domain:alexberenson.substack.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
The host of each WorldCon is voted on by the members of the WorldCon two years previously who also commit to buying a membership to the WorldCon they are voting on. A supporting membership (which gets souvenir programmes etc. plus voting rights but not admission to the con) costs about 50 USD, so you can buy a vote in site selection for about 100 USD. The Chengdu WorldCon bought 2000 votes and outvoted the core WorldCon fanbase. The conspiracy theory is that Chengdu WorldCon is controlled by a for-profit Chinese real estate developer who are using WorldCon to promote their development, and the 200,000 USD is cheap publicity.
This is of course the second ganking of WorldCon by a bunch of outsiders buying supporting memberships and outvoting the ingroup, after the puppy kerfuffle where two groups of less-woke fans bought memberships and block-voted in the Hugos ballot (which used FPTP at the time, meaning they could control the nominations). Or the third if you count the unsuccessful attempt by the Church of $cientology to buy a Hugo for L. Ron Hubbard (which was disqualified by WorldCon staff on the grounds that all the paperwork for hundreds of members arrived in the same posting and written in the same handwriting).
Core WorldCon fandom does not want WorldCon to be in China, as far as I can see.
SanDiegoJuryDuty
11mo ago
deportation is not fatal, hlynka. cute attempt tho
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Historically China has been able to trump pretty much all other woke cards
China dictates to Hollywood and academia using raw power, not wokeness. If you want to be in China, you need to conform your worldwide activities to the tastes of Winnie-the-Panda. This is how you get American basketball players in America being expected to mind their language so the NBA can stay on Chinese TV.
rxzp
11mo ago
Don't forget to treat yourself like a human being. Compassion, patience, kindness. Helps with depression more than anything you can measure numerically in my opinion.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
Looking at the pace of progress in both rigid and soft body robotics suggests that the overhang of software above hardware isn't going to last very long.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
The Scopes Monkey Trial was kayfabe, with both sides of the case being backed by a local newspaper in order to generate publicity for a small town in Tennessee. (See Wikipedia)
I think there are two very different Christian lines of criticism of evolution. The position of the conservative faction of Anglicanism in Darwin's day, and of the Catholic Church until JPII's 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy, is roughly-speaking that evolution is unfortunate if true (because it makes eugenics possible, and because it makes atheism more intellectually respectable and therefore more dangerous) but nevertheless a proper matter of scientific enquiry, not theological debate. In England, the conservative bishops left the attacks on Darwin to scientifically-trained clerics like Sedgwick, who tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to attack him on scientific grounds.
The position that evolution should be rejected based on theological arguments is unique to the tradition of non-denominational American Protestantism that we loosely categorise as "evangelical". That is the position that was being pushed by the prosecution in Scopes, because that is what made the kayfabe show appealing to American culture warriors on both sides. (The culture war in question was mainline vs evangelical, which maps onto the modern blue vs red surprisingly well).
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I guess what we've really learned from this conversation is that you're not self-employed! Can you even try to explain how your claim was supposed to work?!
Gdanning
11mo ago
Don't forget decreasing demand by triggering massive unemployment or otherwise reducing income.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I know this is already dead and buried... and that @firmamenti already pretty much explained why... but we have now gotten the NYT response. No surprise, it's "Republicans pounce". They're banking on their readership not actually reading the report. They just refuse to even acknowledge all the stuff in there that demonstrates how differently the FBI treated claims touching the Clinton campaign from those touching the Trump campaign. If they just close their eyes and ignore the screen for half the movie, it's no wonder they see a different movie. They get their zingers in. "In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation." See! It's all bullshit, what these right wing nutjobs are saying! Of course, completely hidden in this sentence is the distinction between types of investigation, one of the major points of the Durham report. If you didn't read the report or you're not otherwise familiar with this, you'll never notice. They're not explicitly lying. They're just totally ignoring the entire discussion about how they shouldn't have immediately opened a full investigation, how a preliminary investigation wouldn't have justified many of the investigatory steps they took, how thinly the whole shebang was predicated, how an unbiased preliminary investigation would have almost certainly quickly noticed, "There's literally nothing here," and then been quickly closed, how a proper response that was trying to protect American elections and elected officials would have been to provide defensive briefings to Trump rather than the obscene exercise of doing everything possible to malign him for possibly being the victim of a foreign influence campaign... or critically, how this all goes down differently when it is blue politicians at risk.
Of course, again, as already said by @firmamenti, everyone on the right already knows all this, so there's not much that needs to be said here. The only culture war things of interest is the response. How partisan actors continue with their tactics of "not lying" and memoryholing "inconvenient truths". I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the developments of this story back when it was happening in real time in 2016. I know specific media people who know this topic in great detail. The real culture war story is seeing their silence. Usual Suspect Numero Uno, Benjamin Wittes; where is his comment on the Durham report? I've been looking, even went to his new Mastodon. Best I can tell, there isn't one. If you can get away with just squeezing your eyes shut and not watching the painful parts of the movie, you're going to.
