domain:nunosempere.com
They probably intuitively think of gun control as something that prevents only right-wingers from having guns.
TowardsPanna
44m ago
I'm aware of the importance of whole beans and grinding them fresh. That's why I'm getting a grinder, duh.
I was talking about the time when I don't have a grinder yet. I hadn't yet decided on one to get when I wrote that. And the one I have now ordered will take a while to get here. I might sample some pre-ground coffee if my Chemex gets here first. :)
Do you want to recommend some unique luxurious beans, even if they might be hard to find? Something to look out for in the future. I looked through the beans featured in a great video game, heh. (Persona 5). They've got trivia on coffee. Colombian Nariño, Hawaiiwan Kona, and Panama Esmeralda Geisha caught my interest.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
47m ago
Investment, which is heavily incentivized both for reasons of tax and generally because it's considered "good for the economy" is not "storing wealth", it is in fact risking it by having a stake in the system. Which allows and provides for the survival of all of its dependents.
Inflation is just one of the mechanisms deployed to prevent storing "non productive" value, but every modern tax system is designed for this purpose as well.
And this of course was not always the case.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be?
Agree on the other points, but 10 million plus immigrants per year from the shittiest countries in the world can quickly and easily ruin your country.
Corvos
1hr ago
I suppose as a measuring stick I should say I also had not heard of Kirk before his death, although I think I had heard of Turning Point.
eee
1hr ago
Are Crowder, Shapiro, and even Kirk trying to change people's minds via debate at their events on college campuses? No, they are there to rile up lefty college students that have never in their life actually had their beliefs challenged and completely fail to defend them to clip farm. I think Destiny approached it more honestly and wanted more real engagement than they normally do, but I see this as very weak evidence of Destiny's persona and ethos.
If you had evidence of Destiny saying like we live in times that are too polarized and people should be more civil and settle things through calm debate and then tweeted like Destiny tweets you might have a point. However, I have not seen him talk like that and he established himself primarily from internet bloodsports debatebro culture. He's a pig that loves playing the mud. I've never seen him say you shouldn't play in the mud. You are right, he does ragebait a lot on twitter. What I'm not seeing is him making a big stink about how everyone needs to get along and sing kumbaya and then acting like he does on twitter. If someone presented themselves like Peter Boghosian--someone at least outwardly trying to have real conversations and have people question and validate their beliefs--and they acted like Destiny you would have a point. But Destiny doesn't present himself like that.
If you want to paint Destiny like you are it wouldn't even be hard, but you haven't even attempted to do it! He was a pretty niche figure and most mainstream people would not want to give him the light of day. The places he does get debates are places like Minds Fest and Better Discourse.
Here is how Minds Fest 2023 was billed:
“Minds is bringing people together IRL from across the social and political spectrum to facilitate real conversations, human connection and the evolution of ideas. MINDS: Festival of Ideas will feature prominent voices who will come together to have civil dialogue on the important topics of the day. The goal of the event is to create a space to engage honestly with others in open dialogue surrounding divisive ideas in hopes to bridge the current divide and create a path to a healthier discourse and reduce extremism.”
Here's someone describing Better Discourse:
The Better Discourse conference seeks to help create a space where important issues can be discussed, and common ground can be found.
Discourse between differing viewpoints is part of the American Way. Engaging honestly with others in open dialogue about the topics which divide us can help bridge the divide and create a path to a healthier country.
We’ll bring together great minds across the left-right spectrum and find common ground. Or not. Either way, this healthy discourse seems sorely needed and too often ignored.
Both of these basically sound like they espouse the kind of ideals that you are ascribing to Destiny and he's actually spoke at both of them. Did Destiny try to keep a high quality of discourse and decorum at either? Not really. He acted basically the same as he always does. Hell, basically heckled and disrupted a panel he wasn't even on. I'm sure if you want to you can find parts in these talks where he is behaving badly but I don't care to watch them again.
That he could not behave himself and he did not really try would be easy to spin as duplicitous or engaging is bad faith. Personally, I think the organizers invited him knowing exactly how he behaves and expected him to act that way given they invited him back the the next two years.
