domain:theintrinsicperspective.com
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
8m ago
No, where did glassing Taiwan come from?
China doesn't start world war 3 because of all the various American missiles that are likely to blow up Chinese things before they could complete their strategic objectives. There's also lots of American missiles that prevent Chinese missiles from blowing up American things.
If America uses massive quantities of its offensive and defensive missiles, they can't use them against China.
If America bombed Iran with only JDAMs/bunker busters and never fired any cruise missiles or defensive interceptors then sure, that's "free" (we'll ignore airframe wear).
Stellula
11m ago
People are contrarian signaling over “why should he know the population”
Because it shows that he has a general idea of the makeup of the country. Compare a country like Iraq (45M) or Afghanistan (41M) with Iran (90M).
It’s twice their size.
Iran is also a space-faring nation. They started launching satellites in 2009, they have advanced hypersonic missiles.
It’s just a very, very different country than our previous Middle East adventures, and Tucker quizzing him on this was to elucidate the fact that Ted’s primary driving motivation to get the US involved is (as Ted himself admitted in another section of the interview) a doomsday prophecy based on a hilariously absurd (and Israel-serving) misreading of the Bible.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
12m ago
Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.
Avoid consensus-building phrases like "everyone knows," as well as presuming you know the other person's motives. You are probably correct that @hydroacetylene does not want anyone getting abortion pills, but you need to actually engage with him ("Are you saying...?" or "I think your actual agenda is...") rather than simply asserting it in this antagonistic fashion. This is a pattern you're unfortunately engaging in a lot. I hate to see it, because here you are a leftie on a mostly anti-left forum (you aren't wrong about that, though you are wrong about "far right"), and you are of course being heavily downvoted and reported for having unpopular opinions. The usual failure mode from here is you get more and more frustrated and antagonized by everyone telling you off, and eventually the warnings accumulate and you get banned. I realize this is a hard pattern to break out of, and maybe it's not entirely fair, but I will tell you that rightie posters that start taking the same attitude you do to all comers who argue with them also wind up getting banned because they just can't stay calm and gracious enough while arguing with people whose opinions they clearly do not respect.
roystgnr
13m ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?
If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.
Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.
And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.
Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)
The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.
If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a sex-positive Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17m ago
see the comment here. This may be little more than a disagreement over semantics.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18m ago
Alright looks like I made a breakthrough in unretarding the sql queries. Perhaps it's a bad sign that I had to work so much against the framework I'm working with, but I can't think of a better way. Have to chip away at a few more things, and then on to unretarding the content import / sync.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
Tree
19m ago
Nonsense. My family's full of them, and they usually don't deny it.
I don't have to take the words of christian apologists at face value. Their mythology, rules and actions betray an extreme hostility to sex. You yourself, in the middle of arguing christians aren't anti-sex, can't help but insult sex as "soulless pleasure seeking", whatever that means. Just accept that you're anti-sex and stick to the ascetic line.
remzem
21m ago
It was pretty embarrassing that most of the arguments against Iran having a nuke revolve around them being not just crazy like the North Koreans, but crazy religious zealots that don't fear death so MAD wouldn't apply. Meanwhile our politicians are encouraging Trump to listen to God and ignore anything else and claiming their support for Israel is based on religion saying it will benefit us not on any real world analysis.
Because we had 8 years of Obama and then went straight to Trump I think a lot of people forgot why the neolib + neocon version of the Republican party died off, with some RINOs wanting to return to "saner old days". Seeing it suddenly revived this last week really just shows what a broken and inferior ideology it was.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22m ago
Some soldiers are going to have more sympathy for the people they're being told to bomb and shell than they would for Durka Durkas. This will cause reliability issues, of the sort where they don't want to fight, may sympathize with the enemy, and may even defect. Some soldiers are going to have less sympathy, because Y'all Qaeda/Soros-Funded Pedo Antifa killed their kids. This will also cause reliability issues, of the sort where they commit uncontrolled atrocities, which in turn remove the ability to control the intensity of the war. Both sorts of reliability issues make it very hard to return to a state of peace.
I do not think it really matters if a Tyrant tries to go full first-strike Vernichtungskrieg or if they play it like Platonic Lincoln and scrupulously attempt to maintain rule of law. People look at those two scenarios, and they imagine that there's a clear difference in the scale and character of the initial inputs, so obviously there should be a difference in the outputs, but the mistake they're making is in the assumption that the inputs are driving the process. If you have a forest dried out by six months of drought, it makes approximately zero difference if you start a fire with a cigarette butt or a flamethrower; two hours later, you will not be able to tell the difference between the resulting fires, because the exponential growth of energy-release will utterly eclipse any variance in the initiating inputs.
However it starts, whichever winner comes out the other side might possibly still call itself "the United States of America", maybe, but the likely scenario is a dirt-poor, fanatically-paranoid military dictatorship populated by heavily-armed, criminally-inclined murderers with severe PTSD, huddled in the dark, dreaming of electricity and clean water. And sure, "there are levels of survival we are willing to accept", but people should at least be clear-sighted about what they're walking into. It will not be clean. It will not be quick. It will in fact be the worst thing that ever happened to you and everyone you know and love, by far, and it will neither reverse itself nor end for the forseeable future.
