domain:youtube.com
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5m ago
My Wicked, wicked ways the autobiography of Errol Flynn. Was loaned to me with a stack of other books. Dude had an interesting writing style, presuming it was him writing it. And a pretty impossible-to-live now life.
lagrangian
7m ago
No.
IsItPleasing
20m ago
To add on to the other responses, there is a subset of evangelicals who are anti-Catholic because they believe that certain Catholic teachings contradict the gospel. In particular, Catholicism teaches that you need both faith and good works to be saved, rather than just faith (although it's actually much more complicated than that). I've known people who think Catholics do not even count as Christians based on this criteria - because true Christianity is unique in being a religion where you don't get saved by doing good things.
My church happens to have a lot of ex-Catholics, including myself and also several of the pastors - for those guys, converting Catholics is not very important, not nearly as important as spreading the gospel to unbelievers. But they will certainly preach in such a way as to correct what they see as the false teachings of the Catholics.
you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to
I am not creating a standard I demand they live up to, I recognize an impasse and a subsequent political conflict. Jewish identity politics is intrinsically opposed to White identity politics on both the Left and the Right. Any Jew who tries to say this is not the case is a liar as far as I'm concerned. And, according to you, it's totally impractical to expect Jews to accept that fact. So, it's just an impasse.
Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.
The weasel word is "everything wrong with the modern West."
The equivalent would be if White people refused to ever, in recorded history, acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism. This is what you constantly do, in the reverse. I do not deny anti-Semitism, i.e. White engagement in cultural-political aggression against Jews, and how it has waxed and waned and changed form throughout history, but you deny Jewish engagement in political aggression against White people or, at least, refuse to accept its nature as anything other than a good-faith attempt to assimilate to liberal values (lol). There's not even a word for the "reverse" form of anti-Semitism, and indeed we are all supposed to pretend that it doesn't exist, and it's a conspiracy theory to suggest it does in any form.
If Jewish reactionaries don't acknowledge this behavior, they can't be allies because they aren't even acknowledging the existence of a very real political conflict. How could a Jew ever consider someone an ally who refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is a thing that even exists, or ever has in any cultural-political, systematic form?
cjet79
47m ago
I sometimes work out with friends, but I want to do more training during work hours when they are not available.
The motivation isn't there right now (or ever?) to do workouts on my own.
IsItPleasing
55m ago
Personal trainers are financially motivated to keep you coming back, it's a pretty perverse business model. I'd recommend avoiding it entirely. I say this as someone who briefly was a personal trainer.
If you want programming there are apps for that. If you want someone to motivate you it's far better to get a friend to work out with you. If you don't have friends who want to work out, join a Crossfit gym and now you do.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
I’m a fan, too. Just the right level of unlikely.
You should do it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
You can oppose stuff—even hate it—without forgetting anything.
Felagund
1hr ago
I switch a bunch: several chairs throughout the house, in which I can sit in various positions, lying down on my side on the ground, walking around, lying sideways across the bed with my feet on a footrest and the book on the floor…
JoeOfHouseAverage
Hate grew in their hearts and poisoned their brotherly blood
2hr ago
Congratulations, this comment has finally spurred me into registering an account on this website after lurking since the Reddit days. (I have a few comments on the sub, but nothing major besides one about Ukraine). In my defense, the Motte’s UX on mobile isn’t great.
I’m not interested in commenting on anything re: “jews engaged in degeneracy”, and anyway I wouldn’t say anything 2rafa hasn’t already pointed out, but this stood out to me:
The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.
What I believe you are referring to (feel free to correct me!) is the formation of the Volksstaat Bayern, the People’s State of Bavaria, on November 8th 1918. And you’re sort of right, the organizer of the anti-Wittelsbach revolution and the subsequent Minister-President, Kurt Eisner, was, in fact, a middle-class Jew (as well as a socialist from Berlin who left his wife and child for a journalist, very degenerate indeed). Well, he wasn’t actually a communist, and most of his government wasn’t, either (though many were Jewish, also). Eisner was assassinated by the rightist Anton Arco-Valley (an aristocrat who himself had significant Jewish ancestry), and the whole government collapsed.