If you want to make this argument, make it! Instead you are just gesturing wildly at the form of an argument without ever producing one.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen.
Of all the things to say... I don't suppose it crossd their kind this incident might have a negative impact on the coming elections?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
School shootings are not generally committed by ideological allies of the right, nor aimed specifically at leftists because they are leftists. This was not random badness striking a man down. The people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
I gave you a bunch of public, conspicuous and escalating acts of political violence against specifically mere speech and you dismissed it out of hand.
It sounds like nothing short of people getting gunned down like it's the years of lead in very early memory, in your own country, would convince you that politics is dangerous.
The difference between mere public appearance and politics is that there are organized murderous groups that want you out of the picture. Not just nutters. But you conveniently just pack all these in the nutter bundle to avoid having to deal with the fact that there are perfectly sane murderous actors.
haroldbkny
1hr ago
That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.
it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can
The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more conservatives don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
And of course it results in taxes, but governments gonna tax.
Do I remember wrong or aren’t some of the oldest known writings basically tax records?
vorpa-glavo
2hr ago
What gets me about it is that all of this, this entire culture war, just seems like such an utterly trivial thing to escalate into a shooting war. What are the issues really when you boil it down? Whether trans women should have access to female-only spaces or not? Whether immigration law should be enforced, and how much immigration should occur and how difficult it should be? What the limits of free speech are? How tough on crime people should be? These aren't issues that should be tearing nations apart. These should be normal political issues people can discuss civily and disagree on without thinking of themselves as soldiers in an apocalyptic all-consuming war for the soul of the West. If people could politely disagree on gay marriage they could certainly do it for any kind of trans issue, or so you'd think.
I agree with you wholeheartedly here. A lot of these issues are absolutely small potatoes.
I'm one of the Motte's more pro-trans people, and even I can admit that from a purely consequentialist perspective if the "victory" against trans people looks like the segregation of female-only bathrooms, prisons, and sports leagues and ID cards using biological sex markers, then that is less than ideal from my perspective, but it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can according to their own lights in a liberal city somewhere. Private businesses that want to be inclusive can switch to unisex bathrooms if they want, sympathetic friends and family can still engage in pronoun hospitality, parents of trans children can home school or send them to progressive private schools (with concerned private donors helping families that might not otherwise be able to afford that option), and the Earth will keep turning.
But I think the algorithmic Web 2.0 sites that have swallowed the internet have turned everything into a supposedly life and death struggle. It can't just be that a group of people whose interests you care about will have lives that are about 90% as good as they might have in a counterfactual world where your political tribe got everything they wanted, you need to catastrophize about that missing 10% of well-being, and make up outrages and scandals to justify hating the opposing side. It's not very conducive to having nuanced societal debates, with respectful disagreement when you don't agree with someone else's stance.
Ioper
2hr ago
It's a million small things. Everyday values, behaviours, interests, language used, food eaten, what is high/low status etc. It's in every aspect of their lives, just like my culture is in every aspect of my life.
It is hard to sum up because it's all pervasive and at the same time not that big of a difference. The middle class and the upper middle class are not worlds apart after all.
A lot of it comes down to being less confrontational and more dignified. Also, they spend more time and effort on social signaling and maintaining a social network, outside of closer friends.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Read this and this if you genuinely want to understand it. People can't agree on what's right or wrong, what's legal or illegal or what ought to be either. They can't agree on what's murder and what's self-defense and on a million other questions of similar import. They can't agree because their core values drifted too far apart. Liberalism got high on its own supply and lost track of the fact that core human values could differ, and could drift over time unless coherence is enforced. Liberalism didn't want to enforce conformity because that seemed mean and unnecessary, so it declined to do so, and so the values drifted.
