domain:kvetch.substack.com
Im rarely exposed to “extreme far radical right” but when I am, I inevitably feel like I’m back in my early 20s reading some Marxist drivel. It requires me to completely buy into the premise of the civilization collapsing, that we are going to be replaced, that everything currently is so bad, that we require some drastic civilization-altering action, nothing short of complete revolution to survive, where we’ll kill landlords/poofs, enslave women/peasants, etc.
I just don’t see it, the collapse of the Western civilization, or the climate change wiping us out, or capitalism turning into “Neo-feudalism” and enslaving us all or white replacement. There are problems, but none of them induce the doom and gloom in me that ultimately summons the revolutionary zeal. My life’s pretty good! People around me are living normal lives, with the usual ups and downs, but nobody’s miserable to the extent the workers in UK were during the Industrial Revolution.
I say the same thing both to the suburban Maoists and to the fascists: if you see it, go do something about it instead of writing yet another blog post.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
7m ago
If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand.
I mean, or a visible hand, if you just look.
Third Way circulates ‘blacklist’ of terms Democrats shouldn’t use
Third Way, a prominent center-left think tank, is aiming to shape the way Democrats speak to voters as they try to counter President Trump’s agenda, including avoiding words such as “birthing person,” “cisgender,” “the unhoused” and “Latinx.”
“In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions,” the group alleged in a new memo identifying dozens of phrases that Democrats should avoid. “But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths — words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.”
Yes, there are literally memos publicly available about this.
SSCReader
11m ago
Just to point out in the kind of similar Rivera case (3 teen girls kill a Bolivian man in London, also filmed on mobile phone, also on CCTV), the CCTV and video taken by the girls has still not been released (barring a couple of heavily blurred stills) months later even after the trial, nor has the identity of the girls been released. There too the girls claimed the man was harassing them, but witnesses contradicted them and all three pled guilty to manslaughter.
Your chances of getting information from the police on an active investigation as a private citizen are essentially zero. If there is a trial that is the best bet of information being released. Possible CCTV footage might be released here as the clear images of the girls were already released (not by the police), so the cat is out of the bag there. But even so the girls are still being blurred out by the BBC and the like, so even if we get some CCTV stills released they will likely be mostly useless for working out what happened.
Unless it's leaked just be aware even if they have really clear footage it may never be seen publicly no matter which way the situation developed. FOISA requests for anything that may count as evidence in a criminal case are almost always denied. But you could try via
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/new/police_scotland
It does have a note that: Requests to Safety Cameras Scotland should also be made to Police Scotland.
which might be applicable.
You can see requests for information about CCTV have been made previously to Police Scotland (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/communication_between_police_sco_2#incoming-3134038 and https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_on_police_scotland_v#incoming-3102254) but often questions are refused to be answered due to the Law Enforcement exemptions.
Also note requests through this site are publicly visible.
The pivot happened after October 7th, when the woke movement and campus protestors in particular transitioned from anti-white demonstration to protesting Israel. That was the moment the elite apparatus, with Bill Ackman being an iconic example of someone who supported wokeness before that moment, but then had a "realization" that wokeness had run amok and had to be extirpated from elite colleges, began his highly public "war on woke." Ackman, he says, had no idea how dangerous Wokeness truly was until they started protesting Israel:
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
This dovetails with the rise of "anti-woke" figures like Bari Weiss poised to be installed at the top of CBS with her shitty news startup about to be acquired for $200 million, also demonstrating this realignment at the highest levels of media.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15m ago
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.
Fuziness does not imply incoherence, my approach is pretty much identical to yours, and you're just arguing over semantics. What I said was that with "over-exclusion is worse then over-inclusion" approach, you will turn the category of the nation useless.
The same thing that currently happens. Escalating levels of social sanctions followed by criminal punishments.
Well... do you mind providing some details? General rules as to what kind of transgressions would meet with what kind of sanctions? Examples?
That's accurate.
You're really not making this easy... What is? My description of your views, or the statement that I misunderstood something? If the latter, could you put some effort into bridging the inferential gap? Where do you think I've gone wrong?
I'm not sure how else I'm suppose to interpret it. If the main contingent pushing the idea of a creedal nation are the liberals / the left, you strongly disagree with their creed and how it should be enforced, but "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", how specifically would you prevent the importation of a sizable Muslim minority if that idea gained traction? This isn't much of a hypothetical, by the way, actually existing 90+% Catholic countries ended up going the "mass migration with no creed enforcement" route because they drank the liberal Kool-Aid.
