domain:rifters.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18m ago
A lack of revolution is understandable, it's not a trivial matter, and the regime is otherwise not that terrible. What I have very little patience for is our local lawcells acting, and expecting that others act, like law texts are meaningful, and that matters of law be debated within their framework.
functor
18m ago
So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.
As for October 7 Israel was engaging in military operations against Gaza, they had murdered hundreds of civilians and taken thousands of hostages.
There war a roughly 50% civilian death rate on the Israeli side. Is 1 civilian death for every military death acceptable or not? Why isn't it terror when Israel kills more than one civilian for each military casualty?
Tenaz
31m ago
Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.
They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.
I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.
OliveTapenade
54m ago
I've always been very ambivalent on the 'missing mood' argument.
On the one hand, if someone's explicitly-stated argument seems like it implies a particular emotion, and the person making the argument lacks that emotion, that does seem like a good sign that the argument is not motivating for them. The argument is excuse or justification, rather than the real motivation for the position.
On the other hand, taken too seriously, the missing mood argument also sounds a lot like, "You don't feel the way that I imagine you ought to feel - therefore you are not serious." But human psychology is extremely diverse and unpredictable, the way people express their deep emotions varies very widely as well, and you should not typical-mind. Caplan summarises it as, "You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold", but the phrase "the mood reasonable proponents would hold" is doing a lot of the work there. What is the mood reasonable proponents would hold? Are you sure? Is there only one such possible mood? How confident are you of what's going on inside another person's head?
I suppose I think missing moods can be a weak piece of evidence, which may suggest that we ought to look more deeply into a person's agenda, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately the actual examples Caplan gives in his piece are unconvincing and suggest a lack of moral imagination on Caplan's own part. Other people don't appear to feel what Caplan thinks they should feel, so he concludes they're insincere. But maybe Caplan is just wrong about they ought to feel. Maybe he's assuming that they accept facts and moral principles that Caplan himself accepts, and if he looked closer he would realise that they don't.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I don't think it matters what entry points an idea comes from.
Control over these relatively few entry points means you can control what ideas will be spread.
New ideas being able to originate from a few people and being spread to everyone is a good thing in my opinion
How does that address anything I said?
I would consider it mind control if there were restrictions to people encountering other ideas
Ok, this is exactly what we have now.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
You can't fight against a man who has the Mandate of Heaven: history bends to his whim, success manifests in his chamberpot. All that the hero king touches turns to gold before his manifest destiny.
Owlify
1hr ago
I don't think it matters what entry points an idea comes from. New ideas being able to originate from a few people and being spread to everyone is a good thing in my opinion. I would consider it mind control if there were restrictions to people encountering other ideas, especially ones that oppose the original, like how terrorists brainwash suicide bombers.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
No, don't let me put you off. Anyone who is halfway self-aware and tries to do as the locals seem to be doing will be welcomed with open arms. It's everyone else that is tedious. There are also many places to go besides the usual tourist areas--and even they are not so bad if you go during off hours.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year.
As someone who argued for "wait two weeks", I actually agree with this, but the core ingredient is that it has to be a deliberate choice, and that the speaker willingly puts his credibility on the line. I still owe @fmac, who couldn't quite believe I was being serious, a reply, but this is part of why I said what I said in that post. Exposing yourself to the possibility of having your credibility shot is the mechanism by which just going with your gut ends up yielding superior results to meticulously calculating all the Bayesian probabilities.
People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.
Sure, only making predictions on things you are confident making predictions on is a bit of a cheat, this is why I always rolled my eyes at Scott's annual "calibrating" predictions. That said, there does need to be some space for "I honestly haven't a clue". There are cases where I can see a clear signal in the vibes (see "tides turning on trans" or "Elon Musk is cooked"), but there are others where I try to listen to the vibes, and all I can hear is noise, and I think it would be unwise to stake a claim under those circumstances.
throwaway-7742
1hr ago
Assuming it is real and Iran will stick to the ceasefire... what would that mean for Ukraine/Russia? What would that mean for USA/China? I mean, it would seem like the "Axis of Evil" would be a little off balance, no? That wouldn't be great for China, right? Or would it not affect much?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
I hadn't considered that perspective. It isn't nervousness that I might be wrong that stops me from commenting on breaking news, it's the dearth of information. Anything I might say is going to be an uninformed opinion, and the same is true for everyone not in the administration. If people were able to argue without getting personal, maybe, but everybody gets so heated that even playful criticism wounds people - and to get like that over an event which doesn't have basic facts nailed down yet is madness.
But you are right about uncertainty and skin in the game promoting rational analysis over sophistry, and I loathe the idea of people thinking I'm scared of being wrong. So I would like to say I hope and believe that this is real and with that conditional I also hope and believe Netanyahu will retire within the next year.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
I'm amazed that hardly anyone has mentioned what I think has to be the top practical reason to own a truck: they're the only vehicle class capable of towing more than trivial amount. That's why the pickup truck is practically indispensable to the suburban class (at least, here in benighted flyover country).
If you have have ambitions of boating, camping, jet skiing, four wheeling, motorcycling, or snowmobiling, then having a vehicle amply capable of towing the trailers or self contained mobile structures used for these activities is a prerequisite. And if you need a truck for towing anyways, might as well get one that can serve as a commuter and haul family and friends too. This is why the beds keep shrinking and the engines keep embiggening: the utility of the bed for cargo is secondary in most cases to its utility as traction motor.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2hr ago
For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
Heavily against mass immigration, but many of my friends are new immigrants of the type that I don't want to see coming here en masse. This includes some of the women I've dated (some even without PR visa).