All of society is built on a foundation of shared values. When the values are no longer shared, nothing we've built on them works either. Society breaks down, because it all runs on compromise, and humans compromise other things to secure core values, not core values for other things. No more compromise, and shortly thereafter no more society. It's not really complicated, it's just what humans do. More or less everyone has now realized that values have to be enforced, but now they can't agree on whose values get enforced and whose get suppressed. And so we fight.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Maybe? Depends on the situation. This isn't something governed by codified rules.
shamgar
2hr ago
I have very little background in it currently. I've dabbled a little bit in some analytic philosophy which uses it and after I got a degree in a humanities field I learned to code and got a job which exposes me to a little bit of CS every now and then. Basically, both in philosophy and CS I've come across use of formal logic a bit, but I've never actually had to do anything with it myself. It did however produce a lingering interest in the topic which is why I'm now intending to get a proper understanding of it. So I reckon I'm probably better off starting with an introductory book, but I'll take note of your recommendation in case I am motivated to delve deeper after working through an introductory book. Thanks for the recommendation!
aldomilyar
2hr ago
I was aware of Kirk but more as 'Shapiro clone with a moon face' and some vague Prager-associated memories of him getting lashed for something about Slavery (but I may have misremembered them) but now I've done a bit of research he's less obnoxious.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate.
I cannot speak to the manners of formal debate, but it seems to me that this is a reasonable practice. It underlines and attempts to short-circuit the bias of the human mind. If you were delighted to have a number that supported you, it is that much harder to turn around and argue that the number proves nothing when it goes against you.
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time?
With difficulty and a considerable degree of imprecision.
There is pretty obviously no way to prove it, beyond comparing the predictions I've made and the reasoning underlying them with events as they unfold. @Chrisprattalpharaptr is confident I'm wrong, and has called out what he considers my predictive failures in two previous posts, one immediately preceding Luigi killing the CEO and the other immediately preceding Kirk's murder. And it's fair game; I predicted that the violence would get worse during the rioting, and I predicted that the rioting, compromise of policing, and attendant spike in crime would be lasting. Instead, the rioting finally wound down, "abolish the police" was largely sidelined, and the crime spike declined back to around the previous trend after only four years and a few dozen-thousand additional deaths rather than continuing on for the rest of the decade. I was too pessimistic; in hindsight, I think the "Blue Tribe ran out of mana" explanation is clearly more accurate.
And yet, we have had hundreds of attacks on churches, yearly, for multiple years now; mostly vandalism and harassment, but a notable number of arsons and shootings; my church has a permanent armed security team now, which is novel. We had a nation-wide vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla, with Tim Waltz among others winking and nodding along to in public appearances. We've had a worrying spate of trans school shooters which seem to me to be directly motivated by the tenants of trans ideology. We've had the attempted assassination of Trump missing by the slimmest of chances amid, charitably, criminal incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and then the very obvious and quite public disappointment in that failure through Blue Tribe, top to bottom. Since then we've seen the rise of assassination culture in Blue Tribe, "who will kill Elon", national polling showing large portions of Blue Tribe endorsing the murder of Trump and Musk. We saw what that looked like in practice with Luigi: widespread, open support for lawless murder throughout blue tribe, again top-to-bottom, with unrestrained glazing from major media organizations and blue-state legislation being named after him. We've seen it again with Kirk: appalling murder met with undeniable, widespread, population-representative-scale gleeful support.
Multi-city riots against ICE have been limited because Trump established punishing escalation dominance from the very start, removing much of their political cover and aggressively prosecuted as many rioters as possible. And even with that federal hammer pounding away, we've seen facilities mobbed and destroyed by rioters, we've seen numerous serious attacks on federal agents, murder of federal agents, and at least one coordinated paramilitary ambush. In the background we're still seeing what appears to me to be clear support from democrat officials to assist all of the above by doxxing ICE agents and releasing the information to the public.
And to CPAR's point, this is a better outcome than I expected; in 2018-2020, I did not expect Trump to escape jail, much less win the 2020 election. The above is what it looks like after the Democratic party imploded itself in one of the most humiliating and catastrophic electoral defeats in modern political history, when their voters have fled and their donors have shut their wallets. This the mayhem Blue Tribe can inflict when at the weakest it's ever been in my entire life. Barring unprecedented measures or outcomes, it will most likely recover and will once again find itself wielding federal power. It almost certainly will exercise that power with a furious vengeance, unconstrained by the norms and structures that are currently being trampled by Trump in the meantime; Blue politicians are already running on a policy of "drive it like you stole it", and their base does not seem inclined to moderation. And why would they be? They're as desperate and policy-starved as my side is.
