domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Tretiak
2hr ago
Obama was inaugurated in 2009. And Baltimore and Ferguson weighed heavily on the minds of people at the time.
I see no reason to suppose that horse nomads are cognitively superior (or inferior) to agriculturalists. It seems you presume that a conquering people must be superior to a conquered people in every way, you even imply that pastoralists are more physically attractive, but there is no evidence to support this. The military advantages that nomadic societies enjoy (mobility, access to horses, ability to live of the land and thus to mobilize a large share of the male population, proficiency in war related skills such as hunting etc) are obvious and unrelated to IQ. You need no childish Gobineauism to explain it.
Is this what happened when the Mongols conquered China, when the Arabs conquered Egypt, when the Turks conquered Anatolia? Did societal complexity increase. Did IQ scores go up?
The farmers become experts at incorporating the incoming waves of Nobles without losing as much of their own identity
You speak as if this is a kind of alternative path for nomadic conquest to take, but as far as we can tell this is basically what always happens. The thin nomadic elite melts into the existing, and almost invariably more advanced, sedentary culture. Of course the real subject of this chapter is the Aryan conquests, conquests about which we can say very little. We know almost nothing about pre Aryan cultures and whether they were truly dim witted or not, they left no written records. I do not think they were any more dim-witted than the Song or the Byzantines. Nor do I see any reason to assume that Aryans were different from other pastoralist groups. More sophisticated cultures can succumb to less sophisticated ones, it has happened countless times throughout history.
In any case the Indo European conquest was obviously not the origin of civilization or high culture. The early cities of Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, the Indus Valley seems to have been built by indigenous agriculturalist cultures. These civilizations precede the development of sophisticated into European civilizations by millennia. If anything barbaric Aryans probably disrupted the development of civilization. Basing of a comment you seem to believe that the Egyptian elite was Aryan? This is not far removed from Aryans emerging from an ice moon. The suggestion of a kind of "eternal and natural" aristocracy descended from the Aryans is baseless, as are all of the inferences you make about the culture of these "nobles". Beauty, sophistication, intelligence and glory are not one and the same as power. Sometimes a beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent society gets subjugated by the 1000 bc equivalent of Hells Angels and that is just how it goes.
Since you are discussing history you should probably cite sources, preferably ones up to date with the latest scholarship.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
2hr ago
Let me first reiterate how grateful I am for the good conversation. But I don't think there's a gap here. At some point we're just talking about history, not prehistory. The pattern is consistent and runs strong. In fact this pattern is so universally-understood that I hadn't imagined anyone might object. "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
The values, the selection pressures, the endogamy, the conquering, the degeneration, the replacement by more powerful strains -- all of this looks plain as day to me. Is there any particular thread that occurs to you as doubtful?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
I believe that you should have access to Kimi K2, GLM and Qwen, which are the current best Chinese models. Can't imagine they'd be banned in China.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
TheDemonRazgriz
2hr ago
There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data
I recall seeing this once or twice in the wild from online-left types a while back, and it was tremendously funny to me, because if it were true that the mass protests didn’t cause a spike of covid cases, that would mean the lockdowns were totally pointless in the first place… which never seemed to be the point being made…
Tretiak
2hr ago
Twitter wouldn’t have moved the needle on Kamala’s shot at office, at least not after the first assassination attempt on Trump. If there was any doubt before then, there certainly was no doubt after it. It was all but guaranteed to him at that point.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Has this ever ‘not’ been a thing though?
It was not a thing I perceived when I was an Obama voter in 2008.
Tretiak
3hr ago
… we have half the country that sees riots and murders against people they don't like as a good thing, and they don't like the other half of the country.
Has this ever ‘not’ been a thing though? You can literally find this anywhere.
… the opponents of western liberal democracy have resorted to simply executing people…
In 2023 the US was #3 when it came to the amount of confirmed executions. And while I wouldn’t want to be beaten out by choosing to live in an Islamic theocracy, western democracies have no problems when it comes to executing people. In fact it would probably solve some problems by choosing to execute a few people.
Can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against you on this one.
Dean
Flairless
3hr ago
Strictly speaking, any evolutionary / branching system can look like a horshoe if you zoom close enough to see the modeled divergence.
