Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
No bio...
User ID: 102
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8d ago
Is this right? Fifteen books, ranging from #1-6?
Six main novels, yes. I kind of forgot how many side stories are there, maybe I should read them.
The Book of the New Sun?
I recall reading the first book many moons ago, but I didn't read further. My written down impressions from back then are mostly complaining about overloaded, opaque prose, funnily enough. My taste might have changed, but I would still say that the style is quite different
Does this have an audiobook, and is the narration any good?
It does.
is the narration any good?
No. Though I'm not a fan of fiction audiobooks in the first place
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
I'd say you're both being overly dramatic because the intensity of this war and the number of casualties on either side is nowhere close to the last big conflict fought in these lands
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
3mo ago
Forget Americans for now, what do you make of Europe and their "infinite flood of sub-Saharan Africans and Arabs" (as opposed to Mexicans and Guatemalans) predicament?
I'm a libertarian too, and I see it as something that obviously puts the existence of (Western) European civilization as such in peril.
I think there's a problem with priorities here.
If self defense is illegal...
if carrying pointy objects of wrong shape, let alone firearms is illegal....
if freedom of association is outlawed...
if natives are heavily taxed, but foreigners are subsidized...
if you live in an anarcho-tyranny state and the "authorities" are happy to prosecute natives for violation of one of the arcane regulation clauses written down in one of the many tomes of legislation, but are terribly afraid to investigate, prosecute, sentence, let alone deport a Muslim foreigner for rape and plunder...
letting open borders be used as a weapon against you seems rather short-sighted, even if in a better world something as crude as building a wall and physically removing aliens from your country might be less practiced.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
You mean to say we should call him the computer guy?
Well, as I was saying - anarcho-tyranny.
Governments create a mess by deliberately not trying to fix it, while using its full capacity to "solve" certain problems that make the aforementioned mess worse. A more classical state, unlike anarcho-tyranny, would at least have borders in order. I think even the segment of the Right that likes to scowl at "lolberts" will concede that open borders would be more practical with some or all problems I listed in my first comment fixed.
Anyway, what would you like to dispute? Unless you're saying that France/UK/Germany with migration policies of Poland would make the problem worse, I don't think we disagree about anything.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
This is all so tiresome. Since we are going wild with ambitious proposals, how about we deport the Jews instead?
This would have to take place some decades in the future, when the space tech matures a little. That, or we just give the Jews longer deadlines. Everybody (by that I mean mostly the US) does their best to convince the Jews that the promised holy land is, in fact, on Mars. They are then strongly incentivized, both through threats, as well as generous funding, to use their superior IQ to settle the red planet. The place is admittedly somewhat drier, but on the other hand, a lot more spacious and with no neighbors to complain. I'm sure they'll do fine.
Benefits of my plan:
-Space development dramatically accelerated.
-Final solution to Jewish settlement problem. Jews don't bother anyone and no one is bothering the Jews.
-The Palestinians can have their cursed patch of desert all to themselves.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
It is a website, that "publishes a running list, and sometimes personal information, of people who are considered by authors of the website to be enemies of Ukraine" but without any official backing.
In post Soviet parts of the internet it's treated more like a meme, and sometimes site owners seemingly lean into unseriousness as well, but that some gullible American conservative picked it up and started wringing hands about "Ukrainian kill list" fails to surprise me
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2mo ago
Inspired by this post, but it's kind of buried there, and the topic has decidedly nothing to do with culture wars, so I took the liberty of taking it here. After going through a similar line of thought, I've concluded that the best argument in favor of free will I can think of is Magic.
"Magic is Awesome!" approach to free will
I owe Sapolsky for helping me to articulate this.
I recall him putting forward this very argument, complaining about how free will is incoherent and would have to be powered by magic. This got me wondering: does magic actually deserve to be dismissed with such contempt? For the purposes of this post, I explicitly reject the Clarkian definition of "magic" as anything merely outside of our current knowledge, but use it to indicate something that is inscrutable in a far more profound way. Consider two problems:
1. Consciousness. No scientific framework predicts it, no theory can explain it. No experiment can be devised to test it. We have no idea how consciousness works. What's more interesting is that we have no idea how to get an idea of how consciousness works. It doesn't have to be there, yet there it is. If this isn't Magic, what is?
2. Why are we here? Why is anything? One option is that one thing causes another, and another, back-propagating in the past...forever. All the way down. Personally, I find this idea unsatisfying somehow, if not downright annoying. But even if that's how it is, we are still left with the question of why does it do it, and the best you will ever be able to come up with is some variant of "it just does, I guess". This positively stinks of Magic.
