domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
hydroacetylene
7m ago
Social conservatism is pretty correlated with short courtships, globally. From that perspective going steady while not officially a couple is wasting time at best and treating her like a floozy at worst.
The American violet tribers who date for years on end are very exceptional, and both scandalize and confuse their European counterparts.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9m ago
You can go to your custom CSS settings and add
@media (max-width:480px) {
p {
font-size: 16px;
}
}
which will bump the font size from 14px to 16px on mobile devices (technically "narrow screens" not "mobile devices" but that's just how it is in web dev) only (cc @George_E_Hale).
ApplesauceIrishCream
31m ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
36m ago
The Homosexuality article notably you did not post with a submission statement, which might affect engagement. Your characterization of the camgirl/femcel post as "sex positivity vs. purity" is interesting to me, as although I see why you use those terms, that is not the classification I'd have used (I'd have been less charitable.) I just didn't/don't like her writing style. I don't like the writing style of many who nevertheless gain quite a bit of readers.
Also you've posted about 7 or so articles--I was going to say "only 7 or so" to make my point that that's not a large number to start making assumptions about people, but I don't want to discourage you from continuing to post these because I enjoy them and I think we need more people posting standalone threads in this way. Basically I wouldn't make much of this. The Motte does not seem to me to be made up of homogeneous minds, despite occasional comments about a hivemind or whatever.
non_radical_centrist
38m ago
I think I was aware at least 80% of the facts covered in the article.
I don't think the degree to which gender and sexuality are largely, but not entirely, biological is common knowledge. Maybe most of themotte have already familiarized themselves with the science though, if any group's likely to have it's motteizens.
There is no public desire on a large-enough scale in the modern US or Europe for the kind of forced population movements that the alt-right wants. Which means that voting or no voting, it is not going to happen any time in the immediate future. It is not going to happen through voting because the people who want it are outvoted. It is not going to happen outside of voting because the people who want it to happen are outnumbered and outgunned by the people who do not want it to happen. Personally, I doubt that it will ever happen. Attitudes towards these things have simply changed enormously since 80 years ago and the number of non-whites in the US and Europe is growing too slowly to cause some sort of shocked paradigm shift among white people.
ApplesauceIrishCream
42m ago
It is almost true that SYG has nothing to do with the Zimmerman case, and I find the thin bit of exception annoying, because it doesn't engage the philosophical point at all.
In Zimmerman's case, his actions were fully covered by either a generic SYG regime or a DTR regime. The philosophical difference does not apply to that case in the slightest--when he shot Martin, he had no ability to retreat, and it was Martin that forced the encounter, not Zimmerman. All of that is very clear-cut in the evidence presented at trial; if Florida had been a full-bore generic DTR state, Zimmerman would have been equally justified under the facts of the case.
The problem is that the word "generic" in the last paragraph is doing a bit of lifting. Florida's specific SYG law did apply to the case, but on a completely secondary point--the text of the law prohibited the arrest of someone claiming self-defense unless the officers had probable cause to believe that the self-defense argument was a lie. Zimmerman's arrest violated the SYG law because the police never had probable cause to believe he was lying; the evidence collected immediately at the scene and the following day (with Zimmerman's active cooperation) uniformly supported his description of events, as did every bit of subsequently developed direct or eye/earwitness testimony.
"Categorically believing, or disbelieving" is a false choice that does not describe the law accurately--the law set up a presumption in favor of the self-defense claimant in protecting him from arrest, but that presumption could be defeated by sufficient evidence to establish probable cause.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
46m ago
I also have this problem but use old man reading classes on the train. I have wondered, though, why the phone text-size settings didn't work with this site.
Supah_Schmendrick
48m ago
The same one as John Adams, thank-you-very-much.
