domain:kvetch.substack.com
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
She seems to be a true believer. She’s just crazy.
pigeonburger
19hr ago
This is also part of it. I can't understand how Owens transitioned (heh!) from "well-regarded conservative commentator" to whatever the heck she's doing now.
Any one paying attention would have noticed that there was no reason to regard her well as a commentator right from the get go. Her "debut" was during Gamergate, she was trying to get in on a left wing, anti-gamergate grift, got aggressive pushback as she was encroaching on another grifter's turf, then in a week she reappered, rebranded as right wing, likely after noticing that there was tremendous alpha in being a black woman right winger.
Of course, that only works for so long. If you don't really have any worthwhile insight as a commentator to pivot from into doing serious work, the only way to keep the grift going is to go for ever crazier, more radical positions in order to try and keep the spotlight on you.
“Directional whoring?” That’s ridiculous and insulting.
Actually, it's a typo.
And yeah, I was exaggerating. But what I stand by is this: I frequently hear women express sentiments that actually, promiscuity is good, being a camgirl is a completely normal job, and having a dozen boyfriends in one year and collecting gifts and favors from all of them on the way is par for the course and bystanders should politely not notice it. I very rarely (in fact, not in almost a decade by now) hear the opposite IRL.
And sure, #NotAllWomen. Seriously not. This behavior is not universal. But at least around me, nobody's calling anyone out on it.
What’s your justification for insulting the modal Western woman?
The ability to do so on an online forum without getting ostracized, as would happen if I criticized a woman's weird ideological commitment to this kind of libertine behavior IRL.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
19hr ago
Regardless of whether or not that is a fallacy, it's what the Israelis sincerely believe, after having all of their previous offers for peace rejected. Now, you can say that they're wrong to believe that way, but to hold any other position in Israel is politically a non-starter.
jake
19hr ago
Probability estimates, anyone?
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news
Consider that you, in American spaces, only knew vaguely of Owens before news of "Sued by the wife of the President of France." Why is the French First Family taking this so seriously? It's witch-hunt logic but given that no matter the result of this lawsuit, millions of people will become new believers in Brigitte being a man, the only winning move is not to play.
P(Woman) is highest if they'd never acknowledged it. It's inherently undignified for any woman to "prove" what they are, it's a debacle for the French First Lady.
P(Man) increases with threat of litigation, and I'd argue it probably increases further with the actual filing of suit. Owens' defense could argue for medical testing. It's the point of the lawsuit and Owens will argue the documents were forged and that justifies tests. In the fictional court-of-perfectly-principled-justice Brigitte might be ordered to be tested, in the real world there's not a judge in the US who will order such testing for the wife of the President of France. It would be itself an instant international incident beside the separate incident of a US court rejecting the authenticity of French government documents. Point being here, P(Man) is superficially but not actually reduced by taking the matter to court, even US courts where truth is an absolute defense.
Another is P(MSM Emmanuel) and P(Emmanuel's Behest). Doesn't take much to find him in some very homoerotic pictures, and maybe that's a French thing, genuinely. If it's not and he is a man who has sex with men, this could be his closeted overreaction. Although now that I think about it, I wonder what would happen if someone with reach alleged this with Melania Trump. Does Don bring the hammer down? But Macron and Trump are very different men.
There's also P(Third-Party Plot); a US faction seeing an opportunity to financially crush Owens and the Macrons assisting an ally, perhaps not entirely willingly. This is an enormous reach but it still makes more sense than the First Lady of France suing a gauche American for calling her a man.
The one-state solution with enfranchised Palestinians is my preferred solution, and when I lived there I saw some moves towards this, especially in the West Bank (particularly in East Jerusalem). Unfortunately I don’t think that’s palatable to the Israeli electorate any more after 10/7.
When I refer to Israel I’m referring to the parts of the country that are broadly recognized. Not West Bank, Gaza, or the Golan Heights. In these territories, Arabs have full citizenship and can vote and have elected many people to the Knesset. They definitely are still discriminated against, but in a manner much more similar to American racial politics vs. the apartheid. It’s also not like there’s no intra-Jewish tension either. Lots of Sephardic/Ashkenazi conflict along racial lines.
