domain:alexberenson.substack.com
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
I've been increasingly wondering at what point you have an IQ low enough, that you develop paranoid delusions in response to a society you can't possibly comprehend. If you've ever interacted with a particularly stupid person, many of them have this obnoxious personality trait of treating everything they don't understand like a personal attack.
I wonder at what point the IQ required to participate in society hits such a threshold that maladaptive mental illness in response to it increases.
I especially wonder at what point the various dark patterns of our society cause this to happen to me.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
You know, before reading your comment I had the impression that Leif Erikson had only been there briefly and then his trip was completely forgotten. But apparently there were more records than I thought. Reading his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson#Legacy
I found this:
Knowledge of the Vinland journeys spread around medieval Europe, although to what extent is unclear; writers made mention of remote lands to the west, and notably the medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen directly mentions Vinland (c. 1075) based upon reports from the Danes.[note 2] It has been suggested that the knowledge of Vinland might have been maintained in European seaports in the 15th century, and that Christopher Columbus, who claimed in a letter to have visited Iceland in 1477, could have heard stories of it
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
3hr ago
Mine doesn't do so by default.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
Well, so far as heat/ammo problems, I think I just need to commit to be ER LLaser sniper with lots of double heat sinks.
As for the others, who knows. One thing I did notice was that it appeared my mouse was only registering inputs sporadically. My working theory was that a click only registered if it occurred over the span of a frame. I'd noticed it in other games, but it finally annoyed me enough to start trying shit. So I uninstalled the Logitech Mouseware drivers I put on the system to get the mousewheel to work, and it went away. I'm curious if that had anything to do with the keyboard problems too, but we'll find out.
Old hardware, amiright?
MW2 will always have a special place in my heart. Something about the ambient music, the flat shaded graphics, and the utterly alien and somewhat abstract level design felt like a perfect encapsulation of how terrifyingly other the Clans are.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
3hr ago
More content like this please.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees
Most banks will let you overdraw your account.
Tenaz
3hr ago
We don't believe the material universe predates God. They (and all other spirits, including us) are all eternal and have been around forever. I agree that we don't believe God is the source of being, or the uncaused cause, at least not in the sense creedal Christians do.
They start draining Tidus' ocean! They build titanic sea-walls to keep the water out, expanding their islands to hitherto-unprecedented sizes, capable of supporting unbelievable numbers of souls on these great new plains, haunted as they are by the threat of breakdown in wall-maintenance-capability (honestly English I must insist that this should be but one word).
This hit hard, as a Dutchman.
I wonder, and sincerely doubt, if those who come after us will manage to keep up the sea walls, not necessarily in technological ability but in social ability. I saw Louisiana drown. It doesn't take much.
I remember people here being like: pish posh, should've maintained the levees. Yes, you should've maintained the levees. But that's the entire crux of the matter. You need to have a society that manages to do that, and keeps managing to do that, and not (for example) steal all the dike maintenance money to benefit yourself in the short term. And if you couldn't do it then, what's to say we'll (or that those will succeed us will) do that 30-40 years from now.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that we’re used to it and it’s been run through the commercial food chain much more so than other foods. If I want Mongolian cuisine, chances are im looking for a mom a pop restaurant, or buying the ingredients to make it myself. If I want American food, I can go get McDonald’s hamburgers and fries that are made at an industrial scale out of cheap, shitty ingredients and made with indifference by a teenager with an attitude. That’s not a fair comparison, you’d have to actually compare a top quality hamburger made in a mom and pop restaurant from high quality ingredients to the same in a Mongolian restaurant. I think other than the familiar flavor profile from the burger, they’re probably about the same.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
You have a link to that? One of my coworkers will definitely get a kick out of it.
Shit, I’d prefer an AR15 to my bolt-actions in that case.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
Uh, not really.
Political support for gun ownership is inversely proportional to distance from an urban center. It’s more a rural/redneck/rugged-individualist signal.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3hr ago
I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.
But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.
Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.
Now imagine you never have a nest egg.
Grant_us_eyes
3hr ago
There was a video on twitter recently of a PoV of someone having to shoot a charging boar utilizing a bolt-action rifle.
I couldn't help but stare at the set of circumstance and think to myself, 'In that situation, I really, REALLY would prefer a PTR-91. Or AR-10.'
Which are semi-auto magazine rifles chambered in 308. Which is a typical hunting round.
And boars have become an endemic invasive species in America as of late.
That aside... I know enough to say that gun culture overall in the US has undergone a quiet, seismic shift who's origins can date all the way back to the initial attempt at a gun ban in the 1920s, threading through the Firearms Owners Protection Act in 1986, Clinton's Assault Weapons' Ban in the 90s, up until today, where you've had a steady increase in constitutional concealed carry.
