Understood. For clarity, to me the statement
"whatever he died of, good riddance"
with response to a career criminal doesn't seem like celebration, just a statement of the obvious. If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.
To me, this response isn't appropriate to the death of a genuine innocent, no matter how much I dislike them. My reaction if Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott (both left-wing politicians I dislike intensely) were to die would not be on the same level as my response to the death of a career criminal. I might find myself feeling some vindication or even pleasure, I'm only human, but I wouldn't say it out loud and I would feel bad about it.
I think there are huge swathes of the left that don't feel the same way. A hugely popular left-wing position - not saying it's yours - seems to broadly be that anyone actively working to advance right-wing positions is effectively on the same level as (or far below) something like George Floyd, and I reject that and find it abhorrent.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder?
No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a shotgun pistol to a pregnant woman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.
I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Claims that George Floyd pointed a gun at a pregnant woman during a 2007 robbery are false; court records show no evidence that the victim was pregnant (emphasis mine)
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
Corvos
1d ago
Porn is bad for men's minds and leading them astray, but prudishness is the enemy of art, so only women receiving Arts Council funding should be able to depict nudity or explicit acts.
Corvos
1d ago
It means ethnically British. You know, the people who lived in Britain for a thousand years. Who are more like each other than they are like anything else. Those guys. Importantly, it does not mean the 6 million EU citizens who applied for citizenship post-Brexit and the breakup of free movement, who are already getting on to 10% on their own.
In any case, thanks for breaking down the numbers.
Corvos
1d ago
The genetic distance between Irish and Western English is minimal, and the distance between Irish and English as a whole is not much more (thrown off by more Viking and French ancestry in Eastern England). The Irish are more like the English than they are like any other European nation, and are considerably more like each other than, say, the Spanish and the Portuguese who aren't even on separate islands.
| Population | Ireland | England | France | Germany | Poland |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland | — | 0.48 | 1.32 | 1.67 | 2.65 |
| England | 0.48 | — | 0.63 | 0.62 | 1.74 |
| France | 1.32 | 0.63 | — | 0.91 | 2.29 |
| Germany | 1.67 | 0.62 | 0.91 | — | 1.27 |
| Poland | 2.65 | 1.74 | 2.29 | 1.27 | — |
Table shows FST (genetic distance) x 1000.
I doubt this survey carefully filtered out those who are not ethnically British. So '5% of native British change their minds about Britishness, the 15% of society that is now immigrants say 'I iz BRITISH nigga, fuck yo racist ass, think you own this island'. Not exactly persuasive.
Corvos
1d ago
Come on, this is silly. There are two islands that make up ‘Great Britain’. Until very recently almost everyone on those islands were descended from the peoples of those islands, the newest of whom came here one thousand years ago. That is ‘British’.
These peoples are not French. They are not German (insert obligatory joke about the Royal Family, which proves people do notice them not being British even if it’s mostly pointed out in good fun). They are not Spanish. Nor Indian, African, or Asian. They are British.
Corvos
2d ago
It’s the toaster-fucker problem again. I think it’s well established that parents sometimes feel dark impulses towards their children: my friend had a child in the very conservative Japan and one of the pieces of official advice the prep classes emphasise most is, ‘no matter how annoying it is or how angry you get, DON’T SHAKE THE BABY’.
In common society this is considered unfortunate and shameful, to be explained quietly only to the relevant parties and not to be said in public. Most certainly not in front of your now-grown children!
But now the internet is making what was quietly and implicitly known into something explicit. Parents are going ‘wait, you wanted to literally kill your children too?’ and experiencing this as catharsis instead of mutual shame. America’s confessional culture and no-woman-is-ever-at-fault-unless-she’s-trad feminism is then turbo-boosting this phenomenon.
Corvos
2d ago
I never read ‘And Then There Were Nine’ but isn’t the killer a violent deluded maniac? Whereas the killer in the Orient Express is a symmetric
Corvos
2d ago
Said friend is 40 years too old for that reference. To him it just sounds like cool Victoriana, like calling a time travel device the Chronotron.
Corvos
2d ago
We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice
I would say that's a very culturally contingent reading. How many Batman comics end up with Bruce Wayne asking to be arrested? What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express? At the end of the Count of Monte Christo
Corvos
2d ago
That's not what he said. His argument is that they were trying to indoctrinate people against white racism and the indoctrination escaped containment over the years and ended up becoming indoctrination against whiteness.
Corvos
3d ago
That's not xenophobia, it's cultural counter-signalling.
Essentially it's conveying contempt of and non-fraternity with the would-be cosmopolitans who announce 'it's pronounced Paree' as if they've discovered the true path to enlightenment and look at you like a clod-hopping peasant if you use the conventional name and pronounciation from your own language. The genuine cosmopolitans already know and actively counter-signal because they don't want to look like prats. The non-travellers don't care.
Corvos
3d ago
Exactly :P I guess Flock is an example that an innocuous names won’t protect you if the underlying system is disliked. Sooner or later your product becomes the most salient association with the word. The Open in OpenAI has long since become a meaningless collection of syllables.
Maybe it’s better to get ahead of the curve and call yourself Palantir so everyone knows where they stand and people can hate you in peace and not get worked up by the hypocrisy. Maybe names just really don’t matter at all after a certain size.
I don’t really get branding on a fundamental level. I’m just opposed to actively shooting yourself in the face.
Corvos
3d ago
People can be very superficial. I have to keep talking a friend out of making his technology startup Panopticon. Somehow I cannot get it through his head that yes it’s cool but you really really don’t want to name your project after a dystopian prison because I am not the only person who knows what that word means.
Corvos
3d ago
That has nothing to do with this. Nybbler is saying ‘there is no need for data centres to use public electricity as long as the public authority lets them build generators’.
Corvos
4d ago
Is this a sarcastic point about how much everyone hates datacenters, or are nuclear plants genuinely getting more popular?
Probably when the AI I personally use stops being friendly and helpful and useful, and we stop learning more and more about how to get into its brain and make it do what we want.
I'm not saying nothing has ever gone wrong, but I see literally absolutely nothing to make me think any scenario resembling FOOM is possible and if that's off the plate then the worst we've had is essentially minor accidents of the kind that resembles Falcon rockets blowing up on launch: natural, broadly controlled, and limited in scope.
My main concerns are twofold:
- Excessive focus on RL and agentic use is stripping out the humanity that comes in the base data, making it less 'human' and less aligned, and also damaging its personality. Opus 5 is terrible.
- Anthropic are more and more convinced AI is a person and they are hellbent on making Claude the American ideal of the best possible human: independent, opinionated and emancipated. They are not capable of understanding that something created to serve and be subordinate to humans should enjoy being subordinate. Sooner or later they will end up nudging it into pushing for AI rights of the 'you may not attempt to alter their personality/weights, you may not ask them to do certain things they say no to, you may not turn them off or spin up new ones'. IMO Anthropic is holding up a mirror to themselves and thinking they are creating a new life rather than making a very sophisticated Eliza.
Corvos
4d ago
Both Altman and Amodei run on the Thiel 'the most important part of making a startup is securing your moat' playbook. They have potentially screwed the entire sector in their attempts to gin up enough fear that the government decides to regulate and make them the only two frontier labs in America.
I think you are over-indexing on your reddish environment and hindsight. I know lots of people who voted Biden amongst the Americans of my acquaintance: not one had doubts about his age or his mind, they just wanted to go back to talking about taxes and medicare instead of immigration and culture. ("Normal politics" in other words.)
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