culture war roundup
If you want to understand the position of HBD enjoys better, you are perfectly allowed to lay out your current understanding of the HBD viewpoint and then ask about the parts that you think don't make sense.
Instead you post: Acktually, if HBDers really believed what they say, they "would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race."
I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe.
Who is "you guys" and who is "your political tribe???"
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
On the sidebar it says "This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." In this thread, it is claimed "the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
After my ban for this comment, it's hard to take that seriously. It did not include personal attacks, name-calling, strawmanning, or attempting to enforce ideological conformity. It "spoke plainly" and provided evidence. Yet the mods banned me for it, saying I was being an "immense pain in the ass."
I think the mods, and most people here, believe that they want this to be an open discussion forum with people of many different viewpoints, but when they're actually confronted with it, they feel it's an "immense pain in the ass." They called me an "obnoxious trolling shitstirrer." Yes, I am a shitstirrer in the sense that I say things that go against the dominant ideological viewpoint here, and I know in advance that hostility is likely to result. But isn't that what you want here, rather than another online echo chamber? I'm sure many of you have experience being "shitstirrers" in online spaces where you're in the ideological minority, now the shoe's on the other foot.
The mods accused me of "snarling" at my enemies, which gets to the meat of the issue: do you want an ideologically diverse forum or not? I freely admit I have a contempt for forms of conservatism and white nationalism I see as third-worldist. (Anti-vax, raw milk, conspiratorial, superstitious, fetishizing low-skilled manual labor, etc.) That's why I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe. If you think I'm a "leftist," try talking to a real one, the kind who uses terms like "patriarchy" or "heteronormativity" non-ironically. They do NOT like you. They see you as a malignant, cancerous influence on America. If you don't want to have a discussion forum with people who dislike you, change your rules to state that they aren't welcome. If, on the other hand, you want people from other tribes to be in this "jury," then you've got to accept them as they are rather than the imagined versions who disagree with you but like and respect you and never come around to actually posting here.
It seems to me that what some people here want is a forum with "left-wing" equivalents of David French. For the unfamiliar, David French is an allegedly "conservative" columnist for the NYT whose articles are just one after another telling liberals they're right and that conservatives are gross and mean and only ever making "we need 50 Stalins" criticisms of the Left. Thing is, French doesn't play this role for free. And you should be glad you don't have David French's, as I suspect that they have had a detrimental impact on the Left's electoral fortunes. If your only exposure to "conservatives" is people like David French, you're going to get a warped view of American politics that will lead to bad election strategy.
None of this is to say you should get rid of your rules against shaming, strawmanning, name-calling, etc. Maybe a new rule should be "be as polite as possible without being insincere." I admit that this is a tough balance to strike, I just think that right now the Motte is too far toward forced politeness leading to ideological conformity.
faceh
4d ago
Epstein‘s MO was to lie about his girls’ ages to collect blackmail material, theres no reason to believe these people are like actual pedophiles
I mean, sure. But you'd really hope that such people would want reassurances that the woman was there willingly and weren't coerced, drugged, or blackmailed into it themselves. I think most 'normal' people would be sketched out, even if they don't immediately go to the cops.
That he was able to get away with it for quite a while hints that people were willingly turning a blind eye. Not the same as being complicit, but it still reads like a moral failure.
And of course we can go AKSHULLY there's no pedophilia involved whatsoever b/c all the girls were post-pubescent and in their teens. I am sure some people think there's documented proof of like, children being raped or something.
Though of course the more conspiratorial element is that the really nasty stuff occurred on the jet or on the private island.
Do I think there was literal child sacrifice or something going on? No.
But my priors on someone who is involved in pimping underage women out being involved in even more depraved activities are... reasonably high.
It is genuinely harder for me to believe that almost all global elites diligently avoid taboo and socially abhorrent/illegal behaviors. Especially with the more recent dominoes falling WRT to P. Diddy and that whole circle. That said, I don't think they're going around consuming human flesh or bathing in virgin blood, I doubt the very worst of the theories are at all accurate.
What can I say, ensuring there are consequences for elites misbehavior is one of my pet issues.
Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4d ago
gattsuru
4d ago
Common well publicized problems have common well publicized solutions, if your traing data consists of 90-somthing percent correct answers and reminder garbage you will get a 90-somthing percent solution.
As i said above Gemini is not reasoning or naive, it is computing an average. Now as much as i may seem down on LLMs, I am not. I may not believe that they represent viable path towards AGi but that doesn't mean they are without use. The rapid collation of related tokens has an obvious "killer app" and that app is translation be that in spoken languages or programming languages.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/249920?context=8#context
At the risk of a self-dox, I have an advanced degree in Applied Math, and multiple published papers and patents related to the use of machine learning in robotics and signal processing. I was introduced to the rationalist community through a mutual friend in the SCA and was initally excited by the opportunity to discuss the philosophical and engineering challenges of developing artificial intelligence. However as time went on i largely gave up trying to discuss AI with people outside the industry as it became increasingly apparent to me that most rationalists were more interested in the use of AI as a conceptual vehicle to push thier particular brand of Silicon Valley woo than they were the aforementioned philosophical and engineering challenges.
The reason i don't talk about it is in large part that i find it difficult to speak honestly without sounding uncharitable. I believe that the "wordcels" take these bots seriously because they naturally associate "the ability to string words together" with intent/sentience while simultaneously lacking sufficient background knowledge and/or understanding of algorithmic behavior to recognize that everthing the OP describes lies well within the bounds of expected behavior. See the post from a few weeks ago where people thought that GPT was engaged in "code-switching". What the lay-man interperts as intent is to the mathematician the functional output of the equation as described.
eee
5d ago
I'm not about to spend hours going through 5 year old comments of someone to find specific comments. That would be a gigantic waste of time for numerous reasons. The first is that this matter is so no real importance. The second is that you have already not accepted the testimony of numerous people recounting their personal experiences with him. Furthermore, several of them did provide receipts and here you are lying saying that no one has! Why exactly would I bother knowing that no matter what I post you aren't going to acknowledge it? Also when you make similar claims you do not bother to substantiate it yourself?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
and not knowing this poster's alleged prior history
There's your problem.
On top of what cjet says dude always nukes his posts and account after people figure out it's him. The behavior is all the more bizarre, since, as you say what he posts isn't really objectionable, if he just gave the whole "hiding your power level" shtick a rest.
Yeah, from the legal realist perspective this whole debate is pretty settled. It'd be nice if "X shall Y" meant something. It doesn't. Even if you want to cordon off immigration law as enforcement discretion -- pretty hard to do honestly, given the only enforcement in this law is the fed AG going after companies -- we have other examples. King v. Burwell is best-known for its denouement, but earlier parts of the case dismissed challenges to the continuous delays in the employer mandate as unredressable, and it wasn't even a surprise then. That, likewise, included a disclaimer that the government would surrender any possibility of future lawsuit on the matters in the covered time period.
Without explicit mechanism for private modes of action available to actual people (and that's not a guarantee!), or a one-off 'special solicitude' from SCOTUS, "shall" means less than a Zoomer saying "literally". Yes, businesses acting in violation of the law could theoretically get punished under a different administration, despite this 'dispensation' -- it wouldn't even trigger the various rules against ex post facto laws for a bunch of reasons, though there would possibly be some due process concerns -- but anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that it's either not going to happen, or will only happen if a Dem President wants to (threaten to) completely crush some disfavored business.
Which would be fine if Vladeck were some naive rando who still thought the text of the law mattered, or predicating his analysis as clearly on the "ought" side of the is-ought dividing line. But no. The House of Representatives couldn't challenge these rules even if it specifically involved the government's taxation power; claiming that a random competitor might succeed in a challenge of an enforcement discretion letter raises serious questions about anyone with nontrivial knowledge of relevant caselaw's competence or honesty. And Vladeck works as a professor of law, at a school that charges thousands of dollars a credit-hour to listen to him!
ArmedTooHeavily
5d ago
See my response to a different commentator here, I misunderstood.
