domain:alexberenson.substack.com
GBRK
4hr ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4hr ago
In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."
The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)
Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)
Jiro
4hr ago
What about the atoms in your body that have gone through the food chain and been later used in someone else's body? Who gets them?``
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
Some people think being patriotic is some kind of duty, but I'm not one of those people. Your truest and highest duty as a citizen is to make a thoughtful vote at every given election opportunity.
This is something I'm inclined to disagree with. No comment on patriotism, which I think is a snarl word that admits of too many different meanings to be useful, but I think what you've done here is an instance of fetishism. Voting is one thing that dutiful citizens often do. It is not identical to dutiful citizenship. I think you're mistaking one expression of a duty with the duty itself.
As I would have it, responsible democratic citizenship does require participating in the political life of the community. That often involves voting, but voting itself is not sufficient for it. A responsible citizen may choose not to vote in certain circumstances (as act of protest, for instance); and an irresponsible citizen may exist even while regularly voting. I don't deny that there's a correlation - responsible and thoughtful citizens vote more often, the irresponsible and incompetent vote less - but the correlation shouldn't be seen as absolute. Moreover, there are many ways for a citizen to participate in the life of their community and support their fellows that do not involve voting, and I value a lot of those ways above voting itself.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4hr ago
Case in point: https://kirkbangstad.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shutting-down-minocquas
One of our state political cranks (a FIB, natch) has vowed to shut down the community's Fourth of July parade because he doesn't think they deserve one.
clo
4hr ago
the corollary:
I care about treating animals better when it makes them more delicious.
ulyssessword
5hr ago
I always treated the 1-10 pain scale as logarithmic, like earthquakes or sound. 7% of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake ("Near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings.") is 7.8 ("Causes damage to most buildings, some to partially or completely collapse or receive severe damage."), not 0.63 (the scale only goes to 1.0, which are not felt).
Or going the other way, stubbing a toe might be a 3. Stubbing three toes is definitely not a 9. It might not even reach a 4.
walruz
5hr ago
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Pretty clear violation of the rule cited by netstack two posts upthread. One week ban.
TIRM
5hr ago
First off, it is not me torturing them in that game. They brought this on themselves. They board my ship then they deserve for me to cut power to life support, open the air locks and wait with the crew locked in the medical bay while they suffocate. They set foot on my ship, they choose the path of suffering.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
The former.
clo
5hr ago
Pro grill tip is to just rest your goddamn meat. Yes, it's a pain, yes, it's hard to resist meat fresh off the grill, but yes it makes a difference and yes you won't have it bleeding all over the plates if you did it properly.
The rest is just down to preference. Rule of thumb/eyeballing it is like 300-450g of meat per person depending on appetite/size of the person. But if you don't feel like doing a plethora of sides and someone is really invested in getting a Steak(tm) you can make some big-ass tomahawks to split between a couple people at around 600-700g a person. Meat's pretty simple. Sides on the other hand have a wide gulf between mid and great, try for both a healthy and unhealthy salad, cold cuts, etc. Stuff can be laid out without much stress. Grilled veggies also work fine as long as you watch the sear and oil/season appropriately; you can skewer the things if you like the visual but it's also fine to grill or oven them in a big batch well in advance and then toss em in a little oil and vinaigrette and season before serving. I actually like doing foil-wrapped fish in packets on the grill too, if it's a fatty fish you don't need to stress too much over being exact.
TIRM
6hr ago
Orthodox Jews believe in bodily resurrection. Which means they want their bodies kept intact. No organ donation or cremation, etc. They don't think God makes a fresh new body for you. It is your current body brought to life.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
6hr ago
There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them.
As a random aside, reading this gave me flashbacks to when I attended a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. Part of the expected behaviour while you are there is that (besides vows of silence, chastity, vegetarianism, no physical contact or eye contact) you are expected to not harm any other being. This is pretty much in line with strict Buddhist precepts.
We were given guidance to try not to step on ants while wandering the grounds and to try not to harm flies/bees/other insects. It wasn't that hard really, except to not reflexively slap bugs on your skin but brush them off gently instead. Also, I ended up not looking too closely at the tracks I was walking on because otherwise I'd slow to a snail's pace. See no evil and all that.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
6hr ago
It makes me happy that nearly all those users in the Smollett thread are here and active to this day!
GBRK
6hr ago
I have a private theory that reorgs are the company-level analogue to how human bodies evolved to raise their temperature as an immune response. When you can cleanly identify and resolve a dysfunction you do that, but when you can't... when all you have is a lingering sense of dread... you can stagnate, and let your corporate DNA die out, or you can generate a lot of "heat" and hope any entrenched dysfunctions eventually die off. No individual corporate T-cell knows what they're doing-- they're just thinking about advancing their careers and how shitty the coffee is. But the behavior gets reinforced by so many selection pressures that they conform to it anyway, as part of a larger system that they can interact with but never fully comprehend.
