domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
GBRK
2d ago
How's that relevant to anything I said?
Reference to the sororitas paradox. "Coherent" isn't a well-defined idea. You can come up with a definition to make anything coherent or incoherent. I'd rather speak in terms of degrees-- accepting that any social target is going to have to be fuzzy, and working to keep it useful over trying to define hard boundaries.
What happens to people who stray outside these overton windows?
The same thing that currently happens. Escalating levels of social sanctions followed by criminal punishments.
Have I misunderstood something?
That's accurate.
Correct. Catholics aren't known for just letting it go, because they're confident the truth will win out in the end. They are known for a highly organized church, a highly formalized dogma, and putting significant resources into their maintenance, and proselytization. It's like that quip from Star Control "peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon".
Being confident in God isn't incompatible with working hard toward virtuous ends. "Faith without works..." etcetera etcetera.
Yes. It's not the only one though, and the other ones might have the advantage depending on the situation. You wouldn't be considering forcing people to go to church otherwise.
It's not about being afraid of muslims, it's about, it's that going to (a proper) church is a strictly good thing, for both the individual and the community. Rather than impose it because I'm afraid of an enemy group, I'd impose it because "getting people to do good things" is one of the main purposes of a community. And yes, as a consequence, it would keep out bad people and bring in good people. My beliefs are the best; that's exactly what I'd expect them to do.
Huh? If you're wrong about the truth winning out in the general cosmic sense, you should have no fear of being set right? Wouldn't that be your absolute worst case scenario? If you actually had the truth, but it lost, because you refused to fight for it?
If I'm wrong about having the best (most beneficial) beliefs, then I have no fear of adopting better beliefs. You're missing the point by focusing on "truth" here. Of course, I also believe that my beliefs are true, but that's noncentral.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
You're setting the threshold of "norm" precisely at, "taking control of the supreme court by refusing to confirm qualified appointees was Fine but taking control of the supreme court by adding more justices would be Bad." One heap is bigger than the other, but they're both heaps.
If you think packing the court is fine, we can begin right now. Many Republican presidents could have done so during a number of years in the past. Isn't it odd they didn't?
GBRK
2d ago
I don't see how I'm doing this
You're setting the threshold of "norm" precisely at, "taking control of the supreme court by refusing to confirm qualified appointees was Fine but taking control of the supreme court by adding more justices would be Bad." One heap is bigger than the other, but they're both heaps.
So let's a stop with this nonsense, because muh norms.
When did I start? Orange man bad (for me) because he opposes my interests and my ingroup. Whether or not he breaks norms doesn't matter.
GBRK
2d ago
If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup,
extremely illiberal muslims shouldn't be in our ingroup (by default; I'd make attempts to convert them and bring them in). I'm very pro-coherent-definition. I'm happy with making an us/them distinction. I just want to make it on the basis of adhering to a particular creed, rather than arbitrarily assigning it via ancestry.
pigeonburger
2d ago
Maybe Biden was never truly president in anything more than a ceremonial sense, and was essentially understood consiously or not, as simply giving executive power back to the administrative state that the Obama administration installed.
You're clearly defining "norm" in a way that benefits your political interests
I don't see how I'm doing this. The way I'm defining "norm" might benefit my political interests in a specific case, but a simple look at the historical record will yield many cases of it benefiting my opponents.
That's why this whole "norms" business is pointless in the first place. It's just a useless definition game.
Ok, cool. So let's a stop with this nonsense of telling me how orange man bad, because muh norms.
jkf
2d ago
may be uncoordinated enough that you can just grab her wrist before she can flinch
If the girl is not actively on the attack, just brandishing the knife (as in the video), you have first-mover advantage. So long as she's within reach and you act first, you can get ahold of her wrist 100 times out of 100. It's the same concept as quickdraw guys who can draw and fire a holstered double-action revolver before an alert adult can react, so long as they choose when to draw:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ELaiJZ8tjSk&t=249
This doesn't win a knife fight against somebody strong enough to fight back once you've got a grip on them, but in the case in question it's pretty hard for me to see much (physical) risk.
GBRK
2d ago
but the idea this was breaking some norm is absurd.
You're clearly defining "norm" in a way that benefits your political interests. Symmetrically, it should be fine for your enemies to do the same. That's why this whole "norms" business is pointless in the first place. It's just a useless definition game. Similarly, "court-packing" has no objective definition. Republicans have used purely legal means to ensure that the the court rules in their favor. Democrats aren't currently capable of doing the same-- but if they were to gain that capability, there's no objective reason they shouldn't do the same. There might be practical reasons, and I would encourage the democrats to consider them, but if they decide that swaying the supreme court to their side is a good idea, I don't see why "norms" should be any barrier.