CriticalDuty
48m ago
"What it would look like" in Europe would probably be the forced population swaps between Greece and Turkey after World War I, or the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. There already exists a model for this in Europe, it's happened before. But nothing like this happens without state force and a willingness to resort to violence, which means nothing of the sort will happen as long as people continue to believe (as they do in Europe) that they just need to vote harder to solve the problem.
KMC
1hr ago
Erik Prince was on Tucker Carlson. It was nearly two hours, and I enjoyed most of it. They talked about Ukraine, the CIA, republicans, Afghanistan, drone warfare, surveillance, smartphones, and much more.
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1792963714779426941
https://rumble.com/v4wl5or-erik-prince-cia-corruption-killer-drones-and-government-surveillance.html
Also youtube, somewhere.
I wanted to transcribe this part, and talk about it. Approximately 1:09.
EP: There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.
TC: I agree with that completely, but an actual American, someone who grew up here.
EP: Fair. But the left has devalued American citizenship, it should mean something to be an American. I mean, a Roman citizen: it meant something.
TC: I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.
EP: Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
TC: Yeah, you wonder if we've reached where that is impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.
EP: I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible.
I have not been shy about voicing my thoughts on citizenship, so to hear them echoed in some part on a platform like this was interesting and unexpected.
What other societies is he talking about? I am most familiar with the Reconquest, where the mohammadeans were driven out of Iberia over centuries. That fits pretty well with what Prince is saying. I'm less familiar with the partition of India, by religion, then the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This seems less relevant. What else is there? And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?
There's plenty to talk about from this conversation. The parts on drone warfare were particularly interesting to me, but didn't seem to fit with the rest of this post. And I'm out of time, so I post this as-is without any further commentary.
Hyperion
1hr ago
I always heard this line as a kid. That the Communists really meant well and sharing is good, but it just ran against human nature or got corrupted by bad people. Then you read what Marx and Lenin actually wrote and you realize they wanted revolution and power more than anything else. The feel good stuff was secondary to, and a justification for, the hatred and lust for power and violence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken
"Watching other people making friends, everywhere, as a dog makes friends, I mark the manner of these canine courtesies and think, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy."
― Edmund Rostand, Cyrano De Bergerac
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
There is an implication in your post where moves that offend one side, but could actually be promoting justice are a bad thing.
There is no objective definition of "Justice", such that we can measure it with a ruler or weigh it with a scale. I believe that Justice is both real and fundamental, but I have no way of making you or anyone else agree with my understanding of Justice other than persuasion or force. Persuasion pretty clearly doesn't work at this point, and we are devolving toward less and less veiled dependence on force.
We should talk about the facts and then argue whether one, or both tribes are wrong.
Do you believe that such arguments are generally productive? Do they tend to lead to consensus across tribal divides, even here? My observation is that the most "productive" outcome is the sort of Blue-Wins-By-Default both-sides-isms that you seem to be complaining about. For me, long-term, good-faith attempts to bridge the divide have resulted in deep cynicism and considerable radicalization. I think it's pretty clear that the tribal gap is currently unbridgeable, and rapidly getting worse. That's why I've written the OP the way I have; because the amoral, outside view of is and not ought is the only avenue for productive conversation across the divide that I can see.
I asked you about what you think about the facts of the case because it is directly related about whether one can argue that the pardon could be an escalation.
See the edits above, as well as my arguments in the rest of the thread.
I actually don't think it is much of an escalation, even if Perry deserved harsher punishment than a year, when considering how biased the system has been by the blue tribe.
It doesn't matter if you think it's an escalation, any more than it matters if Blues think barricading roads, attacking motorists, and facilitating and protecting those who do is an escalation. Your assessment of their actions is what matters, because it determines how you'll react. Their assessment of your actions matters, because it determines how they'll react. There is no way I can see to get either side to accept that the other side's last action was legitimate, or that their own actions were illegitimate. The result is obviously going to be escalating tit-for-tat until the system runs out of capacity.