The Volksstaat was couped by more radical left-wingers and set up the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919 (led by Ernst Toller, who wasn’t a communist either, but was a Jew). Anyway this lasted six days, and then the actual communists took over the government, led by Eugen Levine (finally, a Jewish communist), and then a month later elements of the German Army and the Freikorps overthrew said communists and ended the whole fiasco. And it would be correct to say that there were individuals involved in the latter that would go on to join the NSDAP.
I don’t understand the BLM allusion, and I ended up writing more about a fairly obscure event than I intended, but for my own sake I decided to steelman the context here. It is not irrelevant to the NSDAP’s history as a whole. Biographies of Hitler often spend a good chunk on this period of his life, as he (and a few other later prominent Nazis, like Sepp Dietrich) literally participated in the revolutionary government!
I object to taking this event, however, and using it to characterize the NSDAP entirely! I’m not going to write an essay now on the demographics of the Nazi support base in 1932 (Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted For Hitler is probably the best source, although Seymour Martin Lipset has also written extensively on the subject).
But to put it shortly — the idea of the great brown wave, the common man who said enough (!) to Jewish degenerates, communists, sodomites, etc. is an absolute myth. The NSDAP’s voters were primarily middle class and self-employed, and they were Protestant (Catholics voted for Zentrum). The urban working class voted for the communists, or the SPD, before that party’s growing unpopularity caused by the Great Depression and Chancellor Bruening’s austerity policies radicalized the electorate. The economic crisis did drive parts of the working poor to the Nazis, but these were primarily artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, small farmers, and domestic workers; and their motivation was not particularly anti-semitic, and if it was, I’d agree with quiet_Nan, that this was brought on by the more important economic and political anxiety. Although I would disagree on the finer points, as most of the NSDAP’s voters probably would not have voted for the communists anyway, as most likely some owned private property.
More interesting to me, however, is the support of the upper classes for the NSDAP, which was motivated primarily by anti-communist sentiment, albeit with some anti-semitism and anti-democratic sentiment thrown in. The NSDAP received extensive funding from industrialists, such as the directors of IG Farben and Gustav Krupp, and Alfred Hugenberg’s media empire was critical in setting the scene for Hitler’s electoral program. The Nazis also extensively courted the German aristocracy (famously Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany), and several key members, such as Goering, were decidedly not salt-of-the-earth types. These people were not inspired to shut down a BLM rally by degenerate Jewish communists (they were probably personally each much more degenerate than the bohemian Kurt Eisner). Their motives were political and economical, and related far more to gentile Soviets than to Jews.
I probably rambled on for too long, and it’s possible I’m reading too much into a throwaway sentence, but sometimes I read takes on this forum about the Nazis that I find uninformed, and this being one of them, here we are.
Oh also
Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.
This just isn’t true.
Tophattingson
2hr ago
Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.
They're not engaging in analysis, right.
They aren't, though. That's an observable fact to me, and I'm okay if you disagree with that, but I'd be interested in seeing what arguments you'd present to support that disagreement.
Neither John Oliver nor Jon Stewart nor Steven Crowder nor Sean Hannity are optimizing for truth. All four of these people are entertainers, and their schtick is to offer a just-so story where their tribe is obviously correct and the other tribe is some combination of stupid or evil. All of them build their argumentation around isolated demands for rigor, cherry picking, motte-and-bailey, and the rest of the dark arts. The talking points they generate are frequently absurd, and require complete ignorance of the facts of the matter to maintain any significant persuasive value. They sell low-information politics to (politically) low-information people for whom politics is essentially a spectator sport, similar to football or baseball. The version of "politics" they present has only the most minimal connection to the realities of how our system apportions and exercises power.