I've thought about this before and have compared it to Ayn Rand claiming welfare. I'm against the policy, but while it exists I will exploit it in my personal life.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
TIL, thanks.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
Lovecraft was pretty intense in his writing, but in person he was usually pretty kind to his friends and relations. Even those who belonged to racial groups that he otherwise didn’t care for, like his ex-wife Sonia Greene, who he remained on good terms with even after the divorce. And he was nice to cats.
clo
3hr ago
Shanghai, although it's been a decade since I've been and has become much less kind to foreigners/laowai/like a weird, high-tech slice of Europe since I've been there.
Chengdu for food, views. Pandas are lame, not worth visiting for pandas.
You can pick any of the major cities in Hubei province and find a well-reviewed tour guide with English language skills.
In general, the further you go from an urban city center, the kinder and more generous people are. The trains are exceptionally good for covering distance if you want to hit up several places.
clo
3hr ago
But I never read his stories.
You built an image out of the man outside of the thing he is widely known for and then are surprised to find out that your image of the man doesn't match?
surprised_pikachu_face.png
Anyone who has even tangentially heard of I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream or any of its many, many derivative works could tell exactly who he is. Harlan Ellison is a viciously angry, frequently bitter to the point of actively poisoning his readers, incredibly gifted writer.
I give him a lot of slack because anyone filled with such seething, frothing rage is the exact opposite of the people who write soft pap dripping with apathy these days. His fiction has a lot of this as a result: he raged against what he saw as the dying of the light. The works he's become most famous for are alarm bells, warnings, bitter screeds, portraits of existential evil and beasts naked shivering in the dark.
And yes, he was also writing lurid scifi for subsistence, so churning out large volumes of work and acting out as a shock jock to get attention and eyeballs on his work would feed back into it.
anti_dan
4hr ago
That is called a siege. It is a legitimate military tactic, albeit one that Israel has not employed in this current engagement.
Let’s try this in different language, then.
I recently called you an anti-semite. Judging from this post, while you object to being called a neo-Nazi (fair enough, Nazism is a specific ideology), you would broadly accept the labels ‘anti-semite’ and ‘white identitarian’ or ‘white nationalist’.
When I say that you’re an anti-semite, what I mean is that your posts seem to me to have, as an animating principle, a very strong and irrational prejudice against both Jewish people as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion. I think this is visible in both the subjects you choose to address and the normative valences you put on them. That is, I think that you consistently want to talk about Jews and steer every subject back to Jews, no matter how tangential they are to the topic, and I think that your judgement of anything involving Jews is prejudicially negative.
You constantly want to talk about Jews, and no matter what a Jew does, you interpret it in a maximally uncharitable light. The conclusion I draw from this is that you are anti-semitic. You just hate Jews.
Do I know what specific policy you recommend towards Jews, particularly in the 21st century United States? No, I don't. As Amadan and magic9mushroom have noted, you are strategically very cagey about that, and when you are directly asked, you respond evasively. You constantly suggest that something ought to be done about the Jews, but do not indicate what you think that something ought to be. It's a simple question, one which you surely must have considered, and you squirm to avoid answering it.
In this context I don't think it hugely matters. Maybe you want them all to be killed. It's a possibility. I will say that, at the least, I think that if they were all killed, you would not shed any tears. But maybe you just want them all deported or expelled, or want their property expropriated, or even just a social norm where non-Jews refuse to associate with Jews and treat them with scorn. Those are possibilities too. I don't care that much because even supposing that your 'secret' position is the mildest of these, it's still bad, and it's still motivated by a prejudice that is both irrational and worthy of moral condemnation.
And for the record, this would be the case regardless of the group in question. If you were obsessed with, I don't know, Tibetans, that would be equally as bad. If you had a similar level of both obsession with and hostility to Azeris, that would be just as bad. Jews have no special status. The same goes for Europeans, and if it's necessary, I condemn Ignatiev as well.
Let me then ask you straightforwardly: do you object to being characterised as anti-semitic? Do you disagree with the statement "SecureSignals hates Jews"? Or is that simply an accurate description?
to hold one's tongue and wait for further developments, or start talking immediately
I 100% believe waiting for further developments is better. Unless you are a direct actor, I believe there is negative value and insight following the news minute by minute. Without greater context, everything looks random and chaotic, offering no clearer understanding of the world. My own community transformed into a news feed and we've faced insight collapse, although some lovely contributors track less popular things, contextualizing them etc. illustrating the problem precisely.
Iran launched missiles 30 mins ago. The ceasefire is over or rather is between certain groups, since multiple entities share/negotiate sovereignty within Iran. Let's see what this actually means, next week.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Man... now I kind of want to not visit Japan, because I feel guilty about the prospect of making life suck for the residents there.
somethingsomething
4hr ago
You can throw things in the back without opening the door is the basic answer I think. Very casual, like you're getting stuff done on you're own time, your gear exposed to the elements etc. Work vans are more ubiquitous for actual company cars.
I'm pretty sure @Amadan would stop asking SS whether he wants to kill all the Jews if SS ever gave a straight "yes" or "no".
I'm also very sure that if SS gave a straight "yes", he would not be banned from theMotte for that. While a number of Mottizens who want their outgroups dead have been banned, it was never for that per se (usually it's been for refusing to stop insulting other Mottizens who are members of those outgroups and/or for insulting mods who mod others insulting the same outgroups; I presume any attempt to use theMotte to organise murders would also get a ban under "Recruiting For a Cause" although I'm not 100% sure whether there's been an explicit example). Given this, I don't think it's correct to describe us as demanding he denounce exterminationism.
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