What I find frustrating is the equating of these two groups of Arabs. Those who live in Israel have relatively normal lives, probably better than they would have in their neighboring countries. Those in the West Bank/gaza are living in occupied territory.
In terms of jew hating, I'm not responding to this comment in particular but further up thread where he said things like
There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years and having them quoting biblical genocides while massacring starving Christians is an excellent way to bring back the west to our historical view of them.
faceh
19hr ago
No real disagreement from me.
I just think people who do pull these shenanigans will blow themselves up more often than not, for want of knowing when to stop/being able to stop.
I want to identify such folks and be far enough away that the explosion doesn't catch me.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
Actually my (main) problem with AI doomerism via the rationalist space is more that it lacks historical understanding, rather than technical understanding. The way humans self-organize, and react to new technologies, makes AI takeover almost literally impossible. The AI 2027 stuff reads like fan fiction because it, well, it is. Their understanding of humanity itself is just grossly miscalibrated, and it seems crazy to me that they think it's anything more serious than that. Usually, good sci-fi, which AI 2027 is not, is explicitly designed as an elaborate thought experiment, and visualization of how humanity can react in interesting alternate factual realities (usually of physics and science, but sometimes culture). There's none of that exploration in their work, and because they didn't even seem to bother to try (instead, getting bogged down in fixing precise probability density curves for various newly-created benchmarks of theirs) they produce little of value. I worry they may gesture at "oh look society is chaotic" and claim vindication and directional accuracy, but that also grossly misunderstands humanity. What kind of chaos, what level of chaos, and what kind of political responses would happen to even their 2026-forecasted benchmarks should be the focus of investigation, not blathering about alignment based on tech that doesn't even exist.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
20hr ago
246 BC is emphatically not the iron age. Rome as a civilization famously did not require all conquered peoples to become culturally Roman so long as they colored within the lines.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
20hr ago
The 5.8% figure is from two months ago and was already part of an upward trajectory. The writeup you linked largely confirms that Gazans are starving, though it argues that it's not due to Israel withholding aid.
Moving further into a true pariah status does not engender sympathy. The further a nation is moved into Certified Rogue State™ category the easier it becomes for people to justify and excuse hostility against it. Bad Guys get what they deserve. A high degree of tragedy in relation to their offense is required to turn Bad Guy into sympathetic character. For Israel, without the Certified Rogue State™ status, a reversal among Palestinian Aficionados might require something like tens of thousands of casualties from a chemical gas attack in Tel Aviv during a peace summit.
It's been 30 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa, yet considering South African whites oppressed in any fashion is not very popular. If South African whites were slaughtered at scale they'd garner some more sympathy. The value of this hypothetical changing sentiment a personal judgment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
20hr ago
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I am responding to the OP’s future scenario
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You linked me to a long write-up by an activist. Why should I take it seriously? Do you have a specific reason to think Gaza isn’t facing starvation? Why not specify the compelling evidence instead of saying “here, read this long tweet by LiterallyWho”
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Why should I not trust the UN? https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165457
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Why should I not trust the World Food Programme? https://x.com/WFP/status/1947036919289741771
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Why should I not trust the World Hunger Organization? https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/gaza-facing-man-made-mass-starvation-says-whos-tedros-2025-07-23/
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Why should I not trust the NYT? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html
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Why should I not trust Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, and Oxfam? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9xkx7vnmxo.amp
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Are American Baptists lying to me? https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/more-than-100-organizations-are-sounding-the-alarm-to-allow-lifesaving-aid-into-gaza/
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^ Is the Catholic charity group Caritas from Germany lying to me?
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^ Is the Episcopal Peace Fellowship lying to me?
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Is Japan International Volunteer Center lying to me?
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^ Is the Mennonite Central Committee lying to me?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
I admit I don't fully understand the analogy OP is trying to make about insects, but you aren't alone in thinking that intelligence is judgable based on economic value - in fact, that's exactly how AGI is defined in the OpenAI-Microsoft contract, that AI generates 100 billion dollars in revenue! Yes, vague, and yes, causing problems, but that was what they wrote at the time. Still, a little lacking in rigor, no? Desktop computers generate billions of dollars in revenue, are they intelligent? What I think OP is saying is that instead of that, let's propose a different standard: intelligence is a degree of reactivity, and mechanically, current LLMs do not have this trait, they just 'make up' for it in practical usage by the sheer breadth and depth of their (text) knowledge base - but at their core they are simply good enough at the practical aspect that the lack of actual, true reactivity is partially obscured.