(This feeds into my whole conspiracy theory about how the stockmarket is already a meaninfully superhuman artificial intelligence but that's another discussion.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
I don't see why people are taking issue with this. Why should suffering and pain be cognitively complex?
Emotional heartbreak or intellectual suffering may be intellectually demanding but that's not really worse than pain. If you thrash a severely, extremely mentally retarded person then he may very well cry out and try to evade you, his suffering isn't obviously diminished by his stupidity. I might well choose intellectual pain over physical pain if given the option.
The real issue is concluding that because animals are suffering due to human policies there's a systematic need to change our behaviour. There isn't. Animals are not people by definition. There's no need to worry about them.
Saying 'oh well bees are only worth 0.0002 human suffering points not 0.02 or 0.07' is a foolish defence. There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them. Put the baseline animal moral weighting at 0 and there's no problem, regardless of how they suffer. Furthermore, it might be discovered that, by scanning the brain of the bee or some other animals, that these animals actually feel deeper pain and more profound suffering than we do. Who cares even if that were so? Does some weird mole or marmot deserve welfare because it has an overdeveloped sense of suffering?
There's no need to go out of our way to harm animals but they shouldn't be considered in this way. Instead of weighted benevolence, there should be a focus on reciprocity. If the bear or elephant is nice to people and helps out, then be nice to the elephant or bear. If the killer whale tries to sink human ships, kill it. The size of their brains or their ability to feel pain shouldn't relate to how they're treated. A bee is worth more than a pitbull in my book.
GBRK
7hr ago
cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
GBRK
7hr ago
Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
Yes and no. The GFC left a lot of college grads with a mountain of debt, short-circuited career prospects, and a sense that they'd been sold a bill of goods. But this sentiment is not limited to middle class dropouts. It is also widespread among the professionally successful. As has been noted, Mamdani did his best with upper middle class white people. These are not just career NGO types anxious to keep the taps open. They are lawyers, engineers, doctors, etc... They are the sorts of people you would expect to be most "pro-system", but they're not. They're increasingly skeptical of it.
Economic precarity is a factor - most are acutely aware of what falling off the white collar wagon would mean for their lifestyle - but the points of highest contention don't fit this pattern. Rather, you have a collapse of faith in the ability of US political systems to solve important problems in a just manner (if at all).
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
7hr ago
What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population.
Indeed; and while invoking Cain and Abel may flatter my personal biases, there's another one right next to it that very certainly does not: you can perhaps view [those humans given to be] traditionalists as Adam, progressives as Eve, and liberals as the Snake (and the sexes in that story are that way for good reason).
The liberals lie to the progressives so they'd take accept something that was too advanced for them and [that the liberal knew] the only reason they [progressive] wanted it was to be turbo-selfish with it.
The progressives in turn lie to the traditionalists, saying the thing was perfectly fine and good for everyone, don't think about it, just enjoy it.
And now everything's fucked up because beings that weren't supposed to have to deal with knowing [thing] now just have to deal with the consequences of knowing you can do [thing].
That, combined with the separation from God that comes from not being perfect with it, is how the knowledge from the fruit kills you!
Actually, both the Garden of Eden and Cain vs. Abel contrapose when read this way, but then the difference between the snake and Abel was that Abel acted faithfully and the snake faithlessly (and the siren call of the liberal t'was ever thus: did God truly say?)
It's strange that I've never heard anyone explain this in this way. Or maybe not, considering it's quite embarrassing, and especially to those "closer" to the fault (though there is ultimately no degree of "closer" in sin, and the traditionalists are too busy abusing it to shit-talk the progressives anyway in the "hurr Eve ate it first that means I'm better" sense anyway).
And maybe it's wrong, maybe I'm reading too hard into these... but if you're trying to explain how human nature and sin works to a prehistoric people then I'd say it describes the major players/impulses/excuses of the classes of humankind very well.
Of course, it doesn't say what each should do in response; the fact people can be bucketed this way is [and quite importantly] not part of the curse, but "the people more ready to accept 'did God truly say?'-type questions when they're posed in faith will instead desire and be ruled over by that class of people who are not so willing, and they will not be willing because they're cursed with having to work for a living until they die" sure is!
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
7hr ago
I appreciate the thorough response, but I think you're painting an unnecessarily bleak picture that doesn't account for several key factors.
You're right that my argument depends on relatively stable economic institutions, but this isn't as unrealistic as you suggest. We already have financial instruments that span centuries - perpetual bonds, endowments, trusts. The Vatican has maintained financial continuity for over 500 years.
Improving technology makes it at least theoretically possible to have such systems become even more robust, spanning into the indefinite, if not infinite future.
So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
The precise details of how a post Singularity society might function are beyond me. Yet I expect that they would have far more robust solutions to such problems. What exactly is the currency to debase, when we might trade entirely in units of energy or in crypto currency?