< is just the more angular form of C, and family branches can easily share traits (and re-merge, Hapsburg-style).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
GoatGuns
Funko pops for the red tribe?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3hr ago
A world that would turn on Israel for imposing these conditions would not impose these conditions on Israel lest it must turn on itself.
If somebody imprisons innocent people in their dungeon and uses them for slave labor people don't actually find it hypocritical to sentence that person to prison. The world in fact did not object to imposing the same conditions on the nazis (death) that the nazis did to the jews. More importantly, those Israelis could simply flee as refugees or return to the country their parents left from - they're actively choosing to remain in their genocidal (remember that we're still talking about the hypothetical so the argument that they haven't been convicted yet is irrelevant) ethnostate. The fact that they are unable to feed themselves because they prioritised ethnic cleansing over sustainability is not really going to engender much sympathy or charity from the outside world.
Somewhere north of 70% of Israelis were born in Israel.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport - it doesn't matter where you were born. The actually relevant statistic here would be how many Israelis are able to get a passport/citizenship for another country. All this statistic really does is establish that at least 30% of the country could just immediately fuck off back home if they objected to Israeli policy.
AnonymousActuary
3hr ago
you can't forget the "in the middle of a pandemic" part. For two months everyone had been told the most important thing to do was slow the spread of the virus. People sacrificed immensely in those two months to do so. And then, suddenly, no, the most important thing is for people to protest, and riot, and loot.
Fauci at least was consistent in saying they were a bad idea. I won't give him much, but I will give him that.
There's been a myth that there was not a rise in COVID afterwards that was pretty easily debunked by looking at city by city data - a lot of cities had spikes a few weeks after protests started. SpottedToad (may he RIP) had some great threads on it back in the day...
Dean
Flairless
3hr ago
This is the lovable sort of self-confidence/smug/humor that, well, I love.
Thanks for the smile.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
Except, because it is not a literal machine but is actually humans implementing complicated emergent behavior, it does not fully embody any of those. It can be bargained with, because the humans that compose it can be bargained with: both individually and collectively. It can feel pity and remorse and fear, because the humans that compose it can feel pity and remorse and fear.
It is currently engaged in a strategy of encroachment: defecting more and more often and more severely in order to exploit the forgiveness of its opponents and see what it can get away with. But this is NOT what a defect bot does. A defect bot defects: always. A defect bot cannot pretend to be anything other than a defect bot, because it has no degrees of freedom with which to signal anything. It does not pretend to cooperate or tit for tat in an attempt to fool its opponents, it just defects.
Again, look at the world around us. Are we currently in the middle of a civil war gunning down each other in the streets? No. That's what maximum defection looks like. We're not there yet. I hope we never get there. And strategic, proportional punishment to defections without escalating maximally is a good way to fight off the encroachment without immediately getting to that state. Even if your opponents are engaged in bad-faith behavior and you need to stop them, deceiving yourself into thinking they're something other than what they are is not strategic. Exaggerations don't help you learn or prepare effective strategy. Maybe you think the appropriate punishments need to be much harsher than they currently are in order to more strongly disincentivize future defections, but this only works because the opponents are not actual defect bots (who ignore punishment and can't stop defecting ever, and can only be solved with death).
Dean
Flairless
3hr ago
Sure. Agreement with this is more, not less, market reason to cancel.
Media market analytics tends to go by national/regional demographics, not partisan demographics. Flat cost decisions (such as hiring) that might make sense if you view yourself in a 320 million market make a bit less sense if you're in a 'merely' 160 million market due to a political filter.
If the 160 lost market might be recovered, you fire the excess and bring in new help. But if the 160 market can't be recovered, you still fire the excess.
DiscourseMagnus
3hr ago
This has got to be one of the starkest and most pathetic instances I've ever seen of the "pseudocomedian political commentator shielded from scrutiny on the basis of their supposed comedian status" complex.
At least Kimmel can rest easy knowing that the Biden administration as recently as last year was publicly mooting to global business elites how to address the sort of disinformation that Kimmel was perpetrating in his remarks, and which has had reoccuring Democratic elite support for years.
