domain:noahpinion.blog
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
6m ago
There’s so much there, and it’s so rich and dense with detail, but I find myself noting one thing in particular — every relationship dispute you describe there concentrates around sex.
Given that Lana has had fallings-out with both a man and a woman over sex, is it possible that she just has a very low sex drive, and believed this to be indicative of lesbianism even though it might actually mean she’s just not very sexual towards anyone? “Well that jerk only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.” “Well that hoe only wanted one thing, and it’s disgusting.”
Maybe she doesn’t really want to have sex with anyone, but attributed it to male perversion, or something, which the lesbian falling-out gives the lie to?
They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum.
The suicidewatch subreddit has always struck me as weird, in that it expects incredibly specific behaviors from posters that are in line with the way suicide hotline call center workers are trained, but from anonymous redditors. I argue that this makes it strictly worse for the people who go there feeling hopeless — the median post gets almost no responses because the rules are so strict no one wants to reply, and the responses someone does get are very vague, non-specific, non-judgmental and therefore useless. There’s no authenticity in it. You might as well talk to ChatGPT.
When you say she’s (or was?) a “religious Protestant” — what do you mean by that? Because it strikes me as very odd that she would hold the views she did and be a member of an evangelical church. I know of feminist evangelicals in that mould, but I always think of them as people who are simply in the process of leaving, as Lana eventually did. I find it shocking that she wouldn’t be able to find a home in the mainline Protestant world, where her views are extremely common! And I wonder if perhaps the extremity of her behaviors reflects the zeal of an evangelical-to-agnostic convert, a type with which I am very familiar. But perhaps she was mainline, which would make this moot and frankly make her behavior and the opposition of the church (the mainlines couldn’t enforce sliced bread remaining sliced even if they tried) even more concerning.
A sad story. But I wonder if the object lesson is not so much about intolerance of dissent as it is about the characteristic Christian calling of humility: humility before morality, before duty, before other people, and ultimately before God. If tolerance comes from anywhere, it comes from understanding in humility that you may be wrong; and that others, in their humility, may also be. And that neither of you may — I say “may” here advisedly — be wicked and perverse for your error, but simply human.
WhiningCoil
8m ago
A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
And much like HBD, an obvious truth gets dismissed because to believe it leads to only a single brutal conclusion. A group of people that you want to enjoy full human rights and political autonomy because that's what we've decided is the bedrock of being a good person, must be marginalized and contained at worst, eliminated at best. Or vice versa? Because it's impossible to share a Republic or a Democracy with a power faction that are literal raving lunatics and/or pants on head retarded.
I have so much whiplash from the 90's. The promises implicitly made to me by the culture (in the absence of parental guidance), the beliefs I took on by osmosis, and the horrifying hellscape of a nation I now live in 30 years later which seems the ultimate fruit of those promises.
Like, as a trivial example. There was a humor site called Pointless Waste of Time, that eventually got rolled into Cracked.com and had all it's best articles memory holed, even from archive.org. There was an article where this guy was trying to catch up with his highschool friends maybe 10 years later. I viewed this author as my peer, just a few years ahead of me. He liked video games, shock humor, and was a sneering atheist who never wanted kids. Over the course of catching up with a bunch of his friends, they'd all changed. He alone remained basically as he had been in highschool. I don't recall the precise score, but something like 2 of his friends overdosed and 5 had gotten married, had kids and found Jesus. He joked that he "lost" more friends to God than to drugs. I laughed. What fucking losers deciding to go to church with your family if you'd made it through your childhood not doing so.