Fundamentally, this idea of appeasement being the road to peace, doesn't work
I never claimed it did. In fact, it not working in either direction is my entire premise. Blues will not accept the pardon any more than Reds accepted the conviction, any more than blues accepted the shooting, any more than Reds accepted the rioting, any more than blues accepted the justice system's delivered outcomes. For the purposes of this analysis, it doesn't matter which side is right. Neither side is going to back down. The conflict is self-sustaining and will likely continue to expand until things break which we cannot fix or even patch.
Good compromise and mutual respect require the right to actually show up.
Good compromise and mutual respect do not seem to me to be options on the table. If you see evidence of them, I'd be interested to see it.
No_one
1hr ago
In the spirit of trying more things re: my problem with wandering attention and all that, I got my hands on something labelled "Concerta 18 mg".
Doesn't seem to do much for the problem with attention, however it does make me feel slightly more energetic as I've just drunk a liter of energy drink, but way 'smoother'. Also somewhat nervous and as If I had a constant weight pressing on my chest from outside. The nervousness ramps up, reaches a peak cca 6 hours after taking it and then passes.
Still not sure what to do with my tendency to delay doing things I don't like doing -bills that aren't on auto pay, cleaning that's not agreed upon, home improvement I need to do.
I keep putting it off and only do it right before the deadline, or even slightly after it.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
That's fair. I was thinking more when the case originally blew up in the media and the facts that came out at trial (the injury details) weren't as clear.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1hr ago
For what it’s worth, the Njal’s Saga post got me to actually read the Saga. By the time I had done so, the post was gone, though.
roystgnr
1hr ago
it's unlikely anything really changed inside his head until his death.
Was this a deliberate choice of phrase, I hope? IMHO Trotsky ice axe jokes never truly get old. Just like Trotsky.
I think "left" and "right" are net-harmful concepts in that whatever minor useful explanatory value they have is more than counterweighed by the enormous confusion and thought-termination that they cause in political discussions. I have never seen a clear definition of either "left" or "right" that people in general can even vaguely agree on.
My politics depends on what mood I am in. I have a certain mood in which I am purely selfish in my politics and care only about whatever will bring me personally the most power. The advantage of this view of things is that unlike political ideologies, it is consistent as far as I know.
However, I am not a sociopath and so there is another side of me in which I do favor certain politics for non-selfish reasons. In this other mood, I am a classical liberal who is an extreme liberal when it comes to social issues like sexuality (I do not care in the least bit what people do in bed as long as it is consensual), a moderate liberal when it comes to economics (I do not think pure free markets are the optimal system, but I do think that regulated free markets are the best one anyone has ever come up with so far), and a libertarian when it comes to free speech.
I oppose the woke, the social conservatives, the alt-rightists, and the moderate political mainstream. Given that people who agree with my politics do not dominate American politics (since the four groups I mentioned in the previous sentence together make up the majority of politically-interested Americans), my political strategy is to play off other political groups against each other so that they expend their energies in futile fighting but without any single group ever gaining a dominant position over the others.
Wokism to me seems like a combination of ignorance about reality about various things like basic economics and HBD and willful refusal to engage with the reality of those things, plus I dislike wokism's censorious anti-meritocraticism and wannabe-authoritarianism. Social conservatism just seems bizarre, primitive, and distasteful to me, a modern relic of times when small groups of embattled villagers had to forge oppressive social structures and rely on traditions and religious nonsense in order to maintain stability in the midst of possible famines and foreign invasions. I view the alt-right as mostly made up of either whiny people with large victim complexes whose politics is mainly driven by sexual frustration, or white nationalists who would start fighting each other and denouncing each other as not white enough if they ever managed to establish a white ethnostate - and in any case, their anti-meritocratic and authoritarian views make them distasteful to me for the same reason as why I dislike wokism. And I view the moderate political mainstream as too contaminated by lies, corruption, censoriousness, "polite" taboos, and a desire for imperial world-spanning big government (no matter what it costs) to consider them allies.