It's around this point I could probably fish around for how holders of CCWs having less crime rates than police officer, the twisted and uncertain number of defensive gun uses and so on and so forth... but there's still a very American cultural thread that basically boils down to, when the Government gets a bee in thier bonnet and tells thier citizens 'No', there's an instinctive reaction of 'Fuck you, now I want it MORE'.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
Progressives were never demanding that the poor get increased access to credit cards; banks have never had a problem marketing high-interest, low limit credit cards to the poor. The argument was that it was stupid for banks to deny mortgages to people with jobs who were currently paying more in rent than what the mortgage payment would be if they bought, on the grounds that they were too high a risk. It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.
There's a thing that can let you pay without carrying cash around, without being present and without having to apply for credit. It's called debit cards. You spend money you actually own, as opposed to some weird exercise of "paying back the money you spent during the month" that I once was surprised to learn most Americans apparently have to engage in. You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees because if you don't have the money, you simply can't spend it.
pigeonburger
4hr ago
During the Palisades fires some months back, a guy (one of the founders of Treyarch, the game development company) accidentally flew his civilian drone into a firefighting airplane and disabled it.
Now I imagine firefighting planes fly uncharacteristically low due to their mission, but the speed and mass of a drone is probably enough to cause severe injury in a direct collision, or to damage low flying planes (say, near an airport) or other vehicles, putting the lives of the people in them at risk. Imagine a drone going straight at your windshield while driving.
I might be mistaken, but I think most countries don't require a license to purchase a drone, only to fly it. Which, for someone planning mischief with their drone, is not a concern.
And this is without considering the additional homemade modifications one could make to make a drone more dangerous. Homemade explosives, yes, but that's hardly the only way to make it deadly. You could have them carry liquids (bleach, paint, lye, acid?) in a container that's meant to burst on impact, you could duck-tape spikes or knives to it... I'm barely even trying to be imaginative here.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
They aren't "openly defrauding" the poor. We have all these disclosure laws about credit cards, which among other things tell people how much and how long they'll be paying if they only pay the minimum. The people who get into credit card trouble want to get stuff and pay only the minimum. They may want this because they are stupid and foolish, or they may want it because they figure if they get in deep enough someone will bail them out, but they want it.
Tenaz
4hr ago
You believe the "godhead" is "one" in the "'scriptural' 'sense'" via the eisegetical interpretation your predecessors tore apart the scripture in service of making, not what Christians have held for most of 2,000 years.
What you call eisegesis, I call exegesis. As I said, no matter your beliefs you must hold that some scriptures are figurative and others literal, and there is no clear reasonable-beyond-all-doubt key contained in the Bible to determine which is which.
I agree some of the other examples are strained, so it's a good thing we don't hold to sola scriptura. Nobody is claiming that 1 Cor. 15 + 2 Cor. 12 is proof, or even sufficient evidence, that there are multiple kingdoms of heaven. Nor, to be clear, am I saying that scripture is clear about the nature of the Godhead either. Then again, I have the freedom to say the Bible isn't perfectly clear about the nature of the Godhead/Trinity, because I don't believe that there's a multiple-choice test to get into heaven predicated on whether we correctly answer that God is three persons consubstantial in essence.
The Septuagint condemns him. Solomon was tested with the lechery of his father, he failed, his chalice was filled with iniquity as the sin was visited upon him fully, the kingdom fell. There's a lesson in this.
Dishonest. I didn't ask if you'd condemn David, I asked if you'd condemn the wives given to him by God. Do you deny that God says he gave those wives to David? Do you have some interpretation of those scriptures where God gave those wives to David, but accepting them was a sin?
I condemn David too, not for his polygamy, but for his involvement with Uriah and his wife, as well as perhaps the later polygamous excesses (after this conversation with Nathan).
The Edmund-Tucker Act preceded the "revelation" and this is what Woodruff is quoted as verbatim:
Well, yeah, that's what I said. Is "the government has made demands, and God told me to acquiesce to them" not allowed as a form of revelation? I suppose Jeremiah was wrong to tell the Israelites to submit to Babylon, and they should have listened to Hananiah instead?
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
4hr ago
If it was actually possible to stamp down the number of handguns circulating in the US metro areas (and not just taking them from the law-abiding citizens), I'd expect a general reduction of crime for the following reasons:
- criminal ghettoes could be policed more reliably and in a less volatile manner, resulting in lowering the hostility of inner city culture towards cops;
- harder to commit crimes and run gangs when guns are harder to get;
In addition, while I'll let Americans correct me my impression was that the large segments of the population who are wary of black people and the segments of non-black population who live in the US metro areas were two circles that do not overlap much. Cities vote blue, rurals vote red, do they not?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
I'm perfectly fine with increasing cost and reducing utility in this situation.
