domain:nunosempere.com
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17m ago
I don’t think it was knowledge. We stopped supporting slavery once machines were capable of at least somewhat reducing human inputs. A slave thus became less necessary. We stopped thinking of genocide as a viable response to natives once we’d finished taking all the valuables land in the West. Genocide is still on their table because there’s still valuable land to be takin and the natives aren’t yet pacified enough to live next to.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
57m ago
I've read both and found Catch-22 uproariously funny other than the places where it was darkly serious, but Slaughterhouse-Five wasn't funny at all, the effect was more of "I need to take a break from all the gruesome WWII shit I remember, here's some aliens as a palate cleanser".
practical_romantic
1hr ago
You're super lucky to have such sparring partners. Their style of mma is highly effective.
I personally wish to learn that if I'm lucky someday with enough defensive wrestling and bjj to be able to defend myself. But yeah, being at the bottom agaisnt such people is a nightmare. Very suffocating!
Xi is openly a Marxist-Leninist. Deng acknowledged what many ML economists had already done (and even what Lenin had with the aborted NEP), which was that the ‘capitalist stage’ had to be fully completed in order to drive down the marginal cost of production before ‘full socialism’ could be implemented from each according to ability to each according to need. There was no fundamental reason why one revolutionary party could not guide and indeed manage the entire transition from feudalism or early stage, largely agricultural capitalism to communism, including through the majority of the capitalist state, provided it avoided corruption and remained steadfast in its belief that - once capitalism had done its job - communism would be faithfully implemented in service of the people.
This is the genuine majority view among senior cadres in the CCP.
According to Xi, "the consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations." On the relationship with capitalist nations, Xi said, "Marx and Engels' analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win." Xi also stated: "The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism."
The extent to which the Chinese believe in HBD is hard to gauge. Certainly ethnic stereotypes of all kinds are common. Nevertheless, the CCP is anti racist, party cadres are taught what is effectively blank-statism in school, research into related evo-psych topics is largely suppressed, even if it is not as immediately cancellable as it is in the US. For 30 years Very Smart Western midwits have pushed the idea that “nah, these guys aren’t really Marxists, they’re mercenaries, they believe in China but not some ideology that a German Jewish journalist came up with 170 years ago, they don’t really believe”. No, they really, really do.
That would make the best time to strike, presumably, the very point at which the contradictions of capitalism become most elevated. Perhaps AI related mass unemployment, who knows? At that point, the US and Western capitalist countries would struggle for an ideology, a path, would be wracked by ideological violence and division. The CCP would simply calmly and peacefully execute the transition they’ve been preparing for all along. Do they believe it will be soon, though? After all, the CCP might not be LW-type singularity believers. Xi did say ten generations, and he’s the fifth generation of party leadership, so that suggests quite a few more.
2rafa
2hr ago
Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.
But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
2hr ago
Haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five but much of Catch 22 is just funny. I don't know if it would count as dark humor.
"You should see her naked," General Dreedle chortled with croupy relish, while his nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform in my room made of purple silk so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. Milo got me the fabric. There isn't even room enough for panties or a brassiere underneath. I make her wear it some night when Moodus is around just to drive him crazy." General Dreedle laughed hoarsely. "You should see what goes on inside that blouse of hers everytime she shifts her weight. She drives him out of his mind. The first time I catch him putting a hand on her or any other woman I'll bust that horny bastard right down to private and put him on K.P. for a year.
"He keeps her around just to drive me crazy," Colonel Moodus accused aggrievedly at the other end of the bar. "Back at Wing she's got a uniform made of purple silk that's so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. There isn't even room for panties or a brassiere underneath. You should hear that silk rustle everytime she shifts her weight. The first time I make a pass at her or any other girl he'll bust me right down to private and put me on K.P. for a year. She drives me out of my mind.
"He hasn't gotten laid since we shipped overseas," confided General Dreedle, and his square grizzled head bobbed with sadistic laughter at the fiendish idea. "That's one of the reasons I never let him out of my sight, just so he can't get to a woman. Can you imagine what that poor son of a bitch is going through?"
"I haven't been to bed with a woman since we shipped overseas," Colonel Moodus whimpered tearfully. "Can you imagine what I'm going through?"
Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;
In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
There are Chinese companies trading on the NYSE where the net cash on the balance sheet is more than 2x the market cap of the company.
Do you have a specific example you could point to?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3hr ago
Probably the thing at highest risk is the electric grid and things attached to it.
Also satellites, which for obvious reasons cannot ground themselves. I would think this a more likely attack vector on US space supremacy than antisatellite missiles.
jake
3hr ago
For what it's worth, I didn't at all consider reporting the comment.
Tomato's response was probably a bit more acerbic than desirable but it's a reasonable conclusion to the discourse of the terminally online left and right. The left is much more gleeful about the prospect of violence but that seems a poor gradient when both sides, again among the terminally online, wonder loudly "Why aren't we killing them all yet?" The right thinks it should have been no later than summer 2020, the left thinks probably no later than Charlottesville, and so when violence hasn't happened but you expect it, you seek an answer. Nobody's questioning first principles, they're not asking if their fundamental assumption is wrong because people almost never do. The right concludes with docility, the left concludes with calling it a larp. When the lefties have been hearing since at least 2020 "One of these days, man . . . " some amount of mirth isn't unreasonable.
Well--not unreasonable within the frame. Stepping back to only observe terminally online discourse (and discuss it here sure) without allowing it to excessively influence one's thinking is best.
Of course I also assert it as a fear response, but I have no blame for someone who chooses to self-assuage fear of the will to bloodshed that still absolutely inhabits western man.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3hr ago
It's hard to imagine any great-power war against the US not involving kesslering every useful orbit as the first move, which would likely destroy any long-range precision weaponry advantage that the US has (consider how even the medium-range kit Ukraine got is creaking under mere GPS jamming, and every Starlink outage causes pandemonium). Under lower-tech conditions, contesting China's geographical advantage over Taiwan may be hard for the US, whose military seems quite addicted to its C&C capabilities, and even the lessons of Ukraine's defense may not be applicable in a scenario where real fog of war is once again a factor.
The US would do well to fix in doctrine that destroying enough of its space assets will be grounds for unbounded nuclear retaliation, but it might require some preparatory propaganda to get people to accept it as reasonable so soft power doesn't suffer for it.
jeroboam
3hr ago
So what you're saying is that if a large enough percentage of Motte users (say, like, 54%) liked your previous contributions, then you get to bend some of the more ticky-tacky procedural rules without extreme sanction.
If so, I agree!
The situation does seem a bit familiar...
But, seriously, the mods are generally doing a good job. People on this forum should probably whine less about the moderation.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3hr ago
Why do you think GDP is the relevant measure of catching up with America?
Oh come on, there are comments on here dripping with sheer contempt all the time that don't get the authors banned.
Keep in mind, I'm not a leftoid, I just think that most of the rightoids on here are retarded. If we had more leftoids here, I'd tell them that they are also retarded, cause I genuinely believe that.
But the Tomato didn't express himself in a way more obnoxious than what we see regularly here, so come the fuck on, shape up or have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.
Right now, this site is mostly just a refugee camp for midwits who overrate their own intelligence because they realize that different races differ in IQ or whatever (Wow! You just have to be a non-retard to understand that different races differ in IQ for probably in part genetic reasons! Congratulations on having a bare minimum intelligence to be worthy of smart people paying attention to you!).
Having the bare minimum of intelligence to be able to see through leftoid ideas of how everybody's on average equal in intelligence or whatever... doesn't take much. It's just like the bare standard minimum. This site is overrun with lame social trads, religious idiots, authoritarians, and so on... all of whose ideas are not rationally obviously correct, but they clearly are pushing these ideas because they have deep-seated emotional (as opposed to rational) reasons for wanting to push those ideas. They often write things that are not rationally justified, and imply that their opponents are all sorts of nasty things when they write it, but I am not calling for them to be banned. So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?
Everyone in the West sort of assumes that Chinese numbers are fake. There are Chinese companies trading on the NYSE where the net cash on the balance sheet is more than 2x the market cap of the company. If people believed the numbers, this would be almost impossible.
I think the numbers are mostly real. Go to Walmart. Everything is made in China. This is not so easy to fake. And if you look at international trade (also mostly impossible to fake) you will see China dominates the imports of nearly every other country.