GBRK
2d ago
Okay, so your argument is that:
- I claim I don't like trump because I don't like his policies because I think his policies are bad.
- Obamacare is bad.
- ... consequently, I should dislike obamacare
- ... consequently, I should dislike the people who passed obamacare as much as I dislike trump
- But I don't.
- Therefore 1 is in contradiction with 4.
- Therefore I am not accurately representing why I dislike trump.
I have two counterarguments.
#1: Narrow
Point #2 is wrong. Obamacare is good. Therefore 3 and 4 are wrong, and there's no contradiction.
#2: Broad
Even if I were to admit that obamacare was bad, that would not be sufficient to demonstrate a contradiction in my position, because my position rests on the particular degree of trump's badness, and also on the utility of opposing him.
Consider this non-political example:
- Bob murders his family and then hangs himself. I find out about this only after it happens.
- My coworker, Jim, kicks puppies every chance he gets. Right now, he's winding up to hit a daschund.
Bob is clearly worse than Jim, no question. But it would be more rational for me to be emotionally motivated to oppose Jim. No amount of anger and hatred would reverse bob's actions, or even be particularly likely to deter future Bobs. But the right emotional reaction to seeing Jim about to kick a puppy might let me intervene in time to stop him, and perhaps even deter future puppy-kickers from doing what they want.
Consider this second example:
- Jim kicks puppies.
- Joe kicks babies.
Jim is clearly bad. But if Jim is willing to get angry with me about Joe, it's politically expedient for me to join Jim in his anger so we can intervene against Joe together than to be angry at Jim first.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class.
Set aside the immigrant/native question for a minute. Is it your belief that killing half the workers in the US would make the other half materially better off? Because that is the implication of your claim.
(A: it won't, of course, because, broadly, more labor => more production => more Stuff That People Want)
You shouldn't be thankful big ag can bring in >100,000 H-2A workers so your strawberries are only $5 a pound. You should be furious that your compensation hasn't scaled proportionally so you can afford strawberries at $10 or $15 or $20 a pound; you should be furious at the greed of banks and corporations, at the incompetence and corruption in government, that has allowed the rampant inflation from the probably $0.50 a pound strawberries cost in 1970.
It doesn't matter if you make $10 an hour and strawberries cost $5 or you make $100 an hour and strawberries cost $50. The way you bring down the price of strawberries is by producing more strawberries. Repeat x1b across literally everything.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
I will point out that the Euro countries which are producing the most NBA stars are also some of the countries with the highest average male heights on Earth. (The Balkan countries, Lithuania and Latvia, Finland, and Germany.) Not saying the other factors people have brought up aren’t real, but it’s worth pointing out that men from these countries do have at least one very important physical attribute working in their favor, relative to the world at large.
EDIT: I realize that I am not quite following the instructions for this forum. I thought of this is as more of a technical discussion forum and did not want to post this in the CW thread.
Coding agents.
I use Gemini and Claude. I pay $20 for Anthropic Pro, so I am not using API tokens for Claude. With Gemini, you can do a lot with just a google account, or at least you definitely could on day 1.
I am hating Gemini lately. If I load the Pro model (default), I get mostly nothing but 503 errors. This was not the case roughly a month ago, when Google was promising a Pro response every 60 seconds and "you won't run out of tokens" or whatever. Fine, it's free, I get it. So now I use gemini-2.5-flash mostly. But this motherfucker is constantly undermining me. If I can get flash into a groove, we do fine, but I fight this guy a lot. I also get a vibe of "petulant laborer". It kind of cracks me up.
Claude is great, super friendly and helpful. I almost exclusively use Sonnet, and Sonnet has a case of the dumbs. It's extremely manageable, and I get more work done with Claude than Gemini. I can switch to Opus, and I will run out of my Pro credits and then open a Gemini session.
When I get stuck, I go to chatgpt.com and copy/paste. This usually unsticks me or gives me a new direction. I see this for 3 reasons:
- a new model
- a web prompt is a more direct interface to the model than the coding agent
- OpenAI sauce
I guess I'll use the OpenAI cursor thing sooner or later. I am CLI-only, headless linux for dev. I have a graphical environment for browsing, etc.
I rarely have the agent make commits, and I have regretted every session where the phrase "vibe coding" popped into my head. I try to discuss more with the agents than make edits, but I do have them make a lot of edits. They are more edit-happy than I would like. The main value-add for the agent, for me, is just the read-access to my project. That they can edit files directly is nice, but also kinda scary and has gone wrong for me. I'm much more comfortable with code generation than code editing. I love these guys for code generation, but I always edit their code, which usually works but ugly. I ask for review more than generation more than edits.
