domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
I think it's presumptuous to assume that a girl considers you part of her in-group just because she agreed to go on a second date with you.
My girlfriend is currently trying to persuade a close friend of hers (I'll call her D) to cut ties with one of her friends (A). I disliked A literally from the moment I met her, as not only do I find her vapid and annoying, she also seems like a legitimately shitty person. (It was a relief to find out that my girlfriend dislikes A just as much as I do). A openly announced that she goes on dates with guys from Tinder, goes back to their houses, then steals shit before leaving. Of course D laughed it off like "oh yeah, she's just being a girlboss" and insisted that she'd never steal from one of her friends. Mais quelle surprise when A starts borrowing clothes and other items from D and never returns them (or loses them and doesn't offer to replace them); or when D invited A to stay in D's parents' house, and various expensive items mysteriously went missing while she was staying there. D's parents now despise A, understandably enough.
2rafa
14hr ago
As I said recently, rules-lawyering is one of the main reasons why any functioning society needs to allow for 'spirit of the law' interpretations. Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath; both shameless and clearly against the spirit of the whole thing, the adult equivalent of signing a contract and going a tiny bit outside the box or making a spelling mistake or getting the date wrong because that means you didn't actually sign it HAHA, suckers, it's not valid!!
In a wider way, this is a bigger problem with the modern justice system. A hundred years ago, a lot of low-level justice was dispensed by police directly. Some youths being annoying just got the shit beaten out of them with truncheons, and they learned their lesson. Today the cops aren't allowed to do that any more, and the justice system is incapable of anything like that kind of rapid, effective lesson.
ControlsFreak
14hr ago
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous.
I mean, we're talking about the possibility of a super intelligence that is going to tile the universe with paperclips, and you want to say that your own analogy is too galaxy-brained? Ok, buddy.
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is.
Correct. There was a scaling limit back when the Wright brothers first took to the air. It was still there when we went to the moon. At what point did we realize what the scaling limits actually looked like?
There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit.
Right now, there's not really that much reason to think that we're not, either. We have basically no theory here yet. No idea whether the scaling is truly exponential or something else or where we might be on the curve.
In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
If you ignore the exponential that comes from physics, then sure.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale?
No. It is "certainly not" that much more if we're thinking galactic scale. It's just underwhelming in general, in context of the exponential of the rocket equation. You can just look at the numbers and say, "Yeah, that's more, but it's not all that much more."
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14hr ago
10 years ago we won with a drag queen, yesterday with a countertenor. Double gay, yes, but also in some sense balance restored.
In fairness, Eurovision faced repeated demands for Israel to be banned from competing, but stuck to their guns, and there's no question that Israel would have been given the award without fuss if they'd gotten the most votes. Some people have drawn analogies with how Russia was banned after the invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a transparent false equivalence to me: Ukraine was invaded by Russia and Ukraine fought back, therefore we ban Russia from competing; Israel was invaded by Palestine and Israel fought back, therefore we ought to ban - Israel?* I mean Palestine aren't in the Eurovision so you can't ban them, but why should you ban Israel?
*I know, I know, Israel "really" invaded Palestine 75 years ago, but come on, surely no one really thinks they started the current war.
2rafa
14hr ago
The veneration of Churchill does not sprout from just winning 'a war' but what war, against who and for what cause.
No, not really. The British popular narrative of WW2 does not and has never centered the Holocaust. It's almost all about Dunkirk, the Blitz, and D-Day. Hitler is a villain, sure, but the real villains were 'the Germans', who 'we' beat twice in both world wars, many of which are often conflated by less intelligent people anyway. His veneration has a number of causes, mainly that he was an idosyncratic and peculiar figure who was immediately identifiable even at that time, and because he was in charge when the country came the closest it came to being fully conquered by military invasion in 400 or perhaps 900 (depending on how you see it) years.
NunoSempere
14hr ago
The issue is that it no matter how many kms of regions Russia wants to demand the ukrainians turn over without fighting, it will still be in the Ukrainian interest to make Russia pay the resources they are willing to spend fighting km by km, rather than let Russia have both kms and the resources to conquer more.
Oooh, this makes sense, thanks
No_one
14hr ago
It was pixiv, not danbooru where he did the count back then..
In any case, are we trying to argue that Keira Knightley, poor thing, has more attractive boobs than a typical page 6 British model? (swimsuit pictures)
but AI art is definitively only appreciated by a niche subgroup, with the modal anime erotica enjoyer being highly dismissive of it.
People are very performative about this, to the point that any public statement about it should be just ignored. I've been amused to observe the nonsense in a certain niche, where some people were literally bullied out of a forum over saying "AI art" is fine, and then a guy comes in, makes some illustrated story that's clearly using AI for both text and images and lies about it and people are okay with it.
Dean
Flairless
14hr ago
I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
Best of luck with your siesta!