Being confident in God isn't incompatible with working hard toward virtuous ends. "Faith without works..." etcetera etcetera.
Yeah, and carrying weapons large enough to punch holes through a small moon is not, strictly speaking, incompatible with a peaceful mission through the cosmos. It does say a lot about what kind of universe you believe you're living in, though.
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 if it can be shown that a mosque is a proper church, with similar advantages for individuals and their communities, you'd be ok with that, and you'd enforce your rule by forcing people to go to EITHER a mosque OR a Catholic church?
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.
What was the point of the "truth is an asymmetric weapon" thing then?
Atian_1
15m ago
Do we know how much of that is from practice though? And genetically faster reflexes/selection bias if you're interested in being a "quickdraw guy"? Can the average man really reach to disarm a knife faster than the knife holder can cut the disarming arm? I'm asking because I'm not sure, I don't know the answer here?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
17m ago
Hey, fair enough. If you (the general "you") are so fragile that your will is crushed by the thought of some people thinking you suck, then I guess you should probably just crawl under a rock and die because this fallen world is simply too cruel for you to survive. I don't really have advice for those sorts of people, they have set the victory conditions unrealistically high and made impossible for themselves to win. Personally, I think it's a pathetic cope, a way to rationalize and justify wallowing in your comfortable sty of self-indulgence instead of putting yourself out there and enduring some embarrassment ("those meathead powerlifter bros are just a bunch of assholes anyway! going to the gym is for jerks and I don't want to be jerk!").
Some people really do just want to curl up into a ball of self-pity and wither away into nothing. They , like everyone else, have been given free will, and so ultimately the choice is theirs.
Sloot
24m ago
And what we're seeing is instead that it's all more complicated than we thought it was, and definitely isn't traceable to US Census category levels of resolution.
Who’s this “we”?
It’s not that complicated at all and broad racial categories work well, especially for the topic of black American (lack of) average achievement. Despite decades of goodthinkers muddying the waters, making excuses, and performing interventions on behalf of black Americans, the standardized test score gap remains substantial between black and white Americans, and even moreso between black and Asian Americans.
Furthermore, "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatism.
gattsuru
28m ago
Noita is a fun roguelike with a ton of deep exploration component, and regularly invites you to jump in well over your head. Very much a game for masochists, though, even compared to Dark Souls: I think I was in the low hundreds of deaths before I 'finished' the game, every death puts you back at the start,
Turniper
29m ago
Nice. Stealing those perfect wins is just so satisfying. I'm still riding the high of one particular sacrifice elevator I hit on a dude half a decade ago. I don't even know what I was thinking, I never practice that, but it just happened and all of a sudden I was in mount. I'm about to check out a new gym for my first class in years. Time to get pretzeled :)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
32m ago
Oodles and oodles of SMS groups, chats, Discords, Slacks, FB groups etc with partly overlapping membership bases. Information on changing preferences can move very fast with reinforcement from multiple sources at the same time.
wingdingspringking
42m ago
The Coordinating Mechanism for Woke
From the early 2010s until roughly 2023, the prevalence of woke coded speech on the internet was constantly on the rise. There has been endless debate over the origins of it, but everyone here is likely familiar with the terms, tone, and intent of such speech. And then, suddenly, in the last 2 years, it basically vanished. Sure there are small, insular corners of the media landscape that still openly discuss such ideas. But on almost all mainstream sites, media outlets, shows, newsletters, etc, the prevalence of woke coded language has decreased by an order of magnitude.
The political reasons for this should be obvious at this point, but what I find puzzling is the speed at which this marked drop was coordinated across all types of media. I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe there is any shadowy cabal actually orchestrating this. But in the absence of any other coordination mechanism, I have a hard time understanding what has caused this. You would expect a movement that built momentum and followers steadily over a number of years to take an equal amount of time to slow down. Indeed, most other social trends follow that pattern. But in this case, the halt was sudden and ubiquitous. So, as the title implies, my question is really about how this has happened.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that any mass coordination across disparate elements of society, without any authority dictating it, has all the hallmarks of the invisible hand. And if it were only news institutions and media outlets I would give more credence to this theory. But just looking at social media postings, there has been a huge drop in people using this type of language. Attending free activities and events, this rhetoric is less prevalent. And since I have a very hard time accepting that the beliefs themselves are gone, I can't come up with a convincing explanation.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
46m ago
I'm completely shameless in regard to unplayed games.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
47m ago
Want to let me know a "default" charity pick for if and when you win, in case I can't track you down then?
