domain:parrhesia.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6m ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8m ago
turned into Phyllis Schafer
Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.
ABigGuy4U
11m ago
That’s why I’ve always thought that the X-Men was a bad metaphor for prejudice. Say what you will about any particular ethnic/social/sexual group, a single one of them can’t usually annihilate an entire city block unaided.
BahRamYou
18m ago
I've read some of Saberhagen's books. And yeah, before it was "The Dark Forest Hypothesis" it was "The Berzerker Hypothesis" so he should get some credit for coming up with it first. But they're very silly space opera books, lots of action with basically no deep thinking. They're not meant to be taken too seriously, so I can see how people slept on the idea.
Still, as crazy as it sounds, there is a certain elegance to the idea- it solves the "it only takes one" problem. Like, maybe most aliens just don't want to expand, or don't want to build megastructures, or are using tech that is somehow hidden from us. That's all fine, but you'd think there'd be at least one similar to us so that we could detect it easily. But in the same light, maybe 99.99% of aliens are peaceful, but there's just that one group of assholes who built berzerker probes and wiped out everyone else (maybe including themselves).
pigeonburger
19m ago
I don't think it's about shame, but it's absolutely about incentives. In a society that reflects you, where everyone has had a similar upbringing to yours, probably looks somewhat like you, has gone through roughly the same events as you, you can reasonably expect your neighbor to act approximately like you.
So in that kind of society, the incentive to be the kind of person who returns a wallet is that you get to live in a society that would likely return your wallet too.
If your society is not just atomized, but also doesn't reflect you, the link between the action and the incentive is harder to see, and by that token becomes less strong.
jkf
32m ago
"People don't drink that much anymore" seems like a far more plausible explaination -- tables eating free shrimp all night is no problem if they are also getting hammered on $12 Crantinis or whatnot. I could believe that R.L. was slow to update their business model to take this into account I suppose.
So I've been watching X-Men '97 and started wondering what opinions here would be on how to deal with mutants if those kinds of powers started to show up in random people. Would you support registration? Something more serious? Nothing at all? Is it really ok to let someone with the destructive capabilities of a nuclear bomb just walk around, or board a plane, etc.?
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as a tool in the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day.
And of course the Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" future ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
34m ago
Yes I am very proud of that move. I am realizing I resemble a lot of people I didn't know were out there. I am about Patton's age apparently.
SSCReader
34m ago
Some black women and black men are in tension but its highly variable. My wife's friends range from those who refuse to date out, to a very small minority who are Black women divest aligned. But that is still very much the minority.
Indeed one of the main arguments of BWD is that most black women are too lenient on and too supportive of black men.
White progressives are in my experience aware of tensions (given feminism they pretty much have to be) between black women and men, they just feel it is not their place to talk about it. That's different than not knowing or caring.
ApplesauceIrishCream
47m ago
That seems like a perfectly sensible statement to me. The ICC is looking to extend its reach beyond its remit, and is getting slapped down by the US (again). Nothing is new here.
The ICC (International Criminal Court) is a treaty-based organization created by the Rome Statute. The ratifying powers have agreed to submit to the authority of the Court in certain cases, specified by the Statute. Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute, which means that the ICC has no authority over their governments or citizens. The ICC is attempting (again) to go after non-parties, in order to create the precedent that it has powers beyond the text of its treaty--in essence, it's trying to create customary international law using Israel as a point of leverage. The real target is American officials in the future, so current American officials are quite interested in shutting down the ICC's overreach at the outset, as they have many times in the past.
(If you follow the wiki-link to the Rome Statute, you'll see a color-coded map that is less helpful than it appears. Only a state that has ratified a treaty, and not withdrawn that ratification, is a full party to a treaty. A "signatory" is not a party. In the US context, the American President may sign any treaty he likes, but the US is not bound to treat the treaty as law unless and until the Senate ratifies the treaty by a 2/3 vote--one of the very few supermajority votes required by the Constitution itself. Many other countries have similar mechanisms.)
jkf
48m ago
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person?
For many many years the main true answer was "the bar" -- zoomers are too scared to go in those either, and now they are dying.
jkf
53m ago
Work gave me one, and I'm kind of cavalier with it -- you have the 'bending over and spilling your shirt pocket' move down pat. Kind of a nice Mike Patton look going on in that segment!
yellowgreenred
56m ago
I was expecting it to be big news but apparently it didn't become a huge story.
