domain:alexberenson.substack.com
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19m ago
I've been meaning to write another update on AI but not sure if anyone still cares.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27m ago
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't.
Reading the conversation, it looks to me like you did in fact conflate the two groups.
Destroying the statue was teabagging the outgroup plain and simple. The moderate voice in every statue controversy has consistently said something to the effect of "move them to a museum" which is what happened here. What this event (moving to a museum and then destroying it) shows is that there is no quarter to moderates in the culture war. It's very much in line with the friend-enemy distinction principle.
As a southerner who was on team "move them to a museum", I'm genuinely disgusted.
"the outgroup" in this comment is pretty clearly referring to contemporary people, not the Confederate slavers. The context of the entire comment is about people in the present day.
Your reply:
Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing? Drop the moral relativism: some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
(bolding mine.) He's talking about one thing, you respond with a line that makes it seem like he's talking about something else. That doesn't make for good discussion. Especially when you follow it up with:
no quarter to moderates in the culture war.
What exactly do you mean by "moderates" here? Not hating a person who rebelled to support slavery isn't what I would call "moderate".
I find it doubtful that you were actually confused by what he meant by "moderate". If you want to argue that such people aren't actually moderate, you can present an argument. You offer a declaration, framed uncharitably. This is building consensus, and it also makes for bad discussion.
You seem to have a habit of writing posts in a way optimized, intentionally or not, for maximizing heat and not light. You also seem to have a pattern of conversation centering on moral outrage that people might possibly disagree with you. If you are actually interested in discussing why someone might not want confederate statues destroyed, or why they should want them destroyed, that's something we can do here. It would help to start from the assumption that people might reasonably disagree with you.
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group?
It's not, and he has in fact been warned. On the other hand, at least it's not an uncharitably-framed argument over definitions of words. The person you're complaining about is pretty clearly a racist, and they aren't hiding it or being weaselly about it. That's actually preferable to the alternative, which is why we have the "speak plainly" rule, and, as I understand it, is one of the reasons we tolerate significant amounts of vitriol toward parties who are not actually present in the discussion.
TIRM
28m ago
Any time 50%+1 voter wants to they can repeal prop 13. Somehow these last few many decades they've declined. I don't like blaming voters from decades ago since other voters continuously chose to stick with it.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
40m ago
If California Forever alone (lol) was developed to Barcelona's density (note we are not even talking high rises here) it could fit 3.4M people.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
48m ago
gus
51m ago
There should be a #4 for effort if they don’t want to be technically wrong.
Notice how this spurred discussion from a simple post…why don’t we vote on bringing back the bare links repository?
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
53m ago
It would be like defining 'violent video games' wide enough that it includes Pong (there's a winner and a loser), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'violent video games' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing GameStop to do age verification.
Newspeak (like "porn", "violent video games", and "woke") is useful because it prevents your opponents from putting a name to your face.
It has no downsides that are recognizable by the people who practice this kind of politics.
NelsonRushton
55m ago
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup.
I think this covers up an important truth. There is an important difference in this respect between "virtually everyone" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. It is one thing to feel like your clan has gotten the short end of some particular stick, but it is another thing to feel like that justifies negating the human rights of your countrymen in the entire offending class. Of course you can find, to some degree, talking heads of any class talking about how their group has been treated unfairly, but when that rises to a certain pitch and tone, you'd best keep your rifle clean.
stav
1hr ago
And I agree they should develop those and it will help with the housing crisis. But it’s not going to make the Bay Area affordable. Let’s say they develop all of that into high rises tomorrow and build 100,000 dwellings. Those homes would still be prohibitively expensive for most Americans.
stav
1hr ago
I think you are massively overestimating the percentage of homeowners in SF etc who are retired boomer and older whites and how much power they have.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
No, you can't even build housing in the middle of nowhere without hearing these nimby arguments.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever
https://protectcoyotevalley.org/
In east Alameda countythere's enormous amounts of empty space. Much of the prime real estate in Santa Clara county is warehouses or other industrial areas, and much of the bay area is really shitty SFHes built on shoestring budgets in the sixties.
That's off the top of my head.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
1hr ago
Why would they keep buying it if the value of that housing is being diluted by all the new housing? Foreigners buy houses in these markets as an investment. The only reason the sunset is a good investment is because the supply of houses is fixed by the boomer death grip. If you could actually build something there it would cease to be a good investment.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Except the actual regulations in question are often things like ‘allow duplexes and triplexes in single family zones’, which NEETS will not be living in except as a dependent, and they could easily live as dependents in single family homes as is the stereotype.
Few people want to build the Kowloon walled city.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Houston also has the loosest zoning rules anywhere in the country.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Correct, housing prices are artificially high because it’s illegal to build houses. That, in turn, is mostly because old white people use their political power to make it so.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Greg Abbott has a propaganda push about trying to reduce housing prices. Someone immersed in Texas politics- or heavily into the YIMBY scene- would probably be aware of it.
In practice a lot of the actual programs he’d point to are populist signaling, but Austin is the only major city with declining apartment rents while the city grows.
SSCReader
2hr ago
Exactly! And it does because Boomers vote and lobby and spend money to look out for their interests.
How they feel about their personal moral obligations has no impact, but what they do does. And the people opposing them need to learn that lesson if they hope to succeed. Being morally right does exactly nothing to advance their cause.
ResoluteRaven
2hr ago
Singapore has a new prime minister, marking the end of the political dynasty founded by Lee Kuan Yew. I don't know much about this new guy, but it will be interesting to see for how much longer the People's Action Party can maintain its current level of centralized control with less charismatic leaders. Given the popularity of Lee around these parts, I figured others may have something to add about the stability of the current system or the future of everyone's favorite Southeast Asian city-state (no offense to Brunei).
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Voice of America is a thing. TBH I’d be shocked if the EU didn’t have similar programs.
Honestly a big, wealthy, influential country is naturally going to perceive a nationalist-ish media law, no matter how anodyne, in its poorer, smaller periphery to be aimed at it.
sliders1234
2hr ago
The white nationalist guy had me thinking about this a lot when they did the full discussion. You can’t just make whites holes by doing things to mitigate black crime. More policing makes a neighborhood feel worse. Many of the small crimes and generally annoyance of the lower class blacks that will find there way in will make the neighborhoods less desirable. People will do things to mitigate the undesirableness by doing nimby things or moving to the suburbs. The mitigations themselves have costs (longer commutes/more pollution). We would probably build our cities more like Buenos Aires which is chill and dense with very walkable communities.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
Well, no. Because what the pod people want is basically Kowloon Walled City surrounded by farmland. An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all. So if the pod people have their way the McMansion people will be pushed until they hit the boundary and then they'll be forced into pods.
remzem
2hr ago
It's surprising how radicalized people have become by the western empire / media / ngo complex. Seems like this also involves efforts to limit foreign NGO influence https://www.politico.eu/article/commissioner-upbraids-slovakia-on-changes-to-ngo-public-media-laws-robert-fico/ and is a similar situation to the bill causing all the riots in Georgia and of course a few years ago Hungary... attempted? or actually passed? I don't remember, a similar bill to label and monitor NGOs with significant foreign funding among other attempts to rid their local media of foreign influence. Are these people just NPCs that listen to too much Slovakian NPR? Or people that see themselves as members of the borderless global professional (laptop) class? Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad. The US and EU response to these laws is very telling as well.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
This is basically a paen to "might makes right". But if we look at it that way, right now the people who own the houses have the upper hand in government, and the would-be pod-dwellers who want their space don't. So it turns out civilization favors the NIMBY, at least for now.
I just don’t think you should be able to tell your neighbor what he can do on his land.
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