Right now it would either be Genspect or Themis Resource Fund, I think the latter should stay relevant even if, god willing, the whole trans mania finally blows over. If not, some kind of uncucked Free Software org, but I don't have specific recommendations here, since they tend to be subject to corporate and progressive takeovers.
You?
gattsuru
47m ago
The adjustment screws on those controllers are almost always simple multi-turn potentiometers, so it's a little weird to see voltage wobble even if one breaks off entirely. Lower-end buck converters can sometimes act up if you try to calibrate them without a load. Putting a 2.5-5k ohm resistor (for 12v, this should keep under 1/8th watt) on the output side may be worth a shot.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
50m ago
I'm trying not to buy games anymore unless I'm going to play them right fucking now. The shelf of shame is just too weighty.
Currently my spare time is heavily invested in Mechwarrior 5 and it's new DLC.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
54m ago
I vaguely remember that movie! I think I enjoyed it. I remember I loved Nick Cage in it, and somehow his trademark over performance seemed perfectly suited for his role in the film. Maybe I should give it another spin.
Have you ever seen Shoot Em Up? It's fantastic. Has some of the worst written dialog you'll ever hear, and two award winning actors chewing the scenery and giving that terrible dialog all they possibly can. Also does a great job of constantly escalating the action to increasingly outlandish and cartoonish places. It's a delight to see what absurdity they come up with next.
It was probably my favorite action flick up until I saw John Wick, and even then I should probably rewatch them both to really help me decide their ranking.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
55m ago
We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade.
HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.
SSCReader
57m ago
I want to see that video. If it shows anything other than the girls approaching the adults and immediately brandishing or initiating assault, the girls are, in my opinion, in the right. The longer we go without seeing the video, the more my priors shift toward the girls being in the right.
Just to point out in other cases the CCTV is often never released. For example the Rivera case where three teen girls killed a Bolivian man in London, was mostly caught on CCTV, but only a few heavily blurred stills were ever released. Interestingly there too the girls claimed the man harassed them, but witnesses contradicted that and all three girls pled guilty to manslaughter.
So I am not sure CCTV not being released should change your priors much one way or the other.
Also it was in Scotland not England. Which doesn't really change the point about the cameras but might save you some harsh words from some of my more nationalistic brethren.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
57m ago
It's super cheap, so there's no reason not to buy a copy today. I'll be starting it in ten minutes.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
But they also 'knew' that people aren't the kind of stuff that can fly.
Did they? Or is it one of those self-congratulatory narratives written by their opponents, decades after the fact?
"They didn't ACTUALLY transcend nature so it wasn't real vindication of hubris" looks like moving the goalposts to me.
I don't think so. There's a few levels to this:
- Reproducing something we know can be done, but is out of our reach. Aerial flight would go into this, but to take a current example, let's take warp drives. We know space does bendy things sometimes, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility to master that phenomenon, and turning into a method of transport. It is beyond our reach, the requirements to reach it might be absurd given our current understanding of the universe, but it doesn't particularly break any mechanics.
- Doing something that, as far as we know can't be done. Let's say time travel. Ok, I don't remember if this goes into the "theoratically possible" bucket or it breaks mechanics, but let's just go with for the sake of argument. Sure, I'll accept that as a good curve ball, but it doesn't matter because:
- We're talking about transhumanists. Their claim that uploading your consciousness into the cloud will constitute it's preservation in any meaningful way is a metaphysical one. Even actually achieving it does nothing to prove or disprove it. It's literally a belief in a soul.
Transhumanist thought, as I see it, lacks the inherent reverence that the religious mindset comes packaged with. (...) In the end religion is not about entering Heaven or Hell, it's about using the promises of those states as a tool for society-building. I do not think transhumanism is about society-building first. I think transhumanism is about entering Heaven first (or Hell, according to doomers).
