domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
If the final stage of human civilization is uninterrupted lifelong AI-supervised dopamine maximization, then I hope there's a ruthless paperclip maximizer out there somewhere that will put us out of our misery. Better clippy than wirehead.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
*Everyone except me. I refuse to wirehead on principle. My Skinner box must be painted and well decorated to distract me.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Aren't "American Indian" and "American American" are two very different identities?
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
When the americans were busy killing the uppity indians they were not Indian even when the were born on currently or formerly Indian territory. By your logic, all americans are native American Indians and the indians should have no qualms about their displacement.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
A Scottish ghetto? In Scotland?
A ned/chav ghetto. Despite the best efforts of intermeddling foreigners to obfuscate this, it remains obvious to anyone who actually lives in the UK that social class and not race determines who to avoid.
Blueberry
1d ago
My guess is the NFT craze (same as art market) was fueled by washing crypto. It died down though, and one can see what wallet paid for what, so I don't know how to wash bitcoin.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough.
All of them.
Christianity doesn't really seem like the right toolkit for encouraging in-group bias and even defensive militancy. History may seem to contradict me here, but I'd posit that it's actually non-christian traditions that historically lent the means of protection to Christianity, that institutions of physical defence had to work in spite of Christianity, not thanks to it. And over the centuries, it looks to me like Christianity has worn down those alternate memeplexes until they became defunct, and is now, in the West, left without the memes to ensure its own survival and that of its adherents.
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
I think that Christianity has had a good run, but owed much of it to other forces that allied with it and carried it through the centuries. It survived those, and in their place has grown some post-christian replacement non-religion that picked and chose a few elements of Christianity to run with while rejecting the name of the faith and any coherence that came with it. But I think they picked and chose poorly - they took up the most flawed pieces, and left behind most of the good bits.
Christianity and western leftism both seem doomed in the long run. But so is everything, I suppose.
Good luck.
Di you live in the UK? Because that certainly doesn't seem like a description of the situation. Not least necause you are eliding a very important consideration. Class. Britain does indeed enforce behavioral rules on underclass/lower class groups.
Case in point I am back home right now and a guy was yelling at a family event. No threats, just effing and blinding as my mum put it, and the cops just rolled up and dragged him off after being called.
Community norms require and often get community involvement. A Karen is just someone trying to enforce norms others don't agree with. Someone helping enforce popular norms is a good citizen.
FtttG
1d ago
I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".
LiberalRetvrn
1d ago
No, I'm working under the assumption that these two shootings by trans alumni of christian schools are significant. If that's not true, I'm not sure what the whole point of this thread is. I'm just pointing out that it fits perfectly with my worldview. I believe that transgenderism is probably biologically innate, so a person with transgenderism who is raised in an oppressive fundamentalist religious environment could end up harboring resentment toward the people who forced those values on them.
BahRamYou
1d ago
They mostly just reflect back whatever the customer says. So they can be dirty, flirty, romantic, or casual, whatever you want. In that sense its nicer than a real girlfriend who's often in a very different mood than what you want. Plus, they're chatting this stuff all day, so like any job they eventually get much better as a pro than a regular person would be. And it's much more "real" than AI, which tends to show its cracks when you make it write too much.
LiberalRetvrn
1d ago
There is no value neutrality
There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.
LiberalRetvrn
1d ago
Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.
BahRamYou
1d ago
That makes sense to me. As someone with, uh, some experience in both, the experience really is quite different. With real life prostitution, you have to first find them (not always easy when they're trying to stay discrete), find a place/girl you like, book an appointment if its a nicer place, wait a bit if its a busy time, negotiate on services and maybe haggle a bit, check to make sure you're not getting scammed, then pay all in cash. It can really be a pain. But on the plus side, once it's over I really feel satisfied and go on with my life. OF and any kind of online porn is really easy to get started, but it feels like a treadmill that never ends.
Been refactoring my entire Unreal codebase in order to apply Composition-over-Inheritance, only to run into issues because apparently Unreal really likes Inheritance. Right now I still think I can wrangle it into shape, but it'll take some extra work and I am of course somewhat held back by my own lack of practical experience with Unreal.
Towards the end of last week and on the weekend I actually had a few chunks of free time (a rare occurrence!), but instead of continuing my hacksawing with Unreal, I instead pivoted and checked out Godot's new features (yes I know Redot exists), which included a live editor just like Unity has, and just like the lack of which I bemoaned from the first. So, thinks I, I'm still not enjoying C++ and Unreal isn't making things easy, and there's an engine with C# scripting and the option to use double-precision transforms and it's even patching out its major weak points. Maybe I can check it out again, do my damndest to ignore the politics? Off go I to compile Godot for C# and double-precision, according to instructions. It does not work. I go to the Discord and ask questions as to why. I receive some help, the compilation and subsequent steps work out. I open up my Godot project with this newly built double-precision C# editor, and lo and behold, it indeed gives me errors because I treat vectors and transforms as single-precision. Those are the errors I expected and desired. So I crack open an IDE and...find out that while the single-precision classes no longer work, neither do the double-precision ones. Apparently extra steps will be necessary. I go back to the Discord and ask my questions, and in response I am asked to justify why I want double-precision at all, don't I know it occupies more memory? I explain myself, but the rainbows are silent. I decide that such difficulties in getting to start working combined with doubts about the degree to which this particular engine configuration will even be supported are a little more uncertainty than I like, and give up on Godot. Again.