How many grains of sand does it take to form a heap?
How's that relevant to anything I said?
"Coherent" is, ironically, an incoherent target. Rather than create a few hard rules, it makes more sense to define a number of overton windows and accept that they're going to shift over time... but within a self-correcting framework that advantages particular kinds of evolution.
Well, I think that's a recipe for having your creed undermined and completely subverted over time, but that's beside the point. I'd like to know some specifics. What happens to people who stray outside these overton windows? What specific self-correcting mechanisms are you talking about?
Assuming I had a creedal nation like I wanted, there would be particular mechanisms in place to enforce that creed, which people against that creed would likely be unable to tolerate. but if muslims really want to come to a country where you have to attend church on sundays to be able to vote, then I'll take the win with grace, and welcome all the soon-to-be-converts.
That's great, I think it would work as well. However, you said that even though you disagree with leftists and liberals on matters of creed, you "think by far the bigger threat is a government that excludes people who indisputably share my creed, versus a government that would try and promote another creed" and went on to say how you're confident truth will win out in the end. This would imply that you'd be fine with importing a sizable Muslim minority even if you didn't have the ability to force them to go to church, and that the costs of excluding the tiny amount of Christians would outweigh the costs of excluding the Muslims, even under those circumstances.
Have I misunderstood something?
???
I think God is willing to personally intervene on behalf of my religious community... and you think it's strange that I'm confident?
Correct. Catholics aren't known for just letting it go, because they're confident the truth will win out in the end. They are known for a highly organized church, a highly formalized dogma, and putting significant resources into their maintenance, and proselytization. It's like that quip from Star Control "peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon".
The truth is an asymmetric weapon.
Yes. It's not the only one though, and the other ones might have the advantage depending on the situation. You wouldn't be considering forcing people to go to church otherwise.
And if I'm wrong... then I should have no fear of being set right!
Huh? If you're wrong about the truth winning out in the general cosmic sense, you should have no fear of being set right? Wouldn't that be your absolute worst case scenario? If you actually had the truth, but it lost, because you refused to fight for it?
GBRK
2d ago
It's great in the aggregate, but not for every individual in particular. I recognize that there are people rationally opposed to immigration. But I have no reason to prioritize their interests over the interests of either myself or the (immigrant-inclusive) collective.
but there's no mechanism for excluding them or making them comply.
What makes you think I'm against compliance mechanisms? I believe the government has a duty and an interest in enforcing prosocial behavior. That's the entire point of creedal citizenship! You can say that it's a problem that people might defect against shared values and I'd agree with you, but it's crazy talk to identify the shared values as the problem, rather than the defection. A society built on-- for example-- shared ancestry, doesn't even get to the starting line!
Best as in most beneficial to hold, or best as in most able to propagate in a competitive environment? Because a belief that is the one may not also be the other.
For every belief I have, if I thought there was a more beneficial belief to posses, I would believe that instead. Therefore I can rationally conclude that I have the most-beneficial beliefs. My meta-confidence isn't 100%, since I could imagine learning reasons to swap out my beliefs again-- but for that exact reason it makes sense to bring in people with competing beliefs, so that I can either convert them, dominate them, or assimilate their more-adaptive traits.
Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them.
Here you imply what is the main issue I have with the western liberal's version of this, and why they are unable to apply it in a way that actually functions; an ingroup implies the existence of outgroups, or at least of people not in the ingroup. If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup, who isn't? If people are denied a coherent definition of their ingroup, they cannot believe it will scratch their back, so they fall back on base individualism and all the civilisational gains that were achieved by nationalism slowly decay.
Honestly, I truly believe that the only thing that could potentially unite humanity in the way globalists dream of is the discovery of alien intelligence advanced enough to exclude from our ingroup. Because there is never an us without a them.
GBRK
2d ago
A rare return from the field of economics is the fact known for >200 years that increasing the supply of labor literally only ever benefits the ownership class.
All your objections are empirically wrong. HDI has risen over time, coinciding with the greatest increase in labor supply in the history of the planet. And in general, GDP is correlated with population growth
The more laborers you have, the greater the economies of scale, the more innovations you can sustain, the more surplus you generate.
GBRK
2d ago
I don't know that a creedal nation can stay coherent,
How many grains of sand does it take to form a heap?