Polls indicate that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low. Those on the Right often refer to much of what the mainstream media reports as “fake news,” while those on the Left characterize much of the reporting from the Right as a “disinformation” problem. However, the approach to resolving these concerns remains partisan.
This issue has come into sharper focus recently following comments by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama, at a World Economic Forum conference. He described the First Amendment as “a major block” to achieving accountability in media reporting on facts.
Kerry’s remarks underscore the delicate balance between protecting free speech and addressing what different political factions consider fake news or disinformation.
“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts,” Kerry said. “But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.”
Kerry noted that the problem of disinformation is unique to democracies, where no single leader has the authority to define what constitutes factual information. He suggested that the upcoming elections in November could lead to changes, depending on the outcomes for Congress and the White House.
“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to implement change,” he said.
Kerry’s comments have revived sentiments expressed by progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021, when she called for greater restraint on media practices during an Instagram live video.
“We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation,” she said. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another entirely to just say things that are false. So that’s something we’re looking into.”
Well, Kerry's monkey paw seems to have well curled on parts of that. But Kimmel's remarks on the partisan nature of the political assassination-
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them"
-would be an almost textbook example of disinformation, i.e. false information intended to mislead. In this case, a false claim that the political assassination was a MAGA gang partisan, to mislead from the already apparent and growing weight of evidence of a left-partisan.
I'm sure if the Biden administration had won, it would have applied its desired rules, fairly.
GroundNews seems aight, I've recommended it to normies after repeated exposure from sponsorships though do not use it myself.
GoatGuns look kinda cool and I've considered getting one to fidget around with but probably won't.
Nebula and History of Weapons & War seem great but I have too much other great stuff in my backlog and I can't really organizationally afford another platform.
Specify 'a few.'
In some contexts, 'a few' is three. In other contexts, three thousand might be 'a few' due to the scale. 'A few' is as specific as 'a bit', which doesn't have to mean 'one.' The Ferguson Effect was long downplayed for having only being 'a bit' of an impact, even as later research claims argue that homicides during a follow-on period raised one-zero percent (10%) as opposed to one percent (1%). That's an order of magnitude difference than might be implied by a figure of speech.
This is before duration-over-time is applied to metrics. Consider the Seattle CHOP autonomous zone, which lasted nearly a month as a de-facto secessionist zone of no law enforcement at the city's tolerance before being quickly and quietly rolled up after an unambiguous murder. Does that count as one protest, or over two dozen?
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
It is financial. No reason to think that it was in better shape than Colbert. And it was a just a good pretext to sack him, while letting the admin take the blame. Disney would have fought tooth and nail to preserve a real moneymaker.
On the other hand - a person has an absolute right to go on the street and sing ding dong the witch is dead.
Which as I remember was actually some of theirs mishandling a flare
I saw this claim many times, linking the videos (there were 2-3) as if it were self evident. I literally could not see anything at all resembling that, watching them over closely several times. I think it was either a conscious bad-faith lie by many claimants, or else identifying the sparkling thing that fell out of the sky as obviously not a drone itself or a typical drone attack as we'd recognize it from frag-grenade-drop footage from Ukraine. But there was still no mishandling (or any handling at all) in evidence in the videos: a sparkling thing just relatively slowly fell out of the sky and exploded.
I saw some evidence it was an incendiary grenade but did not pursue it deeply. Moreover, evidence that it was a model of incendiary grenade in use by Israel, the US, and others (which I pursued even less deeply).
I also noted that its position, velocity and acceleration apparent in the videos really only seem consistent with having been dropped from not very high up and ignited only in the last moments of its descent (which wouldn't be consistent with a gun-fired flare).
On the balance of evidence I believe it was a drone attack
This hoax is much older than last week
Yes I too remember that, and moreover I remember seeing it before. Perhaps it was a re-creation or a leak. What happened last week was official and mattered for that.
(I do not currently have time to properly look up and link any of this, but might if you really want)
The left as forced economic redistribution of resources, to the poor. I thought that was implied. Sulla lining handing his enemies’ estates to his allies doesn’t qualify. Sulla abolishing the grain dole does make him right-wing. Enclosure , that’s just privatization. Although it might be characterized as dispossession of the riff-raff, which would be right-wing.
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