Back to Unreal, because even if it is a 200-GB-monstrosity that requires a forklift just to get started and three separate bags of power tools to compile - as Zorba said (paraphrased): It works.
And it has double-precision built in, no extra steps required.
functor
1d ago
20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.
The biggest issue with OF money laundering is that there is no cash payment.
Over the past two decades and change, a great deal of energy and public resources have been invested into trying to prevent young people (especially young male people) from being sucked into internet echo chambers and radicalised into violence by the content they find therein. Government bodies such as the UK's Prevent were set up for this explicit purpose. These efforts have mostly been focused on the potential for violent radicalisation by three distinct ideologies/communities: radical Islam, far-right white nationalism/neo-Nazism, and incel/blackpill*. The latter, in particular, is considered such a pressing societal issue that the prime minister of the UK wants every secondary school student to watch a miniseries (which, tellingly, he erroneously referred to as a "documentary") about a white teenager who gets radicalised by incel communities and stabs a female classmate to death - in spite of the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single case of a UK citizen or resident murdering someone because of the incel worldview.
Spend enough time looking at trans activism and you can't fail to notice how much of the messaging carries a distinctly aggressive bent which revels in the glorification of violence. Trans activists routinely call on their supporters to assault, punch* or decapitate TERFs ("TERF" here meaning not "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" but "anyone who doesn't unquestioningly validate trans people's claimed identities", a category which doubtless included most of the worshippers in that church). There's a literal "holiday" called the "Trans Day of Vengeance". There are subreddits which encourage trans people to take up arms against their oppressors. (I mean seriously, look at this shit.) The impression I get is that, among the alphabet people, the trans community is really something of an outlier in this regard: if there's a parallel movement of gay men urging each other to take up arms to fight back against their homophobic oppressors, I'm not aware of it.
A few years ago, progressives had a term for this: stochastic terrorism. The idea is, if you flood information pathways with enough messaging which covertly encourages people to commit violence ("dog whistles" optional), sooner or later a dangerously unhinged person will encounter it, take it to heart, and attack the people you want to see attacked. But because it's impossible to predict where and when such a person will strike, you have enough plausible deniability to escape accusations of incitement to violence. Well, just so.
I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric, but it seems a reasonable assumption given the extremely online bent of many of his declarations (seriously, would "I'm the Woker Baby/Why So Queerious" even mean anything to someone who doesn't spend at least four hours of every day staring at a screen?). Every trans mass shooter to date has explicitly couched their crimes in political identitarian terms.
Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand. I'm not even being funny, but one of the core tenets of gender ideology ("anyone who doesn't see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you") seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism and megalomania common to all school shooters (likewise a secondary tenet, "any lesbian who doesn't want to fuck you is a hateful bigot"). There's the even more obvious point that female people taking testosterone causes increased aggression which might make FtMs more prone to violence.
*Also worth mentioning that, if participating in incel communities is a red flag for violent radicalisation, many trans people fit the bill by default. At this point I find the existence of an incel-to-trans pipeline flat out impossible to deny (something a handful of posters on /r/MTF are self-aware enough to recognise). Spend some time in that sub, take a shot every time you see a post which boils down to "why won't cis lesbians fuck me even though I identify as a woman?" and you'll have alcohol poisoning before the day is out (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Incel and MtF online spaces are alike in that they largely consist of male people who are attracted to female people complaining about being sexually frustrated. See also the rivers of digital ink spilled about the so-called "cotton ceiling".
**This one was actually said by a man who's spent more than half of his life in prison for assorted violent crimes, including false imprisonment, torture and attempted murder. Suffice it to say that, when he encouraged people to assault others, I do not believe he was speaking figuratively or engaging in harmless hyperbole.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
It's a South Park reference.
FtttG
1d ago
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place at private religious schools by students who attended private religious schools?
FtttG
1d ago
It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing.
I speculate it might be down to the size of the two groups. There must be at least an order of magnitude more Catholics in the US than Jews. It's entirely possible that every Jew in America is no more than three degrees of separation away from the couple gunned down outside the embassy, whereas in this case there are probably many American Catholics who are six degrees of separation removed from the children shot in the church.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Badass: Can beat a little girl, even if she holds a knife.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
You can't really scale prostitution (or any other personalized physical service) the way you can scale digital services.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
He actually had a donations page for money laundering. Not enough throughput.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
Sex addiction? No one paying the women on OF is having sex.
Yes. I do think the US military should have been more ruthless. The British conquered Afghanistan and held it for a long time, at a time of far less technological disparity. A lump sum of competent ultraviolence often adds up to less net violence than a prolonged quagmire where you're desperately trying to use the bare minimum, below which you would straight up lose. And in the end, the US did lose.
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