domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
Outlaw83
19hr ago
Normal parties don't renominate corrupt, criminal losers who tried a coup.
Like, the Right had this same argument about Brett Kavanaugh - "see, you'll try to take out any Republican nominee with lies and false allegations.'
Except it didn't happen with Neil Gorsuch, who had much the same background and views. Sure, people attacked his judicial views, but in the way both sides do. There were no allegations of him being a rapist or even some lesser crime, because he hadn't possibly done criminal things.
Don't nominate the corrupt former New York real estate guy who tried to overturn an election and you'll be all clear. Yes, we'll say mean things about him if you nominate say, Greg Abbott, but for what I know, he's done no crimes. He's allied with somebody even conservative Republicans think has done cirmes (Ken Paxton), but Abbott himself is just a right-winger.
Outlaw83
19hr ago
The part about Boebert is what your described is an underlying reason why we're seeing such shifts in college educated suburbs outside of the other more obvious factors.
Like, I'm sure there have been a lot of right-wing representatives in the past who actually worried about constituent needs - one example off hand is Thad Cochoran of Mississippi didn't need a single black vote to win easily in the state, but nonetheless, he was well known for having good constuent services, even in overwhelmingly black areas of the state, and not surprisingly, while he didn't do fantastic in the black belt regions, he did much better than Trent Lott did who was the other Senator at the time, even pre-Strom Thurmond praise.
Hell, Brian Kemp has passed a fairly strict abortion ban, passed trans laws close to Florida, passed a strict voter ID law, passed the usual tax cuts, and done a lot of stuff I don't like as a left-wing social democrat, but he has a 65% approval rating in Georgia because he said, "nah, Biden won, you weirdos," then he and his Secretary of State easily curbstomped a primary challenge.
The problem for the modern hard-right/far-right/dissident right, whatever people want to call themselves is that there's zero appeal unless you're either a partisan Republican or you're obsessed with the the Culture War issues of the day, but if you're even a somewhat serious person, they all seem like weirdos. Again, I know some won't like this, but look up how AOC questions people in Congressional panels versus Freedom Caucus types. You don't have to like her questions, or agree with her premises even, but she's well prepared and has follow up questions.
Obviously, not every member of the Squad is like that, but the median member of the Progressive Caucus is more serious about actually doing the work of legislating as opposed to trying to get a hit on Fox News or Newsmax than the median member of the Freedom Caucus, and in the long run, swing voters given the choice of having to use certain genders they don't get and some more immigrants speaking Spanish but actually getting stuff done versus chaos, abortion bans, and weird obsessions with issues they've never heard about, they'll back the woke side, even if they heavily disagree.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
18hr ago
Not to prevent a threat to the agency but to prevent a threat to American security and territorial integrity.
I did consider that but wanted to give the Irish the benefit of the doubt. I can only assume their education system is significantly more challenged than I thought.
2rafa
5hr ago
Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.
ace
11hr ago
I admit I had not heard of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki before.
Two U.S. officials said the intended target of the Oct. 14 airstrike was Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian who was a senior operative in Yemen’s al-Qaeda affiliate.
One administration official described the younger Awlaki as a bystander, in the wrong place at the wrong time. “The U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki’s son was there” before the order to launch the missile was given, the official said.
Is that actually the best example you can come up with? I think it proves my point.
AI War is an asymmetric RTS where armies/fleets scale into the thousands/tens of thousands. I can vouch for the original game being quite fun, but I haven't tried AI War 2.
There is also Planetary Annihilation (:Titans), an RTS played across one or more planets (yes, spherical maps), which is intended as a spiritual successor to Supreme Commander which is mentioned below. The micromanagement there feels more finicky than in AI War, but the graphics and feeling of scale are vastly better and I would still consider the game to be an underrated gem (hobbled by the typical Kickstarter project issue of having been half-baked at initial release).
ace
1hr ago
Yudkowsky believes:
- Human-value-aligned AIs make up a miniscule spec of the vast space of all possible minds, and we currently have no clue how to find one.
- We have to get the alignment of a super human intelligence AI right on the first try or all humans will die.
- Coordinating enough governments to enforce a worldwide ban on threat of violence of AI development until we learn how to build friendly AIs would be nice, but it's not politically tenable in our world.
- The people who are currently building AIs don't appreciate how dangerous the situation we're in is and don't understand how hard it is to get an aligned super human artificial intelligence aligned on the first try.
Given these propositions, his plan is to attempt to build an aligned super-intelligent AI before anybody else can build a non-aligned super-intelligent AI -- or at least it was. Given his recent public appearances, I get the impression he's more or less given up hope.
ace
2hr ago
Fair enough. But you're the one who brought up the Obama administration by specifically claiming it used "torture and executions" (plural) as methods of political repression. To me "political" implies intra-country, not extra-national, but maybe you meant a more expansive definition of that word?