So anyways, I got married, had kids, and now we go to church as a family. I can scarcely imagine how miserable I'd be had I bitterly clung to some version of myself I thought was "cool" in 1998. What sort of neuroses I'd develop to cope with the objectively lack of meaning, stability or community I'd be adrift in. The idea that "being a father cost me my identity" sounds literally insane to me, any more than not being a sneering 90's teenage atheist anymore "cost me my identity". Maybe 90's teenage me wouldn't understand the life 2020's middle age me lives. I don't care.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10m ago
Counterpoint: I wish a mothafucka would. Unfortunately right-wing nationalist violence often seems to manifest as mass shootings carried out by clearly mentally unstable people that target the entirely wrong targets. I.e. random people in a school or grocery store instead of assassinations targeting politicians, the leadership of NGOs that help illegal migrants illegally migrate, etc
First, this reads as a touch fedpost-y (I say as someone who's eaten some bans for the same). Secondly, I don't recall where I've read it, but I know I've encountered at least a couple of people on the right arguing that the Labour Party of Norway was noticeably weakened by their loss of up-and-coming young talent at Utøya, and thus, contra Yarvin, Breivik did make a difference for his side. (I'd argue that this is actually why Yarvin spent so long pooh-poohing ABB, because — particularly after listening to him on podcasts — so much of Yarvin's political program seems to be aimed first and foremost at preventing this sort of thing — for entirely understandable historical reasons.)
birb_cromble
12m ago
If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
I personally noticed this trend starting in 2013, and it reached its apex in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
On some level, I think there's a personality that craves power and control, but is also loathe to admit it through crass displays of naked force.
That internal conflict seems to result in escalating and increasingly nonsensical demands for "common decency" from everyone around them. It's a win for the person making the demands because they can bend weak people to their will, and also because they aren't the ones making the demands; they're just being the better person. They didn't do it, and the target deserved it.
The most interesting thing to me is that there are very similar behaviors in domestic abusers. Seeing DARVO fully generalized as a cultural norm is peculiar, to say the least.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17m ago
I know they shared custody initially, but the job she eventually landed was in another state, and I don't have any information on how their custody arrangement evolved from there.
iprayiam3
17m ago
I originally beleived that DOGE was about systems not goals, and was a way to create a pipeline of influence for Musk side of techbro elites and government power.
From the look at what he was cutting, I can believe it was something more like an attempt at a hype-snowball. If they found quick and obvious and indefensible waste/fraud, while also turning over norms of 'you can just do that?!' slashing, the hope was that there's be snowball momentum to tackle bigger things.
In other words, you come in and start trying to follow all the polite beurocratic processes around suggesting entitlement cuts from an advisory capacity, you will never even get off the ground. Alternatively, you come in and shake shit up by highly publicisizing obvious waste, in efforts of getting populist support and visibility.
I think he actually almost reached escape velocity here, or got as close to a successful system as possible.
Medvedev was keeping the seat warm because Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term, not because he was aging out and his son was too young to take over. Everyone knew that Putin, who was only 56, would be back.
I would call it the Goh Chok Tong strategy after the man who was de jure PM of Singapore from 1990-2004. His political opponents (notably including The Economist newspaper, which was having a pissing contest with the Singapore authorities over censorship at the time) said that the country was actually run by Lee Kuan Yew (nominally retired, but still attending cabinet) and his son Lee Hsien Loon (as deputy prime minister and heir apparent). The joke was that Singapore was run by a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Goh. Teaching a heretical position on whether the power of the Holy Goh proceeded from the Father alone or the Father filioque was punishable by career-ending cancellation and crippling lawfare.
The difference was that LKY was 67 when he retired the first time, and only 81 when he retired for real and Lee Jr replaced Goh as Prime Minister. Trump will already be 81 when his second term ends.
FtttG
26m ago
Great post. I know this isn't really the point of it, but do you know what happened with Lana's child(ren)? Do her and her ex-husband share custody?
RenOS
something is wrong
33m ago
I don't think that's true. I think it failed because as bad as the US establishment bureaucrats are, the EU is just way, way worse. Where the former has a overrepresentation of progressives, the latter has an absolute chokehold.
gattsuru
35m ago
... a more charitable option is that Musk doesn't believe that entitlement cuts are possible while (even if relatively small) discretionary wasteful spending is highly visible.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
38m ago
And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality
I just can't unsee in my mind Col. Nathan R. Jessup: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall." Of course, that's fiction, and as the ur-conservative in an Aaron Sorkin film, he of course went to prison. But I agree it does point to something real, and unfortunately for liberals their institutional hegemony put them in a position to purge enough of these types from positions of power and influence such that they are gone, probably permanently. And now they need to either surrender, or pick up a rifle and stand a post.
there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on
No, there isn't.