And even knowing that, I still think this is probably the best possible path forward; maybe Trump can deliver enough obvious improvement in living conditions that we win the midterms and maybe 2028 as well, and maybe enough political defeats in succession can force capitulation from Progressive ideologues and the demolition of their centers of economic, social and political power, and we can actually wind the culture war down. Maybe. Otherwise, it will be the Blue turn to prosecute culture war escalations through federal law, and my side's turn to prosecute escalations outside it. And there's still hope there too! There's a possibility that the struggle over federal power will have done enough damage to federal institutions that those institutions will simply lack the capacity to prosecute the culture war further, and both sides sag back in exhaustion to simply running their own states and communities as best they can. Society pillarizes, sorts, segregates, and good fences make good neighbors. It could happen!
Maybe.
It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign.
I still remember that Blue Tribe terrorists and murderers got institutional protection and tenure. But sure, last time it died down, it might die down again. This is true.
Last time it died down because, on the balance, the Blues of the time capitulated.
Let's take a concrete example. I do not think the views this person expresses are fringe within Blue Tribe. I think that, prior to the ongoing backlash sparked by Kirk's murder, I would have been fired from most jobs in my industry for disagreeing with this person about Kirk or objecting to her statements. In order for the Culture War to de-escalate, this person's views have to become fringe, or Kirks views, and mine, have to become fringe. This person is pretty clearly willing to endorse extralegal killing to stave off capitulation. So, as it happens, am I, even if my choice of acceptable targets is considerably stricter. One of us has to lose, and neither of us is willing to accept that loss, and until that changes it seems obvious that the escalations will proceed on their current trajectory. Ozy described the core drive and Zunger did the math more than a decade ago, and everything since then has been fractal iteration.
Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
...Having deleted answers to both questions, I will accept that I may be fringe (Ted was much closer to Red, Waco was very, very definitely blue and I would be very surprised to see an existence proof of arguments to the contrary, I can't help myself), but it seems to me that better examples might have been Prohibition and Eugenics. Even there, the answer does not seem like some deep enigma lost to the sands of time; I think most answers from people here would be fairly uniform. It seems to me that the Culture War and the split we currently label red vs blue has been a coherent force for well over a century, and possibly three centuries. In this country, it is easy to see how that split has, over the last hundred years or so, steadily eroded our social and political structures and norms, and how the present unpleasantness is simply the long, slow trend going exponential as the last of our social cohesion burns away.
In any case, it is indeed possible for time to unwind the Culture War. But it is also possible to escalate faster than time alone can unwind, and it seems pretty clear to me that we are now doing that.
Again, the person linked above. Is that person crazy? Is their ideology meaningfully fringe? It's certainly not fringe enough that many millions of people felt uncomfortable expressing similar sentiments privately or publicly over the last two days. It's certainly not fringe enough that I'm confident I could disagree with it publicly and keep my job, even now. I'd give roughly 50% odds that the views they presented, together with views of similar extremity on a variety of other issues, are going to secure federal power in 2028. What do you expect to happen then?
....And all of this is based on the consensus understanding of what we might call the "math" of irreconcilable cultural conflict, which seems to me to give a high probability of things getting very bad. But I think it's actually much worse than that, because the consensus model is badly mistaken in ways that dramatically underestimate how bad things are likely to get, in a similar way and for similar reasons that people underestimated the impact of the iPhone on human interaction before its release.
You may disagree, and if so I'd be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
ihtbs
3hr ago
Gatekeeping is good. Encouraging low effort stream-of-internet posting will be the death of this place.
I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.
Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.
jkf
3hr ago
Again refer back to the point about implications being made regarding other victims of other tragedies if you elevate someone over them in a place like Congress.
Refer back to my last two posts in which I'm suggesting that nobody would likely have a problem with praying for more people in Congress -- which would mean that there would no longer be any special treatment. The dems should just start praying, if it bothers them so much.
Why does an officer who died protecting our society from an antivax shooter not deserving of the same response? Why are members of the military not honorable enough when they die for a public prayer in Congress?
I don't really pray for people myself, but, like -- sure! Pray for those guys too!