MachineElfPaladin
1hr ago
It might simply be a typo of meta-narrative, but if it's the intended word, then 'mesa' is sometimes used as the opposite of 'meta' (cf. here). So that would be, I think, the process of creation of stories inside the fiction - for example, a propagandist spinning events for consumption by in-universe peers or underlings, where we as a reader have a more complete view of the actual events being referenced and know what is being left out and what is being exaggerated.
What is internally contradictory about Hlynka's thought, at least in the sense that it is significantly more internally contradictory than all other political ideologies? (All political ideologies except pure selfishness are internally contradictory to some extent). I'm not very familiar with his ideas, but from what I've seen out of his opinions the one that is most controversial here is that the alt-right is a form of progressivism, and while to me that seems like it's going too far, the milder version - that the alt-right and the woke are very similar - seems obviously true to me.
Both alt-rightists and wokists are people who see themselves victimized minorities that are oppressed by an evil hegemony and are fighting a righteous political conflict against it. Both are obsessed with race, gender, and sexuality. Both primarily care about culture war issues and do not have much to say about more engineering-esque aspects of policy like, say, energy infrastructure. Both despise the liberal/moderate-conservative mainstream. Both are suspicious of voting and attracted to more direct kinds of political action. Both are attracted to various kinds of socialism, communitarianism, and redistributionism - wokes generally favor economic socialism for non-whites and non-males, whereas alt-rightists prefer economic socialism for "real Americans" (generally meaning "hard-working" middle-class white people). Alt-rightists often favor some sort of sexual socialism on top of that, they dislike the sexual free market as much as wokes dislike the economic one.
I edited my post because arguing about the possibility that one side can be correct and how the pardon might provide justice didn't sit as right with me the more I thought about it, and wanted to remove some pro perry sentiments which in second thought don't fully reflect my views when thinking over the case more. But my view about bothsidesism being convenient and wrong remains. It is just that I don't want on this specific case to take position for the pardon. If it was the Floyd case I would support pardon on the merits of the case.
In general, I just don't think it is healthy to treat the culture war conflict as something where it is both sides equally to blame, and respect that the disagreement between tribes is more important than the merits of the case, and cases in general. We should talk about the facts and then argue whether one, or both tribes are wrong.
There is an implication in your post where moves that offend one side, but could actually be potentially promoting justice are a bad thing.
This idea itself encourages bad behavior, when we ought to be promoting the merits of the case. Additionally, if the pardon was correct, then it would not be an escalation, even if the blue tribe was offended. Appeasement of the blue tribe, on the basis that however they react it is important for them to trust the system, gives them no incentive to argue over principle, when they can get their way through outrage. But I modified some of this because this case is one that they might have a point in thinking him guilty.
I asked you about what you think about the facts of the case because it is directly related about whether one can argue that the pardon could be an escalation. I actually don't think it is much of an escalation, even if Perry deserved harsher punishment than a year, when considering how biased the system has been by the blue tribe. When it comes to whether this encourages, or discourages further escalation, it probably doesn't. The reason is that much of blue tribe excesses aren't stochaistic, but the result of too much appeasement and too many cases of getting away with it, and also related to symbols such as pro BLM, or anti BLM. Some of it relates to current year obsessions that tend to remain as sentiments but become weaker, and replaced by new current year obsessions. BLM being something not as popular today than in the past.
Fundamentally, this idea of appeasement being the road to peace, doesn't work, and the system in various western countries has escalated in authoritarian far left directions due to the right wing failing to constrain the use of power by the left. And even sided with it/acted like it. There is this understanding that the value of democracy is about allowing counterweight to too much influence to one side, and yet there is a sentiment in favor of an impotent right and impotent identity groups of the right, that interprets any moves for them and their rights as inherently dangerous and extreme. This is even more absurd in nation states. But it isn't the case even in multiethnic countries. This sentiment is dangerous and ensures that you are going to get increasing double standards and abuse of regulations, laws.