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused.
Where on Earth did you come across this claim???
Does it not strike you as prima facie absurd? The population of the UK is about 68 million, if around 1.5% of the entire population, or 3% of the women, had been raped by organized "rape gangs", I think we'd have noticed. I live here, for Christ's sake. That's the kind of figure you'd expect in a country under occupation or literally in the midst of a civil war.
The confirmed numbers, which are definitely an understatement, are about 5k girls total. I don't see how you can stretch that another 3 orders of magnitude no matter how hard you try.
Putting aside those absurd figures:
The grooming gangs are indeed horrific, but they're not representative of how most vulnerable populations are treated in developed societies. For every Rotherham, there are thousands of care homes, hospitals, and institutions that function reasonably well. The vast majority of elderly people in care facilities, despite being physically vulnerable and economically dependent, aren't systematically abused.
Your examples of state collapse and genocide are real risks, but they're risks that already exist for biological humans. The question isn't whether bad things can happen, but whether the additional risks of uploading outweigh the benefits. A world capable of supporting uploaded minds is likely one with sophisticated technology and institutions - probably more stable than historical examples, not less.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
You're describing the experience of a retiree.
The "ownable commodity" framing assumes a particular legal framework that need not exist. We already have legal protections against slavery, even of non-standard persons (corporations have rights, as do some animals in certain jurisdictions). There's no reason uploaded minds couldn't have robust legal protections - potentially stronger than biological humans, since their substrate makes certain forms of evidence and monitoring easier.
You mention trust extending through infinite chains, but this misunderstands how modern systems work. I don't need to trust every person my bank trusts, or every person my government trusts. Institutional structures, legal frameworks, and distributed systems can provide security without requiring universal interpersonal trust.
As Einstein, potentially apocryphally, said- Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. A post-Singularity economy has hordes of Von Neumann swarms turning all the matter in grasp to something useful, with a rate of growth only hard capped by the speed of light. It's not a big deal to expect even a small investment to compound, that's how retirement funds work today.
Further, you assume that I'll be entirely helpless throughout the whole process. Far from it. I want to be a posthuman intelligence that can function as a peer to any ASI, and plain biology won't cut it. Uploading my mind allows for enhancements that mere flesh and blood don't allow.
I could also strive to self-host my own hardware, or form a trusted community. There are other technological solutions to the issue of trust-
-
Substrates running on homomorphic encryption, where the provider can run your consciousness without ever being able to "read" it.
-
Decentralized hosting, where no single entity controls your file, but a distributed network does, governed by a smart contract you agreed to.
-
I could send trillions of copies of myself into interstellar space.
They really can't get all of me.
At the end of the day, you're arguing that because a totalitarian government could create digital hells, I should choose the certainty of annihilation. That's like refusing to board an airplane because of the risk of a crash, and instead choosing to walk off a cliff. Yes, the crash is horrific, but the cliff is a 100% guarantee of the same outcome: death.
Your argument is that because a system can fail, it will fail in the worst way imaginable, and therefore I should choose oblivion. My argument is that the choice is between certain death and a future with manageable risks. The economic incentives will be for security, not slavery. The technology will co-evolve with its own safeguards. And the societal risks, while real, are ones we already face and must mitigate regardless. If the rule of law collapses, we all lose.
The ultimate omnipotent god in this scenario is Death, and I'll take my chances with human fallibility over its perfect, inescapable certainty any day.
The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism
From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.
I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.
The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them
Then there's this
SCREEN
JACKON: I heard Morpheus has been
on this board.
SUPERASTIC: Morpheus doesn't even
exist and the Matrix is nothing
but an advertising gimmick 4 a new
game.
TIMAXE: All I want to know is
Trinity really a girl?
LODIII: 87% of all women on line
are really men.
Tee hee.
Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.
This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.
TRINITY
They're watching you. Something
happened and they found out about
you.
You're out of the closet buddy.
She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix
He told me that no one should look
for the answer unless they have to
because once you see it,
everything changes. Your life and
the world you live in will never
be the same. It's as if you wake
up one morning and the sky is
falling.
I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.
Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.
AGENT SMITH
It seems that you have been living
two lives.
The pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.
Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.
RE: Uploading.
Do we really need to worry about our uploads being abused and tortured, or sold for parts? By the time technology is far enough along to upload minds, what really is the value of an upload? It can be copied and modified infinitely. Most likely they can be synthesized, procedurally generated or just generated by "AI"s. If a virtual mind is good for anything, then there will be so many of them purpose-built that nobody needs a pre-singularity upload to do the job.
You'll be a useless scrap of data. Just to be very clear about that.
Other than that, I think you reason it out very well. I'd disagree on the assumptions - might even suspect that your motivation is mostly wishful thinking - but the actual arguments flowing from them seem pretty solid.
More options
Context Copy link