domain:imgur.com
FtttG
1m 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
9m 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
10m 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
13m 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.
27m ago
As the ancient saying goes: post shorts.
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
31m ago
My equity is only up about 100% these days, down from those pandemic peaks, but I still love my 3% mortgage.
Mantergeistmann
35m ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
35m 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
39m 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
41m 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
43m 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
43m ago
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
51m ago
Sorry but not everyone is a materialist. Man acts, and so forth.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
55m 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
55m 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.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
I mean, yes and no. The lawfare against Trump and Musk did eventually fail, you know, and mostly because of the USA's protections against that sort of thing - certainly, it wasn't because Biden and Harris decided to call it off.
I agree that there are a vast number of potential attack vectors, but the task's still not an impossible one. Constitutional rights, and literally having fewer laws, are the most obvious general directions for such efforts.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
The problem is that by this logic, as far as I can see, every law is a "power that can be abused". The le pen conviction was based on fairly straightforward anti-corruption laws that disallow using EU funded workers to also work nationally. This is a reasonable limitation and does not seem unduly far-reaching in principle.
The problem is that the law effectively unenforced on the rest of the EU apparatus, especially the most left-leaning parts. A former green EU staffer has already gone ahead and publicly declared that he himself, as well as the entire rest of his office, has engaged in exactly the same behaviour Le Pen has. Crickets.
So the real issue is, as @wlxd points out, is a legislative dedicated to stretching and/or ignoring the law in any way they like, to further the goals they like. You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. 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. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. 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?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
"Oh, yes indeed," Albus Dumbledore said in level tones. "Your acting was perfect; I confess myself utterly deceived. [You] seemed--what is the term I am looking for? Ah yes, that is the word. [You] seemed sane."
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things?
The issue is that the relevant reference class is arguably "everything Musk does since he became a druggie". Until Grok, the last thing a Musk company did that didn't suck was the Tesla Model Y launch in 2019, and that was a minor variant on the 3 - the last difficult thing was the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Since they we have seen the Cybertruck (yuck), the 2nd-gen Roadster (not), the Semi (kinda), the 25,000 USD Tesla (just cancelled), FSD (based on non-standard meanings of "full" and "self" and about 5 years behind Waymo), Starship (subject to rapid unscheduled dissassembly), a deeply underwhelming Boring Company, and Twitter ending up bailed out with XAI's VC money. Oh - and DOGE breaking things without actually cutting spending.
So the case for "Musk has lost the secret sauce" is quite strong. The case for "Musk still has it" is being made by people who are already calling Starship and FSD as successes. The case for "Musk has mostly lost it, but is investable anyway" is that one Grok makes up for a lot of flops.
The bull case for Tesla is based on a pivot to a new AI/robotics business that doesn't exist yet. (Even Tesla bulls don't think the core automotive business is worth more than about 5x10^11 USD), so enough people still believe that Musk can do it again to keep buying the shares.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I think where we're disagreeing is that I think of "powers that can be abused" as a natural category, and you're insisting that different sorts of abusable powers, despite being abusable to the same end, can't be treated as a category.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
I also want to add, I can't remember any atheism rants in DCC (not saying there are literally none, but if there are, they are extremely easy to forget). Carl does have regular (mostly internal) rants against the aliens running the show, but they're really a very small part of the overall story, and for the most part are perfectly understandable for someone being thrown into a gladiator deathmatch against his will. Religion inside the show is transparently fake and gay, but everything inside the show is deliberately set up in mockery. Outside of the show, the alien antagonist are mostly non-religious, and even if they have a religion, their evilness has usually nothing to do with it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
Whatever the attack, I'm fairly sure that a larger amount of people engaging casually in rhetoric described above are suddenly going to indicate that they didn't mean it that way than say that yes, that's exactly what they meant. Or do what other gun rights people do regarding McVeigh: indicate that the perp was a fed or that it was a fed false flag attack some other way.
There's been a lot of cases where the shooter has deliberately targeted immigrants (in a mosque, a place frequented by immigrants otherwise etc.) and the logic, if cruel, is obvious: create an atmosphere of fear encouraging other immigrants to return back to where they came from and discourage new immigrants from coming in. Some shooters have indicated as much. The same logic as when Hamas continues to shoot rockets seemingly at random or encourage civilian attacks: create fear to discourage aliyah and encourage yerida.
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 (retired, but still attended 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.
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