I will note that you are, in fact, still talking about a lot more than small arms here; mortars are far, far more effective than small arms, and are not something the Blue Tribe is currently trying to take away from private citizens
I'm defining small arms as weapons you can build in your home and pack on your back. Mortars are absurdly easy to manufacture out of ubiquitous materials, and I think even the people nodding along with that sentence are still overestimating what "easy to manufacture" and "ubiquitous materials" requires; you do not even need metal. And again, our armed forces were united against the Taliban to a degree that is unlikely in a civil war here. It still wasn't enough.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23m ago
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
FConSCC/Hlynka flow emissions since 2022
27m ago
I get a feeling you are overinterpreting a metaphor.
Yes, I used the word "path". I wasn't really imagining any step-by-step path, I was thinking , dunno, folk thermodynamics or folk gravity surfaces. A path for society to lurch from current equilibrium/stable attractor state to some other equilibrium, whatever it is, by reducing the barrier between the two, reducing the required amount of "pushing" by propaganda alone. The end state does not need to be well mapped and planned, because as you say, such social engineering is no really possible, that is just the nature of metaphor. Naturally, itis more credible to have a vision to lurch towards.
I do think that when individual in modern West finds him/herself in some of the common romantic/sexual paths, there is no single reason but multiple reasons that makes those choices feel the path of least resistance. Same reasons make any other choices (such as trad "date seriously, propose and get married before having sex") appear something so weird and impractical that is not even on their map. Yet in Victorian England or even more traditional cultures, random individual faces multitude of reasons have heavily encouraged marriage. After all, several parts of the society and technology changed along the way to current morality from Victorian morality, neutralizing those reasons (electrification, post-industrialization, usefulness of college education in post-industrial economy, the pill, world wars, several waves of feminism, mass media). Victorian family culture was sill so powerful have we sill have some remnants like Christmas and playing Queen Victoria's favorite Wagner piece for the wedding march.
I do admit this is no grand social theory, it is a handwavy justification why I thought to use word "equilibrium", which I chose as I had brief mental image and I wrote two-paragraph off-the-cuff comment. I don't know how to evaluate whether I emit "Hlynka flow" and don't really care to. Like, I am not really sure what exactly is the point. After reading your other comment in nearby thread, quoted below for convenience , I think we are nearly agreeing? The push against smoking included much more than anti-smoking education in schools: bans in many public and private spaces that are enforced, taxes, fees, inconvenience for selling and marketing tobacco, varied media campaigns not limited to the equivalent of odd sex ed class. School health education about harms of smoking hopefully contributes to anti-smoking, but wasn't decisive on its own.
So reiteration of my point: if the intention is a society of no premarital sex, then abstinence-only sex ed in schools will be much easier time having an effect if there are other policies in place that make the abstinence-until-marriage lifestyle sound more enticing, realistic and attainable than other lifestyles. "Wait until marriage" certainly is not enticing to 15 year old if people get married at 30 (if at all) and it is easy skip both waiting and marriage. But if they introduce bunch of other reasons to make early marriage more favorable, then it becomes easier -- such as, make college more family friendly (everyone can come up with other favorite policies to push, I am not a think tank).
Hadad
36m ago
A shame if the bunkers themselves are truly impenetrable. In that case, we'd have to destroy everything except the bunkers.
remzem
38m ago
The missiles aren't sitting on the mountains, they are under the mountains. For some sites like fordow it's unlikely even the largest conventional bunker buster in the US's entire arsenal would be able to penetrate. We don't have the power to simply destroy entire mountain ranges. Not even counting nukes.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
39m ago
Leftist political argumentation baffles me, and looking at all the different ways to analyze things in a conservative way (textualist, originalist, etc), I fail to find any similar differentiation on the left side of the law. This isn't the first time I've felt this way about left wing judges. They seem to be far more activist.
Breyer wrote a book defending his "pragmatism"--you could read it and see what you think. I haven't read it.
I agree with your general point. The liberals on the court have a tendency towards viewing a case through the lens of "do I agree with the policy at issue," and then proceeding from there. The conservatives are more likely to come out all over the place depending on where their textualism or originalism takes them. When I heard him speak in the early 2000s, Scalia was quite critical of the "hippies" in Texas v. Johnson but thought the first amendment required that result. Thomas' dissent in Lawrence v. Texas noted he thought the law at issue was "uncommonly silly" and he'd vote to repeal it if he were in the Texas legislature, but that it was constitutional since there is no general right to privacy. That sort of "I don't like this law/conduct, but I think the constitution allows/protects it" conclusion seems to only come from one side of the Court.
Hadad
40m ago
Realistically, there is no international law that America disagrees with, and that especially includes a rule of "you must let yourself be overrun by undesirables". I would personally sign up for Trump's Golden Gestapo to mow down orcs by the boatload.
remzem
41m ago
Realistically they are bound by international laws about refugees that they are unlikely to tear up. Also considering both the UK and France have a nuclear triad you don't want to destroy one country just to end up with 2 new nuclear armed foes in a few decades.