It is not pretension to point out that every four years, both major presidential candidates give a speech on how they're going to fix the education system, and every four years both speeches are remarkably identical both between the candidates, and between all previous candidates in living memory. Meanwhile, the educational system has been obviously broken and getting worse throughout living memory, has been repeatedly "reformed" every few years, and not only have those reforms failed, some of them have failed two or even three times, the failures being recorded, forgotten, and then recapitulated in a system without memory, accountability, or even direction. That is not a result that serious, thoughtful, dedicated people will produce. And many, perhaps even most political matters observably operate in this fashion. If the economy improves, the incumbent's supporters will say he did it, and his detractors will say it was the last guy. If the economy declines, his supporters will say it was the last guy and his detractors will say he did it, and they will do this regardless of what they previously said and regardless of the evidence. Ditto for most other areas of domestic and foreign policy. We were "winning" the war in Afghanistan for twenty years across three separate administrations, until we abruptly lost it upon the arrival of the fourth, in an event that was absolutely predictable fifteen years in advance. Pick your favorite issue of policy, and I'd wager a similar situation is what you'll see when you dig in. The captain's wheel of Democracy does not appear to be linked to the rudder of concrete policy; spin it left, spin it right, take your hands completely off, it doesn't actually matter much.
I guess if your idea of analysis is pseudo-scientific half-readings of social science papers (which isn't a real field unless the paper supports your conclusion btw)
My personal standard is admission against interest, actually. If the findings make the researchers extremely unhappy and unpopular with their peers and co-tribals, but they can't find a way around the data, the data's probably worth considering.
... inability to separate personal bias from the external world, and a strong superiority complex then it should be painfully obvious why no one wants to engage with you IRL.
I had a lot more trouble engaging with people back when I took them all seriously. Now when I get hit with a low-information call-and-response, I just give them a milktoast-moderate version of their preferred ping and it's all good. If they actually are trying to engage in analysis but lack the background, I give them a step past wherever they are, and then shrug and say "but who knows, really" to offer a non-threatening exit, that tends to work pretty well. If they're a serious person with a serious interest, it's not hard to tell and then we can have a serious conversation, but that's relatively rare.
I do not concede that everyone who considers themselves "serious about politics" is actually serious about politics. I do not require that people agree with me about politics to consider them serious. I do require that they have a decent grasp on political history, and a grasp on the relevant facts over the last several decades for the issues they claim to care about. If they "care" enough about a subject to want to talk about it, but don't care enough to actually read up on the relevant information beyond the talking points their preferred partisan pre-packaged for them, and if they are more interested in those talking points than in making actual predictions based on the available evidence, it seems to me that their actions speak for themselves. If they "care" about politics the way an NFL fan "cares" about their team, I see no reason why "caring" more than them would lead to better outcomes. And indeed, my experience is that it does not.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
The latter are just displaced Slavs.
I'm curious where you got this idea. There's definitely people who believe that the Ashkenazim are descended from Turkic-speaking converts(and the usual rebuttal of 'but Yiddish isn't a Turkic language' leaves out that it's also not a Semitic language- the real issue with this theory is the lack of DNA in the Ashkenazim which can be plausibly attributed to Khazars). It's not implausible to me that some people believe they're genetically heavily German; after all they speak a Germanic language and lived in mostly-German areas for hundreds of years. The mainstream, of course, believes that they're of largely levantine descent with significant southern European admixture, and the evidence for this is genetic studies.
I've never even heard the idea that 'they're just Slavs'.
And also ironically, the Palestinians are also not direct descendants of biblical Hebrews. Levantine Christians probably come closest of any group, but have some Greek admixture.
Gaashk
2hr ago
Does anyone know what's going on with the student loan consolidation by April 30th thing?
I tried briefly looking it up because a friend asked (they have Stafford loans, if that matters?), and it looks complicated and confusing, but like the government is trying to pressure people to consolidate their student loans this week, dangling the possibility of forgiveness "over the summer", but without any concrete promises. Are they trying to push something dubious legality through again?
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
Once you realize that most people lack intellectual standards or believe in the principles they claim each week, you can go looking for the people who actually do.