Shrike
5d ago
Note my reply here – a decoy without the electronics systems would be pretty useful nonetheless (and that's without getting into using it as an aerodynamic test item or a testbed for new electronics systems, both of which are potentially very useful applications).
to avoid having to explain that under certain conditions (extreme low range, high powered analog radars) your stealth plane isn't that stealthy
This isn't all that secret, I had a B-2 engineer tell me something similar to my face in casual conversation.
ArmedTooHeavily
5d ago
which given the speed at which those hunks of metal can move and turn, is incredibly plausible (also the pilot recovery with zero issues)
Disagree, see my comment here.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
6d ago
Lauren Rosenhall, Soumya Karlamanga, and Adam Nagourney for the New York Times, "California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law" (archive) (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at theschism.) Other coverage is available from Eric Levitz at Vox, Henry Grabar at Slate, Ben Christopher at CalMatters, and Taryn Luna and Liam Dillon at the Los Angeles Times. Some of this work draws from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks' Select Committee on Permitting Reform, which issued its final report earlier this year.
In our last episode, there were three major reforms in play for this year's legislative season: zoning reform (SB 79), improving the CEQA exemption for infill housing (AB 609), and broad CEQA reform (SB 607). SB 79 is currently in the Assembly (it passed Assembly Housing 9-2, and now goes to Assembly Local Government, then the floor, then Senate concurrence, then the Governor's desk), but in a surprise move, Newsom, whose inaction I've previously complained about, pulled CEQA reform into this year's budget process, which essentially makes it a must-pass piece of legislation. There's some room for short negotiation, but it's fast-paced, and if the budget isn't passed, the legislators don't get paid until it is. (There is, as I understand it, no back pay, so it's a real penalty.)
CEQA is arguably the most significant non-zoning barrier to housing production (here's a short selection of shenaniganry, and I've covered it here and here); the CA YIMBY legislative director described this as "probably the most important thing California has done on housing in the present YIMBY moment" and explained how we got here.
The main opponents here were the usual Livable California NIMBYs, but also the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (the "Trades"). On first glance, environmental review doesn't seem connected to labor, but because CEQA provides an all-purpose method of delay (and delay costs money), it's used to extract concessions, like the use of union labor, in exchange for not delaying the project. Note that nearly 90% of the construction workforce is non-union; the Trades are, in effect, taking work away from a lot of construction workers in order to ensure much higher pay for the few union construction workers, who mostly work on government projects or subsidized housing which mandates union labor.
There was, during this process, an intense argument, occurring mostly behind-the-scenes, about what labor standards should look like. The expected proposal was that projects skipping environmental review would have to pay higher, but nowhere near union rate, wages; this would probably not have had a significant effect on the bill's usefulness, since the required wages were close to the median wage for construction workers. This did not mollify the Trades, who claimed that it "will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs"; their official opposition letter described it as "a bill that masquerades as housing reform while launching an all-out assault on the livelihoods, health, and dignity of California construction workers".
But a few days later, the wage stuff was completely removed; the expanded CEQA infill exemption simply exempts most infill projects from environmental review, period. (Projects above eighty-five feet, which do require union labor, generally use more-expensive Type I construction anyway.)
In a bit more detail, one of the components of the originally proposed reform was removing a lowered standard for demanding a full environmental impact statement. Under existing law, if an agency makes a negative declaration (i.e., "there isn't a meaningful environmental impact here"), they can be forced to reconsider that under a "fair argument" standard, which is much lower than a "reasonable person" standard; this incentivizes agencies to do unnecessary EIRs to avoid the chance that some crank will force them to do one anyway. This reform has been removed; the "fair argument" standard remains.
For more deep dives, see Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener (the original authors of these reforms) being interviewed by David Roberts for Volts, "The fight to build faster in California", which is slightly outdated, as it was recorded before the final bill was passed; see also the same two legislators being interviewed by Derek Thompson for Plain English, "How Abundance Won in California". (For a contrast, see Roberts' 2023 interview with Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project, "The progressive take on the permitting debate", which is a defense of complex, discretionary permitting.)