Militant angry Trump supporters actually kind of are losers until and unless proven otherwise. They have loads of guns and a large fraction of them think that the 2020 election was stolen from them, yet they've killed a total of about 0 government workers. If they continue like this, it will make sense for their enemies to ignore them as LARPers. Personally, I'd love to see them rise up and make some of the establishment face the consequences of their inactions and actions, but so far they haven't done almost anything. What's it going to take? I guess there is some breaking point at which they would rise up, but what would it take?
SlowBoy
4hr ago
Please explain what is so serious about the crime of which Trump was (unjustly) convicted.
SlowBoy
4hr ago
Are you trolling me?. Hillary is extremely relevant to the conversation about "propagating stolen election myths". She said 2016 was stolen. That's not a conspiracy theory. You cannot pontificate about Trump as some unique denier of elections in this case. You either need to refine your argument or make a concession.
The fact that you're not talking about Hillary is the problem.
gattsuru
4hr ago
That's interesting, I just got this notification around June 1 23:00 EDT.
The actual post you made, not so interesting. Is this supposed to even be a response to or defense of the question you sent to start? Or is it just the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club, and no conviction by a jury could possibly be overt political lawfare?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
The election will inevitably (particularly now that Trump is a felon) lead to an enormous amount of chaos between October 2024 and February 2025.
Worse than that: this was clear as early as 2022 if not from Jan 6 2021, so the (highly non-trivial) preparations for war could be made. Indeed, back in late 2022 when I posted this, my unstated conclusion was "the Five Eyes have detected an in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan" (I'm still not 100% confident of that, but I can't see any other likely scenarios in which "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and an active decision to avert it is required).
With that said, the chance is not 100%. As Symon noted, we can turn off a linear path; leaders can make decisions. An in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan means only that Xi thinks the option of an attack is worth the cost of the preparations; he could still very easily call "no-go" before the trigger's pulled if circumstances look less than favourable.
I think the "indirect control" plan, if it can even be called a "plan", is bananas and unworkable; the PRC has no jurisdiction over the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (which is a formal member of the WTO) and any attempt to declare border controls would be a legal nullity and would be ignored. I'm not saying they won't claim to be doing this - the PRC claims a lot of things - but they would have to back it up with at least an actual blockade (either shooting or mining) and they know this. So that leaves us with three real options:
- Blockade Taiwan ("surrender or Taipei starves")
- Bombard Taiwan ("surrender or Taipei burns")
- Invade Taiwan ("who cares if you surrender, there's a guy with a bayonet in the Legislative Yuan"), presumably with a preceding bombardment
...with the latter two both having the option of pre-emptive strikes on US/Korean/Japanese assets in East Asia, or not doing that out of hope of keeping them neutral. Frankly, I'm not enough of a tactician to figure out which they're planning on; there've been exercises relating to all three primary scenarios so it's entirely possible they're intending on some degree of flexibility depending on how the situation develops.
Overall numbers - with the horizon of 12 months, I'd say a very uncertain 50%. I'm anchoring on the Paul Symon interview with WWIII being the default case (note that I think it's like 80% that the West comes in conditional on a Taiwan play, and 90% that cities get nuked conditional on the West intervening in a Taiwan play), but I've heard some noises more recently saying it might be more like 2027 so I've shaved a bit off.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
There was no reason for Hillary to set up her own private email server, unless: 1) She was doing horribly corrupt things on it 2) She was extremely willful and ignorant and insisted on doing something that everyone around her would have told her was a bad idea.
I actually think it's a worse double compounding of these two things;
She did it because the people around her knew she was doing horribly corrupt things and convinced her this was a really good idea so that she could avoid responsibility down the road.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
5hr ago
How do you find so much time to watch videos you're not enjoying?
I wanted to add something related but tangential to @self_made_human 's post on therapists.
The business model issue.
Without doxxing myself, I'm just going to say that I once had a person who ran / co-owned a therapy practice explain how his business ran. He and his partner would contract with independent providers who would contract with them, they guy and his partner would handle all of the overhead, paperwork, legal, marketing, etc. and take a percentage of patient fees.