If anything to me the debates sort of remind me of the ones over personality, psychology, and determinism. We still haven't figured out strongly if people are deterministic or not, and so we seem ill-suited to judge how deterministic an LLM is in its responses. Personally, I'm satisfied by calling LLMs jagged or fragile intelligence, and I think that captures more nuance than a more loaded general term.
Or are you trying to make an argument that is a cousin to the descriptivist view of language (how people use a word today determines its meaning more than any internal, nominal, historical, or etymological meaning): if people treat an LLM as intelligent, then that very fact justifies them as intelligent? That strikes me as, well, I guess fair enough to say, but not particularly useful.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
20hr ago
through sheer force of will, it makes the absurdity and stupidity work.
One might say it rejects common sense to make the impossible possible.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
20hr ago
I disagree, I think both are very well written.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
20hr ago
That's fair. The episode stories are generally quite good.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
20hr ago
With all due respect, man, it sounds to me like you want a philosophy course, not a story. Going into the kinds of details you are demanding would be boring. I neither need nor want a meticulously thought out explanation of how the Puppet Master thinks (nor anything else you mentioned), that would just make the story a slog that very few people would want to watch/read.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
Oh, absolutely not, that's partly why I'm firmly a one-state solution advocate. Not that I have any power other than moral judgement, of course.
DirtyWaterHotDog
20hr ago
Are Gazans starving ? Not yet at least. Not in the way we understand starving. At 5.8%, that would put it alongside stable middle-economy nations like Mexico, Thailand and Brazil. Most of Africa & the Indian Subcontinent are doing twice as worse. Gaza's tragedies, like Ukraine over-reported in comparison to mundane everyday evil that kills more people everywhere else.
how much Israel can torture the civilians before there is sufficient moral pressure to make them stop
What's left? To viewers on social media, Israel is already conducting a holocaust-esque genocide. Facts be damned. I imagine Israel can keep going for much longer, because Hamas has milked social media sympathy for all its worth. The only pressure that matters comes from the State department or Israel's population. A change of heart of either group will come from a frustration with the ineffectiveness of how the war is run, rather than any moral calculus.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20hr ago
Maybe this Virginia state lawmaker candidate who livestreamed sex with her husband in the past?
Tiber727
20hr ago
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke?
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
20hr ago
The etruscans predominately were not enslaved and conquered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Etruscan_Wars
Rome was the eventual victor in the wars and the last Etruscan resistance was crushed in 264 BC when Volsinii was destroyed after a slave revolt. The Etruscans were assimilated into Roman culture and Rome became one of the Mediterranean superpowers amongst the Greeks and the Carthaginians, though the Etruscan language survived for another 300 years (until the early first century AD).
Maybe you have some rosy ideas about what iron age "assimilation" looked like. But coming from the civilization that made "Vae Victus" a household phrase, I doubt it resembled an American "Melting Pot" too closely. I think it's safe to say they were conquered and had their cultural identity destroyed.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
20hr ago
There is nothing I've seen that would indicate that people somehow became not ok with it once the ratio went slightly over 10 to 1. Rather it seemed to be that Israel became mainstream news, that's all. People whose special interest was the Israel-Palestine conflict have been harping about "genocidal settlers" well before the war.
Mantergeistmann
21hr ago
that's because what, 1200 Israelis died, and they've killed more than 12,000. We're up to what, almost 60k?
You really can't compare raw numbers, given a) Israel tried to keep its own people alive, b) Hamas tries to put its own people in harms way, c) the war is being fought in Gaza and not in Israel proper, and d) Israel is the stronger faction. Nobody would say, "Well, only X US soldiers and civilians were killed in Pearl Harbor, and now that the US is winning in the Philippines, the casualty ratio is shifting significantly, that means the US is doing warfare wrong and needs to sue for peace".
Ok, then why are we supporting them?
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