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4hr ago
While he's reported to be academically gifted
Academically gifted zoomers are often some of the most brainrotted. It's a verbal IQ thing. I have dozens and dozens of those damn vines stuck in my head that replay randomly. "Look at all those chickens," (they were geese), "they were roommates", "freesh a voc a doo", etc.
Not a zoomer, but a good example of the type is gwern. He's obviously very intelligent, but I find it hard to read essays of his because they're so dense, and filled with javascript pop-up hyperlinks to various things that are connected to the core topic of the essay in his mind. I remember reading something by him and being astounded at the sheer number of hyperlinked references to unrelated anime phrases. I felt like I was getting a firehose of his mind rather than a focused essay. Smart people collect phrases, anecdotes, factoids, data points, and it's entirely conceivable for a smart person to get fixated on things that aren't useful, like internet memes.
That is fair. Let me clarify. If you try to paint yourself as someone extending an olive branch to the other side and try to get them to see your side via debate, only to change your tune and start celebrating the death of regular civilians just because they are on the other side of the political side of the isle, you're no longer trying to convince people via discussion. Evidence for him extending out the olive branch is him going around the right wing circuit engaging in debates without him talking shit about the people he is reaching out to during the 2022-2023 time period.
Destiny's attitude towards regular people on the right has completely shifted since. On numerous occasions he's celebrated or made fun of the deaths of regular ordinary citizens (the fireman at Trump's rally that got killed, the children that died in the texas flooding, and now Charlie Kirk to name a few examples). The only reason I can think of that he would do this is because this is rage baiting and that gets him more attention, which is how he makes money. The way I see it he wasn't able to increase his viewer count from people on the right to the level he wanted otherwise he wouldn't have changed his tune. It would be one thing if he were to talk shit about the people he debated, it's another to start insulting the population you were once trying to reach out to.
As for bad faith tactics in debating, I'm going to point to one example that soured my impression of him. https://www.themotte.org/post/752/smallscale-question-sunday-for-november-5/158604?context=8#context
To summarize, Destiny's debate opponent made a claim, then Destiny proceeded scroll through his phone trying to prove the opponent wrong, while the opponent is still talking. He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate. Behavior aside, I also looked into the data and I walked away with more questions than answers, I certainly would not be comfortable using that particular stat unless my goal is to just win an argument in a debate at the moment
To quote myself
I like to think I'm a somewhat intelligent guy, but this exercise has shown just how untrained I am in information gathering and fact checking. I supposed to the next step is to call or contact experts or at least the authors of these articles but honestly I feel like that is a lot of work for something that at the end of the day is just a result of me wanting to find the source of a fact mentioned in a random two hour debate from the internet. I suppose for informal discussions this level of research is more than can be reasonably expected, and if you were trying to write a book or video or anything that you want to share to the public, you should do your due diligence to make sure you aren't spreading misinformation.
But in every speech and conversation, we are constantly referencing a bank of information we have accumulated in our life times. And we shouldn't have to walk around having to fact check every little thing we come across, because knowledge is near limitless. I think Destiny is one of the more reasonable twitch streamers when it comes to political content, and for him a 30 second google search was enough to decide on the facts for a point in a debate, while I spent 15 minutes looking into the data only to come up with more questions than answers. I'd rather not have to go through this exercise every time I'm questioning what someone is saying, and perhaps the answer is stop listening to that person, but at the same time I'd also rather not disengage in conversation just because I'm being lazy.
You can see I was far more amiable to Destiny when I made that post. I gave the guy a chance. Watched his debates. Lurked on his subreddit for a while. Sorry, but I don't want to listen to a guy that wishes the worst on those on the other side of the political spectrum, and he's a guy that primarily focuses on trying to win an argument, not seeking the truth. In essence, he's a guy that maximizes heat and minimizes light.
On a side note, congratulations, that sounds really impressive. You must have been good.
This I think is where our intuitions aren’t matching up.
I think we can agree on this: There has grown up in the last few years a certain creature called the “Right-wing grifter” who make lots of money serving the right-wing need for influencers and talking heads, and are somewhat well-protected by having a right-wing funding stream that is loyal to them.
My dissents are as follows:
Hopefully that lays out my thoughts clearly.
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