Thompson is, of course, Ezra Klein's coauthor on Abundance, as covered in the last installment, and Newsom, in the press conference announcing the signing, specifically gave a shout-out to the concept and to Klein (though not Thompson). (Note Senator Aisha Wahab, the Housing chair, at left wearing black, pulling some faces at that.) Newsom, understandably, made a meal of this; the full press conference is here.
bonsaii
7d ago
It's just yet another step in the direction of forcing American society to restructure for the benefit of dog owners. I've posted before about my utter disdain for modern dog culture and the strong correlation between selfishness/narcissism with dog ownership. They have already turned my city into their personal open-air toilet and have made nearly every space "dog-friendly" despite signs politely requesting otherwise. The difference here is that this isn't just some rule or norm they can repeatedly violate without asking until society throws its hands up at the futility of enforcement. For once, they are on the side opposed to the social norm defectors and need top-down enforcement, but have their heads too far up their dogs' asses to see the irony.
I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.
Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing.
One would think! And yet.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
Fun, mildly interesting—what's the difference?
I think the Hussen case in particular is fairly funny. He submitted oodles of evidence, but the government still refused to believe that his marriage was genuine.
In addition to these two affidavits, Hussen submitted seven affidavits of family members and friends, many of whom had traveled great distances to attend the wedding, stating that the family members and friends had witnessed both the development of Hussen and Houndito’s relationship and the wedding. Hussen also submitted a copy of the signed marriage certificate and Islamic marriage contract, with the latter obligating Houndito’s family to pay a $10,000 dowry; numerous photographs depicting the wedding ceremony and honeymoon; a receipt for payment of more than $4,000 for his purchase of a diamond ring; copies of two plane tickets and a receipt showing that the couple paid more than $300 to fly to Miami for their honeymoon; a receipt showing that the couple paid more than $1,400 to place a four-night reservation at a hotel in Miami; a copy of a lease agreement they signed for an apartment in Virginia, dated three days prior to the wedding; a copy of an automobile insurance card that named both Hussen and Houndito as the policy’s insured; and finally, photos that depicted Hussen’s family meeting Houndito’s family in Ethiopia and the celebration that Hussen’s father hosted in Ethiopia to celebrate their marriage.
The BIA denied Hussen’s motion to reopen, stating that the standard to reopen proceedings to seek adjustment of status based on a marriage entered after the commencement of removal proceedings required Hussen to submit “clear and convincing evidence of the bona fides of the marriage.” While the BIA acknowledged that Hussen had attached photographs of the wedding, honeymoon, and gathering between families, as well as affidavits from friends and family and the couple’s lease agreement, it concluded that this was only “some evidence of the bona fides of [the] marriage” but was “insufficient to establish the bona fides of his marriage by clear and convincing evidence.”
Also, don't forget about the context of past discussions of marriage fraud on this forum (1 2).
Someone should remind the North Koreans their 'GDP' is small, so they can't provide more shells to Russia than Europe (huge GDP!)
If someone told the North Koreans that having a higher GDP meant you could buy more foreign weapons, I'm sure they'd agree. In any case, I don't know how this supports your original claim that "merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic".
Israel gets the most advanced US weapons to fight a few Arabs, while Ukraine gets second-rate equipment, F-16s rather than F-35s, in a war with Russia.
Plenty of other countries also get F35s, like Belgium, who don't even have Arabs to fight.
The distinction is that all other US allies bring something to the table.
Israel brings plenty to the table, although I suspect you're too emotionally invested in a certain point of view to ever accept any evidence of this.
Britain, Australia, Canada will send troops to help America too.
Because they have mutual defence treaties. Such an agreement between the US and Israel would be drastically more in Israel's favour than America's, given how much more often Israel is attacked. Frankly if you want a single piece of evidence that America foreign policy isn't beholden to Israeli interests, this would probably be it.
They create enemies for America, they harm collaboration with the Islamic world,
Every vaguely functional Islamic country is already onside with the US (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, etc). Iran's hate for the US goes far beyond Israel. The original reason the US chose to ally with with Israel during the Cold War is because it wasn't one of the Arab states aligned with the USSR.
they sell military technology to China
This is the only legitimate criticism of Israel I've seen you make so far.
Suck up aid like a leech.
I'd advise you to look at those aid numbers again. They're small when it comes to how wealthy Israel is, and insignificant to the US. And I'm not sure why you'd consider Israel a leech and not Ukraine when Ukraine has been getting much larger amounts of aid over the past few years.