Don't be ashamed of it in the least. It truly can be for the best. Focus on your family, friends, or just take the opportunity to do some half-days of volunteer work improving your community. Even if it's as simply as helping clean up a graveyard with others, it can really help get one's head out of all-politics-all-the-time mindsets.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
14hr ago
I'll add Eurovision to my list of awards requiring the 'correct' ideological adherence.
jake
14hr ago
If we ask what most defines the bad governor the singular example is "He has an innocent man put to death." Whatever the truth of Pilate's reasoning, he was in dereliction of his greater duty to good governance. You call to cold practicality. Kill the innocent rebel, end the movement, prevent instability and possibly save many lives. Those bad but "necessary" decisions don't come from nothing, rather they come as the long consequences of earlier bad decisions and failures. How many seemed necessary at the time?
There is also a nice irony to preventing instability. Jesus, who held tremendous draw, offended the elders. They wanted him killed and they were appeased. Bar Kokhba also had draw; thus went Judea.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
14hr ago
100% busy with family stuff. I think of tinkering a lot, but never get around to actually do.
Corvos
15hr ago
OP said
It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.
Those seem to me classic examples of OP’s first case. Modern Germany defines itself (negatively) in relation to the Nazis, while Australia and Canada are constantly weeping performative tears (and arson campaigns, cancellations, affirmative action etc.) on behalf of the ‘genocided’ peoples.
Germany is the obvious one, to the point that a lot of people think they take it too far (e.g. deporting people who criticise Israel). Arguably Australia and Canada, although I don't really believe either of the latter two were really guilty of "genocide" as such, but certainly genocide-adjacent activities. I've heard that American high schools have gotten a lot better in recent years about teaching pupils about slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, Vietnam etc. (even if I'm sure it likely often devolves into lists of atrocities those horrible Red Tribers committed, which we noble Blue Tribers opposed at every turn).
Corvos
15hr ago
For sure. I’m just saying that I don’t think the first approach is actually viable and I can’t remember seeing any examples, except when the genocide is centuries old and long forgotten except by revisionist historians. Can you think of any examples?
FtttG
15hr ago
Of course it's easier. And I'm not singling out the Turks for criticism as uniquely evil: this whitewashing of history is reprehensible no matter who does it, whether it's the Americans, the Japanese, the Belgians, the Brits etc.
But in practice the first is much harder than the second. Telling someone, “Yes, my ancestors killed millions of people not very long ago, but I choose not to let it define me,” is very difficult, especially if your conversational partner is related to the people they murdered.
It’s much easier to say, “nah, that stuff’s all exaggerated,” or as e.g. the SNP do, “no, you don’t understand, all that British Empire stuff was the evil hateful ENGLISH really, they oppressed us too, please don’t look at any of the Mac names on the memorials…”
Ioper
15hr ago
Kind of but it isn't necessarily a right/left thing and people don't necessarily falsify their opinions.
Something similar is the reason why in many modern democracies we use shitty FPTP instead of enlightened Approval Voting. The story is that back in ancient Greece they voted by placing stones in jars so when their democracies tried to do Approval voting some unscrupulous voters would put all their pebbles in the jar of their favourite candidate instead of putting no more than one in each. This being the time before cheap paper the only real solution they had was to give each voter only 1 pebble, and hey shitty FPTP was born...
FtttG
15hr ago
It's one thing to refuse to allow your national identity to be defined by a horrendous crime committed generations ago. It's quite another to pretend it never happened at all, as modern-day Turkey quite explicitly does.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
15hr ago
What kind of weather situation were they in where he was actually cold, not just making idle chatter
Modal men don't do that. If we're making idle chatter it's usually about shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings. "It's cold today" is idle chatter, "I am cold" means the dude is freezing.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
15hr ago
Not exaggerating. You're about 1/3rd through on the way to the final 'true' endings.
The 2nd 3rd is probably doable solo without being too frustrating. The final 3rd is incredibly pedantic (and was mostly crowdsolved on discord/steam forums). Some streamers like CohhCarnage ostensibly managed to complete the whole thing solo, but I suspect Cohh and those like him get fed hints behind the scenes to allow relatively smooth progression.
I pretty much fizzled out after getting 2/3rds of the way through as I'd gotten most of the lore by that point and was frustrated at the obscurity of some of the puzzles/solutions and increasingly narrower RNG windows for progression.
Owlify
15hr ago
I don't consider it a good thing to do either, I was just describing why @_brentbaum called it agentic in the first place. I presume he was ok with the status quo (feeling cold), and hadn't considered doing something to feel less cold (problem solving is agentic), let alone deceiving a hotel and taking other people's stuff.
The bike cuck meme is kind of a brain worm in that while that example is egregious, there are plenty of ways in which reframing a loss as at least helping someone else or something else can by psychologically beneficial. I didn’t get the promotion, my friend did, framing that in your own mind as ‘well, at least I’m happy for them’ is better than stewing in resentment.
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