would have to persuade me first not to want to harm them, and then persuade me to want to help them and then try and come up with a solution that works. You are many further steps away from a positive outcome for Jewish people (assuming for the moment that is your aim).

Even if we accept that these ideas were the product of 20th-century Jewish immigrants channeling their conscious or unconscious bias against white gentiles, I don't think it necessarily follows that knowing their motivations would be that much help in your fight against their ideology, any more than knowing the biographies of Marx and Engels would be particularly useful if one were engaged in a geopolitical rivalry with a communist state (rather than understanding Marxism as interpreted by living party members).

Here I'll borrow a metaphor from Scott to make this more interesting:

I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it included things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

I'd wager that most of us here believe something along these lines, although we differ in the details of what exactly the alien is, the merits of being eaten by said alien, in which century it was summoned, who did the summoning, etc. In any case, you seem intent on crafting weapons to fight the long-dead summoner and his kin, rather than engaging the alien directly, and it seems like an ineffective strategy to me.

“Secret” is doing a lot in the OP. In any case, Sailer and BAP have very different views on most of these issues, Sailer is largely a form of civic nationalist, BAP has an incoherent kind of gay misogynist LARP more focused on contempt for women than other groups. Neither attempted to ‘hide’ their Jewishness, Costin wore an IDF t-shirt in college and posted his DNA test results and is open about it, Sailer is adopted but has speculated his birth father (iirc) could have been Jewish on several occasions over the last 20-30 years. In either case I don’t think that Jews shouldn’t participate on the right or in these spaces because some people might deploy related evopsych arguments in favor of antisemitism. As MacDonald and others show, they would do this anyway.

The logic of your argument is exactly what led to a lot of Jewish academics being unwilling to believe the obvious evidence for a lot of this stuff in the mid-20th century, not because they were nefarious manipulators trying to destroy European civilization but often because they didn’t want to be ‘on the side of’ people who justified antisemitism which they were personally afraid of. That doesn’t stop scientific enquiry, though, and the truth is the first duty of the principled researcher, wherever it leads.

It reminds me of ‘tradwife regret’ discourse (see Lauren Southern recently) and associated schadenfreude. But that doesn’t mean modern western gender relations are good, let alone optimal. It certainly doesn’t “disprove” women being socially conservative because hurr durr leopards ate her face lol, girlboss discourse is back because one person tried the hashtag tradlife and it wasn’t all that fun. There’s the famous cautionary tale of Ettore Ovazza, loyal Jewish Italian fascist, shot by the Germans in 1943. Did leopards eat his face? Perhaps, but no moreso than anyone destroyed by a twisted version of a belief system they once supported, and that is a very large number of people. I’m not going to become a leftist just because there are antisemites and misogynists on the right.

tell me you've never held a blue collar job without coming out and saying it.

I have a blue collar job and agree with him. If we could organize politically our wages wouldn't be stagnating as our bosses replace everyone they can with illegals.

If we weren't hopelessly inept at organizing, how did construction workers end up being forced to take "male privilege" training sessions? If we were capable those responsible would already be dangling from cranes and meat hooks by now.

A society that requires constant war to flourish

But does fascism actually require war to flourish? Spain and Portugal, Pinochet's Chile, etc. seem like strong counterexamples for this.