You talk abstractly about vague notions of 'political repression', but I have no idea who, concretely, you're talking about.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
It would take a fairly-major spark, yes. Here are some possible sparks big enough:
- hard hit on debt ceiling, police and military defunded for long enough that they desert from lack of pay
- a true repeat of Bush v. Gore without a concession and with a hated candidate winning (Jan 6 was as mild as it was because Trump was clearly bananas to the point that the Republican machine didn't back him, and because Joe Biden was a milquetoast candidate who didn't (yet) have the hatedom that Trump himself and almost every other Democrat did)
- open defiance of SCOTUS by the executive, or possibly court-packing.
None of these is remotely a sure thing, but it's hard to rule any of them out either. Hence, serious possibility.
(And there's at least one other I know of.)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
“There’s no realistic white nationalist movement in the country” could very well be due to the propaganda against it for more than a decade. In other words, it is as much evidence against my point as for my point. The “unite the right” event was catastrophized in the media specifically to destroy the threat of similar rallies; Nick Fuentes was de-person’d, forbidden to fly and having his bank accounts cancelled, not to mention banned by all social media giants. Literally, anti white nationalism was a major news plot point for years during the beginnings of Trump admin.
shakenvac
4hr ago
Fair - there was an 'Israel' button but no single 'not Israel' button - the closest to that was Irish singer Bambie Thug who has been at the centre of some very juicy Israel/Palestine drama, tried to get the Israeli team banned and the producers prevented xirself from wearing a pro-Palestinian slogan during her performance, but I guess that was opaque to most viewers.
Armenia
Now, that was a banger!
johnfabian
11hr ago
He's really fat. Easily obese.
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
13hr ago
No, I think if someone was acting according to your intent it would be more akin to beating a kid to the point of hospitalisation to 'toughen him up'. American cultural resilience is not anti-fragile.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
15hr ago
This sounds like a very unhappy and mentally unhealthy way to negotiate life with half the human race, believing unironically that they all hate and want to castrate you. If you are being serious and literal. (Which I doubt.)
laxam
16hr ago
This wisdom is why the South is currently the most patriotic part of the country instead of a hotbed of political terrorism and separatist ideology.
Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound a whole lot more rational than straight-up Jew-hatred, but I appreciate your thoroughness in writing out the history of this mode of thought.
theincompetencetheorist
21hr ago
The whole point I'm trying to make is that the given that it is very public protest against the Israeli-Palestinian situation and Israel getting the second place in the popular vote. So if that vote is political then calls on cracking pro-Palestine protests would have been bigger than it is now. People are sitting at home and basically "fuck your virtue signaling" to the protestors and voting Israel. I see that as an apolitical act. One of the reasons we have a culture war is that we allow people to make everything political.
theincompetencetheorist
21hr ago
That is the point. It wasn't the queer theme or the politics that matter it is if people enjoy the show or act, my comment is in response that the "usual suspects" are "organizing a ballot stuffing". Well the usual suspects should have also been stuffing with UK votes. Ukraine winning because they are being invaded is an exception.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
23hr ago
Everyone claiming that "feminists want to castrate all men" cite the same small handful of mentally ill fringe figures, e.g., Valerie Solano, Andrea Dworkin, etc.
The number of women who actually, unironically want to "cull men and castrate them" is probably considerably less than the number of men who actually, unironically take KulakRevolt's or Dread Jim's ideas about lobotomizing/turning women into sex slaves seriously.
Boarchariot
23hr ago
You should make one if you want people to read it. They might not, but they certainly can't if it doesn’t exist. You probably shouldn’t go into it with the expectation that it will be popular, but if you’re going to write things anyway, why not?
yellowgreenred
just now
Watch an NFL game this fall.
I'll pass.
I don't think most people dispute that there is probably a higher proportion of interracial couples in commercials than there are IRL, but that doesn't mean interracial relationships are an oddity. They're normal, in both a biological sense and as a reflection of what you'd see in cities and towns across the US, so why not portray them and tick your diversity box?
Also, part of the point I was trying to make, and as @Steferri says below, is that the black man-white woman pairing tends to stick out but that doesn't mean it's nearly as prevalent as people assumed in last month's post. Of the two dozen movies in my post, Somebody I Used to Know is the clearest example of BM/WM, but it'll probably stay in your mind over other movies because Alison Brie stars as the white woman.
Awarenesss
13m ago
Fair point. I think this a benefit of a property management company—they are consistently transactional by nature and requirement, whereas my softheartedness would probably vary by tenant.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13m ago
the Leviathian shaped hole
I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?
Again, because Biden, Pence, and other politicians when informed immediately returned some documents. The problem isn't having the documents. It's an expectation that in a world where there are 9 trillion documents, some classifield ones will get moved, not out of malice or illegal acts.
If Trump had done what Biden, Pence, and others did, there would be no case.
But, when you refuse to work with the agency tasked to get these records, show said records to other people and talk about how they're classifield, and more, yeah, that's worse.
It's the difference between accidentally forgetting you put a candy bar in your pocket and running out with a shopping cart full of electronics.
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