Yes, of course you are. Because you value the wretched above all others, because that is the general rule everyone is taught. This is itself a problem with modernity, if modernity goes back to AD 1 anyway.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
This is the part of Uncomfortable HBD Facts that is very underdiscussed: Blacks More Likely to have paranoid schizophrenia.
African Americans were four times more likely than Euro-Americans to receive a Schizophrenia diagnosis … race was the strongest predictor of an admission diagnosis of Schizophrenia after controlling for the influence of other demographic variables. Interestingly, Barnes showed that Schizophrenia subtypes were not equally distributed by race, with African American consumers significantly more likely to receive a diagnosis of Schizophrenia-paranoid subtype or Schizophrenia-undifferentiated subtype than Euro-American consumers.
There's a ton of results in this vein, and his Arabic name makes me suspect that his parents were into Nation of Islam stuff, Yakub doctrine and all that, which is of course schizophrenic throughout (very funny though), so it might be hereditary for him, on top of direct schizophrenia-promoting nurture.
But I don't think the beancounting method really explains the problem. Many, many, many more Blacks who don't get any diagnosis and generally function well buy into this zany conspiracist bullshit. In the limit, the whole narrative of Black existence under the yoke of Systemic Racism and mass slaughter of unarmed black men by the police in the US is a giant conspiracy theory with clear paranoid motives, and spotlight cases like Nick Cannon going off about melanin, people buying into Jussie Smollett hoax, Candace Owens spiraling into even crazier hypotheses about secret societies behind Macron's wife being a man, "black scholars" with mind-bogglingly idiotic and racist doctrines propped up as real intellectuals (I like Kobi Kazembe Kambon a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin, read it up), etc. etc. all add up to a general schizophrenic-paranoid tone in the Black community. Except – wasn't it Whites (and Jews, but in any case, the well-off, educated non-Black demographics) who championed the doctrine of systemic racism? Aren't Whites also buying into many of these hoaxes and libels today?
These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
And I think this is the elephant in the room. There is simply not enough capacity to suppress delusions induced and exacerbated by the information environment. There is no clear separation between delusions and sincere confusions, Hassan won't have a mature enough epistemology to distinguish things that he pathologically overfixates on from things that just kinda legit sound right, even if you pump him full of antipsychotics. This is the ground zero of Black American Madness, along with smarter people than Hassan who also have a more profound illness and/or higher ego strength so they keep it together and spread their nonsense around. Then there are borderline cases who are relatively gullible and either propagate the message or simply do not push back, like that smart and non-insane Black guy once did for another celebrated Guggenheim scholar, Ibram X. Kendi:
"They are aliens," I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. "I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That's why they are so intent on White supremacy. That's why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens."
Clarence listened, face expressionless. "You can't be serious."
"I'm dead serious. This explains slavery and colonization. This explains why the Bush family is so evil. This explains why Whites don't give a damn. This explains why they hate us so damn much. They are aliens!" I'd lifted off the doorframe and was in full argumentative mode.
"You really are serious about this," Clarence said with a chuckle. "If you're serious, then that has got to be the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life! I mean, seriously, I can't believe you are that gullible." The chuckle turned to a grimace. "Why do you spend so much time trying to figure out White people?" he asked after a long pause.
Clarence had asked this question before. I always answered the same way. "Because figuring them out is the key! Black people need to figure out what we are dealing with!"
"If you say so. But answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can't reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with aliens from another planet? Come on, man, let's get real."
"I am being real," I replied. But I really had no comeback. I stood and turned around awkwardly, walked to my room, plopped down on my bed, and returned to staring at the ceiling. Maybe White people were not aliens. Maybe they became this way on earth. Maybe I needed to read more Frances Cress Welsing. I looked over at The Isis Papers on my nightstand.
Well, Clarence then probably got a normal job and never achieved prominence as a thought leader for his people. He wasn't exuberant enough to be made a champion.
…and then comes everyone else, who is simply overwhelmed by moral blackmail, the volume of second-hand "corroborating evidence" and plain emotional confidence. And here we are.
In short my thesis is that a small (large relatively, but still amounting to fractions of a percent of the total population) difference in the rates of paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by significantly lower IQ, creates a critical mass of self-propagating cultural madness in the Black community, which lowers general epistemic standard to rock bottom and then spills over to the broader society, warping the entire default narrative of what it is about. And now we're training large language models on this oeuvre, which seals the bubble of the consensus reality. I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
Regarding your actual question: I think paranoid schizophrenics, no matter how "functional" for the moment, certainly can't have guns. This isn't hard.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
4hr ago
Can I blame the lenders and the progressives?
In general this argument that political pressure has forced businessmen to be immoral is not very convincing for me. I hope to live in a society where generally businessmen have lines they won't cross, like openly defrauding the poor.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
They wouldn't accept cash? I mean, literally piles of Benjamins?
And yet you’re insistent on dating women who are part of communities dedicated to those principles, and considering yourself a part of them.
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