He told me that the customers break down into three groups.
The first two are what you would probably expect.
The first group is more or less stable people who go through specifically difficult life circumstances and require the services of a therapist for some amount of time. People after a divorce, death in the family, traumatic event. In addition, you also have those with enduring mental health issues (major depression, bipolar etc.) that can function in society but probably need therapy and possible medication to do it. In many ways, these are the "best" patients in that the therapist gets to see them heal, grow, thrive etc. Very much a win-win.
The second group are folks with severe mental illness that have sought out therapy usually with the assistance of family and / or friends. Now, because the guy telling me about this was running a very much for-profit no-insurance practice, I will caveat that this is one perspective / reality. I can definitely see how this group's dynamics may be different at other kind of practices / state sponsored hospitals etc. Anyways, these folks have brutal situations and are doing what they can to manage. In addition to the severe mental illness, substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors are super common. Some therapists really are dedicated and do what they can to help, but few and far between see these folks really turn it around. Maybe a few "stabilize" and can live with a lot of family support.
So, here's the first business question. Do you think Group 2 here can ... pay their bills? on time? Even with family support, the answer is "no."
But that first group! Surely they always pay. The answer is "yes" .... for a time. Remember, folks in that first group often "get their shit together" after 6 months, a year, two, three ... And even the ones that are getting therapy for decades are probably not doing it weekly after a while. They often slow down to once a month or even less frequently as check-ins.
So, from a cash flow perspective, you're in a rough spot; some percentage of your patients are so unreliable you can't really put much confidence in their recurring revenue. Another percentage pays, but does not pay with enough volume or long term durability to cover that other group. What to do?
Group Motherfuckin' 3.
Group 3 are the textbook, highly online, utterly insufferable "therapy culture" people. Soccer moms, yuppie young professionals who probably had awesome childhoods, confused and wistful early retirees, college professors (who may be banging those young professionals), and art history majors. Unfulfilled dads don't get therapy - they become very good at grilling meat and an expert in either WW2 or the Civil War (God Bless all ye taxpayers!). Group 3 is at least weekly in their visits. Many are more frequent. Most will go through periods of "needing" more intense therapy. They change prescriptions a lot for .... unknown reasons. If they catch a hint of lack of interest from the therapist, you can bet they will effect some sort of scene outside of therapy to re-energize their sessions (_"When we were in Cabo, I told Braden that I wanted to try polyamory. He just went golfing without saying a word! HOW CAN I LIVE LIKE THIS!") I'll be nice a little here; sometimes, Group 3 types just need a little professional reassurance and they do turn their shit around. Sometimes, even, they realize a lot of their problems are of their own making or that their perspective was just miscalibrated. Yet, the majority are absolutely using a therapist as a paid friend. Depending on where you live, lap dances from strippers are more cost effective.
Back to business - how do we square the circle of Group 1 and Group 2 not covering our costs or making us money?
Group Motherfuckin' 3. And boy do they Make. That. Money.
What to take away from this? As @self_made_human 's post pointed out - therapy works (if you work at it, I would add). But the problem is that so much of the therapy business and market is now geared towards "therapy culture" people that it's creating a really bad situation in which new providers either think that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife or, even worse, that everyone they're going to meet is just an exasperated housewife who doesn't care if it's $275 / hr holy shit free money hack. When that second group comes face to face with their first hard case of a patient, it can be horribly destabilizing for both of them. The proliferation of the online telehealth therapists is the poster child for this.
What's the market solution? I don't have one and I don't want one. If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand. And, as I hope this post as pointed out, the way it works in practice, you do have an effective voluntary (albeit semi-informed) wealth transfer tax. I will never not let rich people spend their money the way they see fit.
I have no horse in this race, but: as a small case study, the Effective Altruism forum has been impoverished over the last few years by not being lenient with valuable contributors when they had a bad day.
In a few cases, I later learnt that some longstanding user had a mental health breakdown/psychotic break/bipolar something or other. To some extent this is an arbitrary category, and you can interpret going outside normality through the lens of mental health, or through the lens of "this person chose to behave inappropriately". Still, my sense is that leniency would have been a better move when people go off the rails.
In particular, the best move seems to me a combination of:
Two factors here are:
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