"Coherent" is, ironically, an incoherent target. Rather than create a few hard rules, it makes more sense to define a number of overton windows and accept that they're going to shift over time... but within a self-correcting framework that advantages particular kinds of evolution.
I think I disagree. If you have a nation that's 98% Catholic, facing the importation of a sizeable population of Muslims, with some Middle-Eastern Christians sprinkled in, that seems like a clear example of excluding people who share your creed being to your benefit.
Assuming I had a creedal nation like I wanted, there would be particular mechanisms in place to enforce that creed, which people against that creed would likely be unable to tolerate. but if muslims really want to come to a country where you have to attend church on sundays to be able to vote, then I'll take the win with grace, and welcome all the soon-to-be-converts.
(apply this to your capitalist/communist objection too.)
It's particularly strange to hear it from a Catholic.
???
I think God is willing to personally intervene on behalf of my religious community... and you think it's strange that I'm confident? I think it would be stranger if I wasn't! The truth is an asymmetric weapon. If I'm right, then I should be confident that I'll win. Not in the short term, maybe, but in a general, cosmic sense. And if I'm wrong... then I should have no fear of being set right!
This is a thing where my brain just declines to recognize the danger. Even aside from the strength issue, most 12 year old girls are just not terribly coordinated.
My thinking is less from playfighting girls, and more from a childhood spent playing with knives and cutting myself a fair bit in the process. Sharp knives require very little force to cut or to pierce, and the motions needed are natural and instinctive. Fuck up the disarm and you can do all the cutting yourself, just bumping into the edge whilst trying to get to the limb behind it. And sure, a tweener girl is likely to have the aggressive mindset to go on the offense, and may be uncoordinated enough that you can just grab her wrist before she can flinch, and probably that knife is even pretty dull because she probably doesn't know how to sharpen it. Probably.
My claim is not that a girl so armed is certain or even likely to win a fight with an adult man. She is not. My argument is that a tweener girl brandishing a ~7-inch chef's knife is making a very serious threat, because a knife can hurt you very badly with very little force.
The marker test is going to tell you mostly about the point. Get a cardboard box and a hot-glue gun, glue together two layers of cardboard and then cut out the knife shape with a boxcutter. paint the edge with food coloring or acrylic paint or whatever. tell her she gets ice cream if she gets a line on you. there's a big difference between trying to get past a quarter-inch of marker tip, and trying to get past six or seven inches of blade.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
The screenshot is right there in my original post, but the source is the anons following the case, so it still could be a TracingWoodgrainesque hoax. I wish the local media could get the girls' side of the story but they're all awfully quiet on that.
GBRK
2d ago
Instead of psychoanalyzing me, tell me how proving "who started it" would actually have any bearing on the logic of my argument. You want to make this a discussion about "who started it." I'm pointing out that that would be pointless because-- among other reasons-- you are not even attempting to accurately describe events. If you truly thought the question was central you would acknowledge what actually happened, that gives rise to your opposition's counterarguments-- and then dismiss those counterarguments by establishing why a particular framework to decide "who started it" is generally useful. But, spoiler alert, that wouldn't work-- because I'm glad norms are being destroyed, and I don't care who took the first step up the escalation ladder.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
Did the adults actually throw the kid to the ground and kick her in the head? Is there any evidence of this in the video or from the aftermath: dirt on her clothes, scrapes or bruises, bloody nose, split lip, any evidence of physical harm?
The GSG excerpt above talks about three girls; the two sisters in the
Someone else in the thread has cited hospital records of treatment for a concussion, so it looks like there was in fact violence inflicted on at least one of the girls.
GBRK
2d ago
They might not conceive of their position as such, but in practice they're in favor of letting in every refugee who claims to be part of the alphabet. Meanwhile, they're mostly in favor of taking away the privileges of citizenship from groups like, for example, nazis. (They might not want to change their citizenship status on paper, but the powers citizenship confers are more important than the actual accounting value.)
Again, I don't believe in their creed, but I agree with them that in principle, someone with the right creed should be allowed the privileges of citizenship (after some time spent proving themselves) regardless of ancestry, and that people granted the privileges of citizenship should be inculcated with particular values.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
If she'd taken off while Lola was arming herself, the video more or less adds up?
If this happened they way the anons / crowdfunders describe, I'd guess she took off after Lola showed up. The dude was tormenting Ruby, Lola comes back armed and tells him to leave her alone, he turns around, takes one look and says "oh, ain't that cute, let me get my phone, I have to record it".
I got interested in the ESP32 stuff just from learning a little about the language, Espressif? It might have been something else, and you can see I never got into it. But one day! I will be a hardware guy doing a lot with cheap chips.
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