They even got the US to pay off their neighbours too, Egypt and to a lesser extent Jordan get billions in aid for being nice to Israel, the aid started as soon as they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Egypt and Jordan get money to keep their governments from falling apart. Neither poses anything close to a threat to Israel. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed six years after the Yom Kippur war ended with Israel advancing on Cairo, because relations and with and recognition from the largest Arab state were worth way more to Israel than continuing to humiliate Egypt further.
If it weren't for Israeli influence, the war wouldn't have happened.
I doubt it, but it doesn't matter, because the claim that Israel caused the war isn't sufficient for your argument that the US almost always prioritises Israeli foreign policy over its own.
The US has bombed Yemen and Iran, given Israel munitions to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. US troops were infamously on the ground in Lebanon before getting blown up and departing.
On a scale from complete non-intervention to ground invasions in all the countries mentioned (which is probably what most Israelis would like to happen if they could choose), the US' historical actions in the ME are overwhelmingly closer to the isolationist side of that spectrum.
Just because the Israel lobby doesn't get everything they want all of the time
Didn't you start by saying something very close to this? The particular quote being:
Occasionally the US tries to do something that actually prioritizes American interests over Israel's, the Israel lobby usually nixes this in the end
In any case:
It doesn't mean their influence isn't excessive.
Is much more reasonable than the original position you staked out.
No_one
9d ago
Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.
Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.
The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.
Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.
Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.
So, in conclusion:
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
- feed Israeli narrative
- not actually provide them with the required capability to deter anyone
- cause normies in Israel/West to demand an actual end to Iranian nuclear program
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
faceh
9d ago
Tooting my own horn. December 1, 2022 I predicted:
My honest bet is that any student currently in their first year of Law School will be unable to compete with AI legal services by the time they graduate. Certainly not on cost. The AI didn't incur 5-6 figure loans for it's legal training.
Put another way, the AI will be as competent/capable as a first-year associate at a law firm inside 3 years.
This was before GPT4 was on the scene. Reiterated it 3 months ago
And then today I read this nice little headline:
Artificial Intelligence is now an A+ law student, study finds
If they can stop the damn thing from hallucinating caselaw and statutes, it might already be there.
But, let me admit, that if we don't see downward pressure on first-year wages or staffing reductions this year, I missed the meatiest part of the prediction.
There's the counter-argument that AI lawyers will actually stimulate demand for attorneys by making contracts way more complex. I don't buy it, but I see it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9d ago
I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.
First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.
Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.
I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).
But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.
You know who drove him away?
Me.
The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.
Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."
But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.
Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.
(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)
Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."
@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.
You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").
The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.
You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.
But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.
@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.
When you moderated a forum, what did you do about posters who threatened to leave and take their valuable perspectives with them if they didn't get their way?
(I promise that thought came to mind before I realized it would come off as accusing you of doing so. I can say I hope you're not.)
You see, moderators do not have the power to keep members in a community: they can only ban/punish or not. Members have their right to decide to stay or go. And here, many left-wing posters have left not with a permaban but with a flounce: a public door-slam denouncing the moderators, and/or the posters, and/or whomever, for tolerating the wrong kinds of people too much and the right kinds of people not enough.
Or they just didn't make the jumps: there are still plenty of well-known left-wing posters from the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Roundup days still seeming to post their same views under the new "no culture war" regime. (Speaking of which, it occurs to me this community has twice been sent off into exile, both times on account of outside demands/threats over too much right-wing activity.)
But what do you do about flouncers? The most obvious solution is to give them what they want: give them special treatment, "affirmative action for left-wingers," as Scott did on SlateStarCodex. You can do that, but, in this case, affirmative action doesn't prove effective at healing underlying divisions. The majority ends up rankled and chilly towards the officially-favored minority, it seems.
Offhand, I don't have any other policy proposal options based on the history of the Scott-sphere. Now, I thought about asking about your experience handling intractable disagreements, not as a forum moderator, but as an Israeli, but that seems like it could get really pessimistic really quickly, so maybe we shouldn't get into that.
More options
Context Copy link