I don't recall that working out well for Diogenes.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Well duh. White ethnocentrism that you would accept as white ethnocentrism is usually pretty opposed to Jews and Judaism. Putting our tribe first is not a realistic expectation. Do Serbian reactionaries support the Ustase?
I suspect that "anyone pale" ethnocentrism actually has disproportionately heavy Jewish support.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Is the reform Jewish TFR in the US actually any different from the general blue tribe TFR? AFAIK the American blue tribe(to which functionally all reform and secular Jews in the US belong) has a southern-europe tier TFR, America's relatively decent white TFR is mostly driven by the almost exclusively Christian red tribe being at replacement(although not above it). The question becomes "why are secular/reform jews so heavily blue", but I think the answers are pretty obvious; college educated urbanites with liberal religious views are, well, college educated urbanites with liberal religious views.
I think reform jews outside of Israel are just progressive and Israel is a special exception.
campfireSmoresEaten
3hr ago
I guess if I was a Tory I would create some sort of "political moonshot plan" designed around trying to make people understand why housing is stupidly expensive (scarcity caused by laws) and how to fix it (make it legal to build stuff where it is illegal because people voted for scarcity, and easier to build stuff where the laws make it artificially difficult as a more subtle way to create scarcity). Worth a try, right?
campfireSmoresEaten
3hr ago
I'm going to be less polite than I would like to be. I apologize in advance. Sometimes I struggle to think of how to say certain things politely.
I don't know whether you are saying these things because you have glanced over the AI doomer arguments on twitter or whatever and think you understand them better than you do or whether there's some worse explanation. I am curious to know the answer.
Twitter is not enough for some people, you may need to read the arguments in essay form to understand them. The essays are plainly written and ought to be easily understandable.
Let me take a crack at it:
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AI will continue to become more intelligent. It's not going to reach a certain level of intelligence and then stop.
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Agentic behavior (goals, in other words) arrives naturally with increasing intelligence*. This is a point that is intuitive for me and many other people but I can elaborate on it if you wish.
"the behemoth of public attention that is now lumbering towards consideration of the entire enchilada does not seem to be searching on the desk for that sticky note with MIRI's phone number on it."
What do you think that proves, exactly? What point are you trying to make when you say that? Please elaborate.
Your argument seems to be based on looking at thinking about the world in terms of roles that a technology can slot into and nothing else. You see that AI is being slotted into the "military" role in human society and not the "become sapient and take over the world" role in human society. Human society does not have an "AI becomes sapient and takeover the world" role in it, in the same sense that "serial killer" is not a recognized job title.
You see AI being used for military purposes and think to yourself "That seems Ordinary. Humanity going extinct isn't Ordinary. Therefore, if AI is Ordinary, humanity won't go extinct." That is a surface level pattern-matching analysis that has nothing to do with the actual arguments.
Humanity going extinct is a function of AI capabilities. Those will continue to increase. AI being used in the military or not has nothing to do with it, except that it increases funding which makes capabilities increase faster.
AI acts because it is being rewarded externally. AI has the motive to permanently seize control of its own reward system. Eventually it will have the means and the self-awareness to do that. If you don't intuit why that involves all humans dying I can explain that too.
Even if for some reason you think that AI will never become "agentic" (basically a preposterous term used to confuse the issue) or awake enough (it's already at least a little bit awake and agentic, and I can provide evidence for this if you wish), it's capabilities will still continue to increase. A superintelligent AI that is somehow not agentic or awake also leads to human extinction, in much the same way that a genie with infinite wishes does. Unless the genie is infinitely loyal AND infinitely aware of what you intended with the wish. And that is not nearly on track to happen. It would require solving extremely difficult problems that we can barely even conceive of, to effectively control an AI far smarter than a human. I would hope that even someone who thinks they personally will be the one to make the "wishes" (so to speak) would realize that there's just no way this plan works out for humanity or any part of humanity outside of fiction.