Hadad
42m ago
In your worldview, am I to understand that the reason China doesn't start World War 3 is because it fears America will bomb Taiwan into oblivion, and thus, if at any point we seem like we can't glass the entire place, they will invade?
Hadad
44m ago
I'm more confident in this administration's ability to enforce our territorial sovereignty than previous ones. We don't actually need to let them in, no matter how many there are.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
45m ago
Hypothesized chain of causality:
America expends large numbers of munitions on Iran > this lowers China's risk of making a play for Taiwan over the next ~5 (10?) years > China makes a move for Taiwan > both juggernauts slug it out > during the conflict, global trade collapses > depending on who wins the conflict (or if it even ends, it might just turn into a stalemate with occasional explosions), global trade potentially never recovers, and the world bifurcates a lot > we all are worse off as a result
remzem
46m ago
Given how much damage the middle eastern refugee waves did to the US and Europe it would be nice if our Senator's knew that Iran's population is larger than Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria's populations (at the point of their regime change attempts) combined.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
47m ago
Same, but I'd prefer neither much more. I think the two of them have much more in common with each other than they do with our current system.
Hadad
49m ago
No. It is true. There is no "may". These things I mention being complicated and multifaceted doesn't mean there is a chance or a scenario in which population is not critical in their determination.
It remains "may", because as said, scaling a population up doesn't necessarily improve its military or state capacities.
America was superior to Iraq (2003), and Syria, and Afghanistan, and Libya. Did our intervention in these countries go well for America? No, they did not.
The wrong goals were pursued in all of these cases.
It does not matter if America is superior to Iran. It matters if America can achieve what Ted Cruz wants to do, in the way Ted wants to do it, at an acceptable cost. If Ted Cruz does not know basic facts about the capacity of Iran to impose costs, how will Ted be able to know what costs Iran can impose?
I asked this to another, I ask it to you: at what point do you think the US military asks Ted Cruz to handle logistics? This is not a Senator's role. The country's population numbers are not an important concern for him. They are trivia.
remzem
51m ago
and though Iraq now has a population of ~45m when we invaded in 2003 their population was only 27m, Afghanistan's was 20. So if it's relative to the points of our regime change attempts in those countries Iran has more like 4x the population. The potential refugee wave would be larger than Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Every word of this is cope.
Your tax rate is as imposed to you as it was then, and as with every human society it's within a range, but the median and average was much lower in medieval societies. People always try to point to the Ancien Régime numbers as if a post-famine state bankrupted by war was representative of centuries of wide variation in quality of life. It's not.
Most peasants didn't own land nominally, but you don't either and basically nobody does in the modern world. You pay rent on an exclusive lease just like they did, and yours is more expensive than theirs.
As for the size of dwellings, I encourage you to actually go and visit peasant cottages in England or France, divide by the size of a common family at the time and then look for yourself how attainable a home like that is. I've done this myself and that's what formed my opinion.
The idea that the social relationships that you get over your whole life in a village are lesser than those you get with strangers in a city or online because of sheer quantity is something I've only ever heard from people who are stuck in either. I don't really feel the need to refute that because it's just a transparent indictment of itself.
Peasants worked for themselves most of the time, this is pretty much indisputable given that without industry, you had to make everything yourself. But I'm puzzled as to where you may have even gotten the idea that they didn't, given how uninterested most nobility was in agricultural matters in the first place. Perhaps yet more 1800s treatments?
Of course schooling and general vocational choice weren't available, but this is part of my criticism: those were specifically introduced to fill the needs of modern society in both control of the population and production of workers for ever more abstract pursuits. None of this has anything to do with freedom, and as much as I value knowledge and its dispensation as a virtue, we are quite literally arguing for yet more social control in the name of the maintenance of society here. Not for individual freedom, not in the slightest.
So too was conscription invented to serve the needs of the modern state. You're not exactly going to convince me, a Frenchman, that the practice was widespread or accepted in Europe before the French Revolution since our national anthem is about how exceptional it is to do that and how it grew so specifically with the advent of Napoleonic total war. To quote De Jouvenel:
Medieval warfare imposed other ills on civillian populations, but getting entire populations blown up in massive engagements was neither possible nor desirable given the fragility of the food supply.
As for you decrying the inability of peasants to fill paperwork, I think they'd rather argue for their illegibility to the State than against it. How else to explain that a common feature of peasant revolts was a burning of records, so as to deny their rulers taxation. You want "rights" for them, theoretical constructs instead of the practical freedom that is denied to the victim of the Rousseauan panopticon. Yet more talk of liberation that only spells bondage.
And as for your last point. It is provably impossible to build yourself a cabin in the woods and disappear to be left alone, many have tried, all of them ended dead, destitute or in prison at the hands of state funded men with guns.
The modern state offers no exit rights. This is yet more of consoling fictions that would have one justify a practical enslavement for theoretical freedoms. Please look at man's condition instead of entrusting it to ideas. I beg of you.
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