Ditto6687
7d ago
What makes it a gulag instead of a prison? How are American jails different?
If they locked up Trump, would you refer to American prisons as "gulag"?
Ditto6687
13d ago
They are certainly powerful enough to get America to send billions in aid to a country that seems far more brutal in their war than Russia, as part of the same package that is meant to punish Russia for being brutal.
Edit: just remembered that American evangelicals have weird beliefs about Israel + geopolitical concerns. That might be a better explanation for the blatant hypocrisy of supporting Israel's actions in Gaza than Jewish power.
Ditto6687
16d ago
I have not. It's just that a lot of people in my circles talk about it. For example, I follow Justin Murphy (who imo hosted one of the best Moldbug irl appearances) was very into it. Interestingly, most of his followers would fall into the Continental Philosophy constellation, so there's some viewpoint diversity already.
Ditto6687
19d ago
I can't explain myself to ants because they do not have notions at all. Nothing can be explained to ants. No one can do it. None of the possible combinations of pheromones will ever lead to any "ant understanding".
Not the case w/ humans and language.
Ditto6687
19d ago
I think dogs can't understand us primarily because they can't "understand" pretty much anything. As long as a species are capable of thought and have concepts like goal-seeking behavior, I doubt any intelligence gap actually causes the problem you are describing.
Asking if ants can understand humans is like asking if rocks can understand us. It's not a matter of scale, it's a category error. But asking if humans can understand God is just a question of knowledge. God could explain himself to us, we can't explain ourselves to ants.
Ditto6687
19d ago
If you aren't willing to show your face for a cause, to have your name associated with it, do you really believe in it at all?
I'm pretty sure I saw the official Israel twitter account or some large American Jewish account bragging about how they were gonna use facial recognition tech to make sure "none of these people ever find a job again."
Ditto6687
1mo ago
The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.
The Russians just confirmed they had contacts on the Ukrainian side. They were caught trying to escape to Ukraine.
Ditto6687
7mo ago
The Germans cancelled Karl freakin' May for crying out loud.
Are you a friend of this Karl May? If not, this is still an "internet event" for you. My friend group has actual Marxists in it, and quite a lot of left-wing people, or at least people who strongly support LGBT or whatever the American embassy has cook up for them in a given month. Nevertheless, I have not seen a public meltdown once.
Then again, we are a homogeneous Catholic nation, and our only experience with immigrants was Syrians passing through, and then a wave of SE immigrant workers who everybody agrees are nice and doesn't really think about. Funny enough, we've held a couple of BLM marches (allegedly) but they mostly didn't register. I suppose our strongest leftist factions are LGBT and feminists, but no real tantrums happen (outside of popular instagram pages "calling out misogyny").
For a while Euros could enjoy the time lag between cultural changes taking hold in America before they made their way to Europe, but it's over.
I mean, I agree. It's just that nothing really important happens here in my country, and we have very little ammunition to cancel people with. Maybe Germany really has become like the US as of late (in terms of public-meltdown-having leftist activists gaining power), I just wouldn't know.
Ditto6687
7mo ago
Real life isn't the internet. The average Marxist friend is just a dude concerned with sounding smart and banging chicks. Maybe it's because I'm a European, but "Marxist" here doesn't mean "cares about microaggressions".
Ditto6687
7mo ago
Holodomor was a famine that also affected Russians. Russians were among the primary targets of political repressions. Ukrainian and other minority languages were enforced and supported in institutions.
The idea that they tried to rid themselves of "non-Russians" is ridiculous: several of their most powerful leaders weren't Russian, and Bolsheviks viewed supporting smaller nationalities as a way of internal powet balancing. Their first defining war was against Russian nationalists.
Ditto6687
7mo ago
Nobody yet seems to have considered that amongst normal 15-25 year old people, right-wingers are less pleasant to be around than "Marxists", and have comparatively much lower social status. I am not talking about behavioral extremists who interrupt lectures or something. I'm talking about how for some rando college student, their cool friend who is eloquent and gets invited to parties is far more likely to subscribe to some far-left ideology than a far-right one.
Who is more likely to bring you shame when you bring him around, your racist and homophobic programmer friend, or your Marxist friend who reads French literature and watches art films in his free time?
I feel like these dynamics are reflected in other age groups too, to an extent. Right wingers who are smart and eloquent have carved out their niche on the internet, but in meatspace there is a vast discrepancy in likable-human-capital.
Ditto6687
7mo ago
The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true
How is it "obviously true"?
Also, Eastern European SS sympathizers just looked to act out ethnic revenge fantasies on civilian populations. This is what Hunka's group did, mostly focusing on killing Polish civilians. Same thing in Croatia and doubtless other places too, where it was an excuse for killing local Serbs and Jews and stealing their property. What about that makes them "the good ones"?