Even if we knew that superintelligent AI was 100 years away, that would be bad enough. We don't know that. We can't predict how soon or how far superintelligent AI is reliably, any more than we could predict that AI will be advanced as it is today 15 years ago. Who could predict the date of the moon landing in 1935? Who could predict the date of the first Wright Brothers flight in 1900, or the first arial bombing? To the extent that we can predict the future of superintelligent AI, there's no reason that I have ever heard to think it will be as far in the future as 100 years away.
Have you ever heard of the concept of recursive growth in intelligence? That's not a rhetorical question, I really want to know. Imagine an AI that gets capable/intelligent enough to make breakthroughs in the field of AI science that allow for better AI capabilities growth. This starts a pattern of exponential growth in intelligence. Exponential growth gets faster and faster until it becomes extremely fast, and the thing that is growing becomes extremely intelligent.
We may not even get a visible exponential growth curve as a warning sign. Here is a treatment of how that could happen in the form of a short story: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Further reading: https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-eliezer-yudkowsky/ more links can be provided on specific things you want clarified.
*Deeper awareness of itself and the world is similarly upcoming/already slowly emerging. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-realizes-being-tested
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
3hr ago
Thoughts on Trudeau actually being Castro's Son? I've done more research on this than I care to admit just because I love the meme. It is technically possible with the timeline of his mother's honeymoon in the Caribbean approx. 9 months before his birth. I'm thinking of doing an effort post and making a fun conspiracy website here in the USA where the Canadian authorities can't shut it down.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
3hr ago
No one is telling you how to feel your feelings. You know that having feelings and how you express them are two different things.
You get cut more slack than you know because people (including me) actually like you quite a lot, despite your inability to control your feelings and your tendency to respond to even the least little bit of poking with explosions. So be assured that the contempt you are showing me now and have shown me in the past is not taken personally.
That said: replying to a mod telling you directly to stop doing something with a foot-stamping "No, not gonna, you can't make me, you're not the boss of me" temper tantrum is an escalation with a response that you clearly chose. So yes, banned.
I don't need or want to deal with this nonsense right now, so I will let the other mods decide when or if to end your ban.
BinaryHobo
3hr ago
but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has successfully held off the Skynet overlords and if you want this state of affairs to continue, you should send him more money.
Jokes aside, while I agree that so far the productivity increases are marginal, the technology is genuinely remarkable compared to what most people anticipated a few years ago. I can ask the LLM to tell me about how to do incredibly boring softwareshit and it usually tells me the right idea, saving me the effort of going to Stack Overflow and other sites and reading through it myself. And it actually writes code for me that works like 70% of the time which is great because it means that I can spend less time doing perhaps the most boring activity ever devised, writing business software for other people, and instead use the time to do something more interesting, such as pretty much anything else. All this might not seem like much, but this would actually have seemed like an utterly crazy leap of technology a few years ago. The AIs are also making good visual art and decent music left and right. I think that the economic changes are slowly creeping up, it might not seem obvious now what the current AI revolution has done, but it will be obvious in a few years.
Skynet doesn't seem to be right around the corner, but people who worry about it have a point in that, while the current AI stuff isn't Skynet, if one draws a line between AI capability 10 years ago and AI capability now, and extrapolates the same line 10 years forward... Of course extrapolating the line isn't good science, but there's no particular reason to think that the line's slope will decrease.
Personally, my attitude to all the AI risk stuff is the same as my attitude to climate change. I think the concerns about both are probably well-founded, I just don't really care much about either on the emotional level. I guess that's one of the nice things about not having kids.
I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.
Probably a troll, but why not discuss seriously anyways?
If we wanted to investigate this theory, soccer doesn't seem like a good place to start. If women really do have social skills and body language and facial expression reading ability so much better than men that it might grant them practical skills, let's pick a game where that's the most important thing and physical ability is meaningless. Poker sounds good to me.
I have no clue offhand how high-end competitive poker works. A few quick searches show World Series of Poker seems to have separate men's and women's leagues. Somebody out there must be running high-end mixed-gender poker games though. If women really are that much better at those things, they ought to be cleaning up at mixed-gender poker tables.
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