I'd be happy to know of any evidence that hasn't been discredited, if only because it'd be a first lead as to the cause of GD, but as far as I know there is no such thing. Brain scan studies cannot be used because there simply isn't enough datapoints available to produce anything but noise.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
52m ago
As the ancient saying goes: post shorts.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
55m ago
My equity is only up about 100% these days, down from those pandemic peaks, but I still love my 3% mortgage.
Mantergeistmann
59m ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Perhaps, but Moldbuggian solutions in particular seem, at least to me, more about making High Modernism more efficient — and cementing the power of technocratic Blue elites — through eliminating (the pretense of) democracy (and the Landian variety is anti-human).
The truth matters in a practical sense because bad models make bad predictions. People who anthropomorphize AI are taking an intellectual shortcut that leads them to absurd conclusions instead of wrestling with the reality of what we have created, and that's bad because it'll lead to bad policy, bad legislation, bad judicial precedent and bad morality.
Philosophy is important.
Language and mathematics has no agency, you're pressing the buttons, you're responsible. Passing the blame on the tool is unserious.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
To actually take it seriously as something that matters in the world, including the present day; and not just treat it as a creation myth — something of the long, long ago — to serve as an alternative narrative to Genesis.
In slightly less broad terms, to recognize things like Darwinism meaning you can have telos without a (conscious) telos-giver (what makes an adaptation an adaptation?); or to reject the creationist-adjacent idea that evolution is always so "crude" and "random" that even the smallest amount of Intelligent Design will always do better (that's how you get High Modernism). Back in the last century, quite a lot of effort into AI was about trying to work out how to Intelligently Design a mind top-down, while others worked on more evolutionary, bottom-up methods like neural networks. Well, who proved more fruitful there? Or recognizing that there isn't one single "environment" to which creatures — or social institutions — adapt, but countless local ecosystems. Just as there's no "perfect bird" — only birds perfectly adapted to particular conditions in particular places — there is no single "ideal government," only governments ideal for a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular culture, at a particular time in history. (I seem to vaguely recall de Maistre having said something relevant to this point.)
It's about recognizing that the idea that some armchair "experts", with just a couple months of mental work, will necessarily "outdo" the products of evolution — whether that's the folks confident about vast enhancements without trade-off via genetic engineering, tankies who think that this time their socialist central planners will beat free markets, or Seeing Like a State-style High Modernist social engineers.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
What does materialism or lack thereof have to do with being effectively agentic? If the AI is going to kill all of us the last thing I care about is whether it had free will or a light inside its mind.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rhetoric
This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
Sorry but not everyone is a materialist. Man acts, and so forth.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
That might be a subcategory of what I'm talking about, but not everyone goes as far into laissez-faire as they do (after all, we're social animals, and building cooperative communities is part of our extended phenotype).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Since other people are bragging, I also called this one.
The interesting point is what happened at DOGE. Musk didn't have to call out Trump over the budget and may pay a price for doing so, so we can reasonably conclude that he is genuinely worried about spending. But he didn't run DOGE like a man who is genuinely worried about spending - he ran DOGE like a caricature of someone who wants to look like they are cutting spending without actually doing so. (In particular, he never went after the waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare or military procurement.)
My candidate theories:
- Conspiracy. DOGE was never meant to be about cutting spending - it was always about purging wokists from the civil service and defunding the pro-establishment left NGOsphere.
- Cock-up. Musk was in effect high on his own supply as a result of spending too much time on MAGA Twitter and had actually convinced himself that the right-idiotarian theory of the budget was correct. He expected to find an order of magnitude more easy cuts (wokestupid, fraud, obvious waste and inefficiency etc.) than he did.
- Kayfabe. DOGE was meant to produce the impression of big cuts that could provide political cover for the big giveaways in the BBB without actually cutting the big popular programmes,
In the conspiracy and kayfabe theories, Musk is willing to play ball when Trump tells him that he isn't actually going to be cutting spending because his businesses benefit more than most from a friendly government. Ramaswamy doesn't because he is now an asset manager, not a CEO of an operating business.
If you ever wanna grab a Yuengling, just slide into my DMs I'm buying.
You'll have to go to good ol' @WhiningCoil for the great kettlebell exploits, though.
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