Gdanning
11mo ago
Not very different from rhetoric around being born again, or simply accepting Christ: "God's solution to the problem of my sinful self is to get rid of my old self and make me a new person in Christ." But if anyone posted here equating that with physical death, they would quite properly laughed off the stage.
JTarrou
11mo ago
If by "democracy" you mean the pro-forma elections held with ever increasing participation from the organs of government and the commanding heights of the economy, I agree.
If by "democracy" you mean real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions, I disagree. If that ever existed, it will not for some time now that power is coalescing. None of us alive today will ever see a more participatory government.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
And when they were gainfully employed petroleum geologists, they did petroleum geology based on the assumption that earth is 4.6 billion years old and the geological column (including fossils) was laid down the way the heathen textbooks say it was. Otherwise they wouldn't have been very good petroleum geologists. Their commitment to creation science is entirely performative.
The fact that the oil and gas industry is politically aligned with people who claim to reject modern geology for biblical reasons is hilariously funny, but significantly less shocking than, say, Churchill ending up politically aligned with Stalin.
This also goes to the point that Brett Devereaux of acoup.blog is repeatedly making - people in the past generally believed their own religion. In the early 21st century, when you don't need to believe in the supernatural in order to make sense of the world, most intelligent people do not actually believe in religion, and the occasional person who appears to is widely assumed to be lying or crazy.
JTarrou
11mo ago
There are only two paths available to the US.
1: We continue as sole superpower, power continues to coalesce in Washington, the empire grows (fast or slow), and this collection of power moves further and further from the people who provide its basis. As the captured wealth of the global economy flows into our coffers, politics becomes something not left to the proles. Big stuff at stake. The disenfranchised working classes will eventually be joined by the lower and middle middle classes, and conspire together to get around the vast bureaucracy and get their guy in at the top. This will be resisted, violently. But sooner or later, we will get our Caesar. So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
2: We do not continue as sole superpower, whether through division, incompetence, or poor war choice. Then, anything can happen, but it will all be worse for us personally than a gradual shift to greater empire. A modern Caesar eventually ending American Democracy is the good scenario.
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
If you accept any egalitarian premises you are a leftist. Is it not the case that salvation through jesus and his sacrifice is posisble and was for everyone? That would seem to be a fundamentally egalitarian and open religious doctrine.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Or incentivising multiple occupancy.
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
Cultural environment that encompasses a class. Underclass, working class, middle class, educated middle class, professionals, upper middle class all have vastly differing cultural environments and changing between them is possible - while changing your class fundamentally is not, due to the impossibility of changing the past, but you can pass and learn things that you aren't taught by your parents or those ein your environment, things you learn by yourself due to your intrinsic ability and inclination.
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
A lot of people don't work, and physically running the economy isn't needed if that economy is providing things for people who aren't needed anymore. Shift the numbers of people who can't be of use too far and what mechanism is keeping them around? what reason is there to provide for them at all? remove their violent retribution from the equation and to exist they have to rely on charity many times, but to die they simply need to be ignored once (metaphorically).
This isn't what I want, I will be one of them as I am not, as many here imply they are, part of a hereditary wealthy family with the ability to exist sans a working income. This doesn't change the complete lack of mechanisms to enable my existence to be selected for if I am completely useless and this is the widespread state of society (such that parasiting off of maladaptive compassion heuristics isn't viable due to scale, etc).
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
Azth
Enoch Powells Friday night masseuse
11mo ago
None of the things you described except child rearing has any way to cause continued existince!
People at the top don't need to cull everyone for there to be no reason for the peasants to exist,.and without reason to exist what mechanism is going to provide for them or select for their existence?
Religious fervour in the elite driving them to care for the masses? this is delusional thinking and dangerously naive in my opinion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The context of this conversation is:
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
That there is no currently extant physical machine shouldn't matter when talking about 'what comes next'. It's not impossible in principle to replicate the human hand mechanically.
Improved AI will not automate the world because the barrier to automation isn't software or intelligence. It's physical.
Sufficient intelligence can get you physical automation.
Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing. I don't want to go and wipe out all the peasants (myself included).
Moving to a world where non-elite existence is an unnecessary adornment to civilisation, and non elite actions cannot do anything about this, even in violent we will take you with us last resort style violent protest, is absolutely horrifying to me.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
To be honest, I just jumped at the opportunity to speak about something I have first-hand experience with, for a change ;)
The hierarchy of wokeness makes little difference when it encounters a wall that simply does not care about criticism and has a lot of financial power. Unlike in North America, twitterati & such have no power to cancel Chinese entities with a large financial clout, including the government itself.
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