It has become a big story. I remember it being covered in real-time on CNN, but they've also now published a story that puts the blame on the pro-Israel "counterprotestors". The New York Times has a similar story.
Again speculative:
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I can't seem to remember the source, but very recently I saw a journal article speculating that our desire for spices had to do with anti-microbial properties? For example, I know historically salt and pepper were used for their preservative properties in addition to their flavor profile. Another possible explanation for seeking variety is that before food safety standards, every specific food item had some levels of particular toxins. By varying diet, an organism could avoid building up too much of any one toxin. The fact that we can now make a variety of flavors and textures with the same ingredients using modern culinary knowledge could just be a workaround for what was a crude byproduct of certain organisms never eating enough of the same thing to hit LD50's in the past.
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My guess here would be that our ancestors were selected for finding the set [not emaciated] attractive. Since there was no one obese in the past, preferences gradient descended into the most common body type that fell into that set, which would be close to what we might today call a "healthy weight". The reason for finding obesity less attractive would just be its distance from that body type (albeit, in the opposite direction).
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
I was up late watching the unbelievable live footage of the UCLA encampment being violently attacked by a pro-Israel mob. At the time I was 100% certain that this was organized as some sort of op. The counter-protestors were clearly attacking the UCLA students in a coordinated manner, in a way that was so violent it must have been preplanned- for several hours while police did nothing. It was really shocking to watch, I was expecting it to be big news but apparently it didn't become a huge story.
There were several major injuries, the worst was a head injury that, according to CNN, (NSFW) required 14 staples and three stiches. It was actually an antifa account who identified the attacker caught on video here, who is an Israeli apparently associated with the IDF.
Another Israeli who was caught on video pepper spraying and attacking UCLA students was identified by an antifa account. The man is listed as CEO/CFO of five different nonprofit organizations which are all staffed by family, including "Black and Jewish Unity".
After an antifa account identified the second Israeli in a different violence incident, he received phone calls reading out his own address and SSN and threatening his credit score (?) as well as physical violence.
CNN also reported on some of the violent attackers, including an attacker who was revealed by his mother posting on Facebook:
The young man sporting the white mask and a white hoodie in widely shared video clips is Edan On, a local 18-year-old high school senior, his mother confirmed to CNN, though she later said he denies being at UCLA. Video shows On joining the counterprotesters while waving a long white pole. At one point, he strikes a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole, and appears to continue to strike him even when he was down, as fellow counterprotesters piled on.
“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother boasted in Hebrew on Facebook, referencing Hamas. She circled an image of him that had been broadcast on the local news.
“He is all over the news channels,” his mother wrote in a now-deleted post.
No_one
1hr ago
Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.
Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..
Skulldrinker
1hr ago
At this point, I don't think Wokeism is a revolution against the established order, certainly not to young people and definitely not college students. Wokeism IS the established Order. They're conforming to the social context around them.
No_one
1hr ago
but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one
Not the thin one. The curvy one..
Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.
There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
cjet79
2hr ago
I know of one person that met their spouse on here: https://www.itsjustlunch.com/
Both of them weren't very attractive. The one I knew was a nice person and good conversationalist, but I imagine dating apps did not treat them kindly.
2D3D
2hr ago
Would you say that is because the physical presentation of the three archetypes are distinctly different? Physical presenteeism maps pretty cleanly into each archetype, moreso than behavior, and to pull off all three in the same body requires a sort of amorphous age presenteeism. The chief I mentioned and a few other women I know who pull that off all have a sort of 'maybe 20 maybe 40' look to them, mainly due to excellent skincare regimes (which was difficult enough). Matriarch seems to ironically be the easiest to pull off regardless of age, bossy women can be big sister or grandmother to her juniors. I've seen a tiny thai woman boss around girls older than them simply by force of will.
2D3D
2hr ago
You are 100% right that black men and women are in tension with each other, which is an interesting topic onto itself, but your point about requiring a black woman to start that conversation first is the key factor to note. White progressives do not care or consider that blacks are not a unified voice, and suborn black male interests to black female ones. The only vector I have seen progs be critical of black men is in the context of Trump, where increasing black male support for trump is viewed as black support of white supremacy.
I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.
This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.
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