Good compromise and mutual respect require the right to actually show up.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.” ― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
Pretty well, given the generally consistent validation of his arguments.
As long as you don't extend them beyond the points he's actually making, they're pretty banal and uncontroversial, unless you consider things like 'major economic interventions come with a cost' controversial. If anything, it's critiqueable for being non-falsifiable by predicting long-term consequences that wouldn't be expected yet.
Just to go by its own TL;DR, the video is making a constrained set of points, with some topic-adjacent topics explicitly in other videos including an entire video later on how war economies don't suddenly collapse, that Russia has tools to patch short-term damage to the economy, but that Russia is likely to receive longer-term harms due to the tradeoffs it will have to do to continue fighting. He calls the pro-Ukrainian view that sanctions would grind the Russian war effort to a stop a dream, but also that they do harm, which has been generally observed in how the Russian economy's growth and metrics have changed over the years since 2022. He makes clear that the economic competition is dependent on how willing the West is to support Ukraine- and that he has questions on how the West would be willing to provide the significant levels of support needed, which is downright preescient given how the 2022 situation evolved before the Nord Stream explosion led to the general German shift on permitting major categories of support that were within the west's economic capacity to do.
From various other sections on the Russian economy- feel free to register what you think aged poorly-
-The war is not a closed-system war of just Russia vs Ukraine.
-The Russian economy will not have a near term collapse, and that Russia built up substantial pre-war preparations to mitigating economic disruption to the war production economy (and that he would talk more about that in a following video).
-The Russian indicators of economic health in the first months of the war relied on interventions that can provide short-term metric success but which disguise (and cause) longer-term issues. That Russia has resorted to more, not fewer, distortionary techniques- as well as obscuring data that could verify health if the economy were healthy- would also seem to validate.
-The Foreign Trade Reserves, despite the immediate drop in the early war, were a concern but that he specifically disagreed with a lot of the then-contemporary views and did NOT view it as a short or medium-term threat to Russia's ability to wage war due to options available to stabilize it. *For those less familiar with western government planning time frames, which is his background as a procurement specialist, 'short term' is often 0-to-2 years, and medium-term is often 2-to-10.
-On Russian energy exports, he makes the point that Europe was/is undergoing an expensive economic shift away from dependence to limit Russian ability to blackmail, which occurred, and that the Russians would progressively lose the Europeans as a dependent market, which has also been seen as Russian gas exports by pipelines have decreased far more than LNG gas exports have risen At no point does he argue that this means Russia is going to lose all their income and ability to sustain war in the coming years, and this is well before the European sanctions model (which was designed to let sea-based hydrocarbons continue onto global markets, but reduce Russian profits) was outlined, which itself is reflective of the Western political will.
Skipping ahead past the NATO economic figures to Russia on, the 'What Next' section is more predictive-
'What Can Russia Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options Russia could do to maintain the war economy, with the general theme of longer term costs, but continued ability to wage war into the medium term. A number of the options have been seen, including appropriations, interventions, inflation, and Chinese import substitution.
'What Can the West Do?' Perun identifies a number of potential options the West could do to leverage their economic advantages. Many of these were not utilized in 2022, and we're seeing the implications of some of these delays this year with the current artillery ammo disparity- which is a validation of the analysis that the economic advantages depended on will and longer-term planning, which there was a lack of support for in 2022 and into 2023 is causing consequences in 2024, which remains well within his window of Russia's ability to continue fighting.
And so on and so on. As an analysis video, it continues to hold up- not because the facts are the same in 2024 as they were in 2022, but because they were true in 2022 and resulted in the sort of actions he predicted Russia could do to continue fighting the war over the period of time that has passed since the video. Russia has repeatedly intervened in its markets and taken more and more steps to sustain the economy, and these are the sort of interventions normally considered to cause longer-term damages and costs.
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