Ditto6687
7mo ago
and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi
What standard of evidence are you looking for? When someone volunteers to join the SS, which requires swearing an oath to Hitler and probably a bunch of other stuff, hosts Himmler, carries out a genocide against Poles to Himmler's approval, etc., I believe it's fair to say that they are a Nazi. I am not saying that he personally carried out a genocide, of course: just that he willingly joined and armed group whose primary accomplishments and motivation was killing Polish civilians, when he had every option not to.
I mean any standard of evidence that excludes literal SS members from being Nazis is ridiculous.
It's not, because one could also argue that "capitalism is genocidal" if we accept those standards. Communism is bad because it impoverishes people and requires brutal oppression to sustain. But going beyond that, for example counting WW2 dead from both sides as "victims of communism", does disservice to good arguments.
Communism is just not a genocidal ideology in the way that Nazism is.
Ditto6687
7mo ago
Genocide requires intent to wipe out a specific ethnos. For example Nazism was genocidal towards Jews and Slavs. While Marxists certainly didn't shy away from political violence or bad policy, they were not "genocidal".
Ditto6687
8mo ago
List is used in court, by police officers, and by death squads. Fair to call it a kill list if international journalists who were put on it get killed.
That the authors of the list don't do the killings themselves but merely help in coordinating them is just a convenient cop-out.
Yeah I too saw this take on Twitter ;)
But I want to push back a little bit. For sure, "wokeness" does have a lot of official support and literal commissars in American HR departments. But it also has lots of genuine grass-roots support. As in, people who congregate on Reddit and Twitter and devote their lives to this "extremism" in varying degrees.
I'm sorry but someone who transitions and spends their time and money on an ideological crusades with very good results is a strong opponent. It's an insane level of fanaticism and commitment. I would wager this is an important factor that explains why wokeness is winning. And crucially for my argument, it's grass-roots support from actual true-believers, not a gerontocratic elite pushing unpopular views in a top-down manner.
If you like video games and talking about them online, your world has basically been taken over by these people. You want to talk about game X? How about instead of that we talk about the private life of a VA in that game that once said something transphobic. How about instead of that we talk about LGBTQA+ representation in the game. How about ------.
This happens IRL too. In a group of N friends, most people don't care about the woke stuff. But that one friend who does can decide to push that perspective. What are the others gonna do? They don't really care, and this one friend seems to really care. Through his tone and the very fact of what he's saying he has made it clear that he's willing to enter conflicts about this. So, he's unlikely to get any pushback. People aren't "beaten into submission by commissars" always, sometimes they're just too passive and don't want to upset the social dynamic, so the fanatics get the final say.
Ditto6687
9mo ago
Can you write a bit more on why you're playing Skyrim? I'm just genuinely curious. I want to motivate myself to play, and not give up after a week this time.
I'm endlessly drawn to Elder Scrolls games. They're near to what I would call "perfect" games for myself. My biggest complaint is the combat system. In Morrowind and (maybe) Oblivion I don't mind it, because the magic system is so open. You can craft your own spells, launch yourself all across the world map, nothing is restricted. In Skyrim however, the restrictions are there, and I can't give it a pass on the combat system. Not to mention that the quests are notoriously shallow. And that's something, coming from a person who usually doesn't notice such things and consumes most media passively.
At the moment I find it hard to not pick going for another Elden Ring run instead, even though that game is much farther from what I would call "perfect" (personally, although it is probably "perfect" in general).
Unfortunately, I have "gaming OCD" and just can't install any mods, except for bugfix or graphics mods. I want the vanilla experience in games, the way they're "meant" to be played. Not to mention the technical difficulties of installing mods. I've recompiled my kernel and have been an Arch user, but that shit is just too much for me.
Can someone redpill me on financial products like options, from the perspective of "how does this benefit society"? I understand why price discovery via supply/demand and markets integrating information is beneficial. What I don't understand is which contributions does a person who buys an option contract make to society, in theory. I want to be crystal clear that this is not a question about morality, I'm well aware that people are free to make contracts and profit. I'm just wondering if there is some benefit to options existing, and I'm maybe looking for some wider navel-gazing about how complex financial products are a social good.
My attempt at answering this is the following. Mind you I'm basically guessing from vague memory that options are a contract that you can buy, which allows you to buy another thing later at a specified price. There is no immediate benefit created by a person who profits off a correct bet he made. That part is zero-sum like gambling. However, there is a benefit when a market for such contracts exists, because it functions like a prediction market. People make real-money bets on how valuable certain products will be in the future. In this way, the options market aggregates information about predictions. This information may be useful to other people who observe the prices, because they can adjust their behavior accordingly. Maybe they are policy makers, for example, who can better stabilize their economies.
Is that correct? Furthermore, is there any simple real-world evidence that this happens, i.e. that people other than speculators benefit from complex financial products in positive-sum ways? For example, does this benefit the overall economy of a country? Does it benefit it in concrete ways so that politicians (or more realistically, economists) there might say, "hey, lets encourage options trading"?
I've asked my gf about this.
Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.
I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.
And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.
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