I don't think a lot of religious people would agree about their religion being about society-building first, and I'm pretty sure that if any belief described itself as "entering Heaven / Hell first" they would instantly recognize it as religious.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
That's too bad. I keep seeing these memes going around that all the remaining mainstream review sites that nobody has any respect for (IGN, PCGamer, etc) hated it. But I can't see that they've reviewed it at all, because there are no review copies. I'll probably grab it on Switch 2 at some point, unless community consensus decides that it's a completely bomb.
lynchings
Lynchings were a response to violent crime. Something like a third of those lynched were White. Africans were lynched more because they commit more violent crime, and also because their crimes were seen an attack on the community from a foreign community. Generally, it worked as follows: if you were to rape a girl, the community would strangulate you to death, and they would make a whole spectacle about this so as to deter future crime and to reaffirm that the community is protected. Lynchings are bad because justice is better, as a small percent of the lynching victims were innocent, though jury trials also pose their own problems. But we see in recent events eg Rotherham that lynching can produce better justice than subverted judicial processes even into the 21st century. Had the men of Rotherham lynched the rapists immediately, they would have prevented many thousands of rapes, which is clearly better than no justice at all over decades. Following from this, one problem in the south was that Blacks were allowed to be on juries, and we now know from studies that Blacks on average cannot judge defendants impartially. Blacks, but not Whites, are more likely to let someone of their own race go free yet convict someone of another race. Possibly because Blacks, but not Whites, have a high in-group preference.
You write
[cults] were handed a public issue, in which the mainstream was quite obviously morally wrong by its own standards and factually wrong in its claims
This depends on your values, really. If you believe that all groups should share in each others’ resources, despite having different behavioral tendencies, levels of intelligence, cultures, and histories, then the mainstream was wrong. But if you believe that White people are genetically and historically different, and consequently deserve to be raped less, and murdered less, and deserve to enjoy the justice system they created which requires honor and trust, in accordance to their ability, then the mainstream was obviously correct.
When the reality was, racists of the past were genuinely racist, they really did believe that the blacks and Jews etc. were inferior
Yes, you are supposed to make generalizations based on observable evidence and trusted testimony when you lack superior evidence. This is the intelligent thing to do. This is the moral thing to do. It was their best option because they didn’t have an entire science of intelligence, and even if this did exist in some obscure intelligence journal, the average man did not have easy access it. So they say, “wow, this golden retriever is gentle and kind”, or “wow, this pitbull is aggressive and dangerous”, based on a collection of experiences. When Americans were debating the Chinese exclusion act, the argument was not that the Chinese were stupid or lazy. Even proponents of exclusion knew that the Han were industrious and intelligent. Is it really racism if human intuition is just that good at generalizing?
White racists often believed that every black was inferior in every way to essentially every white American
I don’t think there’s evidence for this.
Only in recent years have we seen black QBs break out of the running QB mold (and arguably seen teams overrate black QBs perceived as Athletic over white QBs perceived as statuesque pocket passers).
These QBs are usually more than half-white, with light eyes (this has its own interesting genetic reasons), and there’s also been political pressure to introduce more black QBs. A lot of what you’ve written is just “some Whites underestimated Black athleticism”. We’re not talking about chess or strategy games here, we’re talking about a very base form of human leisure activity. Your opinion seems to be that we should shame Uncle Roy because, well, while his intuition may have been correct about the most important things in the world, it was wrong about…. sports. Something that doesn’t matter. Something done for leisure. Something that is more fun to do the worse you are at it. You didn’t attempt to prove an equality between the races for anything that actually matters (development, virtue, productivity, etc). Surely the best hominid heavyweight lifter is actually a gorilla, but does this matter? Has anyone checked if Terence Tao can dunk?
Cults
I don’t find the overriding argument compelling. NXIVM didn’t draw on the mainstream being wrong, and neither did Osho’s cult or the nascent Mormon cult. ISIS is probably the worst cult of the modern era, and they are wrong on virtually every issue. To understand cults it’s easier just to understand that humans have certain vulnerabilities which evil people can take advantage of. One of these vulnerabilities is our innate desire for equality and fraternity, which evolved to aid the tribe, which is why racism has been a powerful rallying cry since the 60s.
Tretiak
1hr ago
I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.
First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been know between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:
The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.
Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.
So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).
This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.
I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).
So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).
Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.
How many people are having kids?
We're trying. What's wrong with writing a blog post sometimes?
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