The more old-fashioned alternative to an infinite causal chain is a finite causal chain, one that terminates with God—the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover... Magic? Magic.
We could even ask whether God could share a bit of this Magic juice with some of his creations; we could call it a divine spark or something like that.
That's part of the reason why common in these circles brand of autistic materialism doesn't sit right with me. Both the place we live in and our very direct experience of it seem to be a middle finger to rationality.
I don't believe that free will is something spurious and irrelevant to ethics and meaning. I'm also not convinced that linguistic atrocities like molesting the definition of free will until it's compatible with determinism are of any help here.
If you're of the same mind, "magic is awesome!" seems to be a nice motto to live by.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
Ukraine put the Pope on official list of enemies.
Worth noting that this didn't happen. It's not an official list of Ukrainian enemies (the Pope isn't even in that list, but that's details)
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
9mo ago
There is a Twitter account called "Trump history" and it's somehow the funniest thing on the internet I've seen in a while. It's like a historical trivia account, except every post alleges Trump's role in every conceivable historical event, backing it up by an AI-generated illustration.
There's something hilarious in the idea of Trump as a fixture of human civilization, guiding and guarding mankind through millennia.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
3mo ago
I didn't quite reach Marcus Aurelius yet, but I've read a few books on Roman history this year and it's more or less a story of how Roman citizens just can't catch a break. I'm somewhat less impressed with Hoppean "kings have low time preference" argument now
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
I would push even further than Nybbler and assert that "the Holocaust should happen" is not specific and concrete enough to be a candidate for "call to violence" exception.
Given the very special treatment of the holocaust in comparison to other genocides one could make a good case that the holocaust legislation amounts to little more than anti-blasphemy laws.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
You had me wondering for a minute what could possibly happen to Contrapoints that he managed to become a conservative Warhammer enthusiast.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
Great idea, but I must admit I find it rather annoying to use, not even taking the lag into account. It would probably be more useful if implemented just with some hyperlinks, tags and collapsible lists
I never felt invested in arguing about piracy simply because how unbelievably flimsy the whole idea of intellectual property is.
Utilitarian, practical angle: we use property claims, first and foremost, to avoid conflicts over scarce resources. Ideas and combinations of zeros and ones are not scarce. Maybe IP can be justified because it brings value by incentivizing creation? In the first place, I find it questionable that we should bring certain legal frankensteins into existence to maximize GDP per capita, but is this goal even achieved? How to price in costs of legal bickering over patents and lawsuits, big actors using IP to suppress potential competition? What about indirect consequences of curtailing individual freedoms and ever multiplying victimless crime legislation? Surely there's a better way to do this.
Deontological angle: Material and Intellectual property as similar things - intuitive at first glance analogy, after all we could say that creator makes a certain "thing" that he can then "own" because he made it. However, as mentioned before, IP is not scarce and IP holder loses nothing from piracy, and often gains in exposure and influence. Surely it's clear that this analogy doesn't really work. And how applying this ethical principle looks in reality? Is an Indian kid downloading a western textbook because he can't possibly afford buying western ip for dollars committing an ethically wrong act? Do people actually believe things like this? I imagine an IP advocate might bite the bullet and say that he commits a minor wrongdoing that is balanced out by him benefiting from the "theft" a-la a starving man being justified in stealing bread, but I find this whole thing laughable. Though not as laughable as I find calling breaking IP laws piracy. Ah, yes, sea-faring robbers and murderers is a very apt analogy for downloading certain combinations of zeros and ones. It's so absurd that I can't help but like it.
Edit: strongest argument in favor of IP was voiced by one of the other commenters - basically that by disregarding certain laws of the land, no matter what they are, we compromise our social fabric in an ever so small way. It's a real concern, though it would have more weight if our governments and laws were much closer to perfection than they are. I would rather put the blame squarely at legislators for outlawing mundane, victimless actions, making sure that a big chunk of the population will find themselves committing legal crimes at some point or another, which certainly doesn't benefit society.
Now excuse me, I have some torrents to unapologetically download. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
A lot of heat in this discussion, so I will just go ahead and throw in a cut-the-Gordian-knot style solution here: complete separation of education and state. Negotiations as to who has a right and duty to what are held between the parents and the school before enrolling. Minute details like whether it's completely privatized or funded by the government in a roundabout way like charters don't matter here, so insert your preferred arrangement.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
11mo ago
On the topic of boycotting woke business: did anyone bother to make a website listing all potential boycott targets and their offenses? It seems like an empty niche that could be filled fairly cheaply, though the list will be quite long. People just forget about yet another woke commercial outrage fairly quickly, having something that could be quickly linked might go a long way.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
The current model has many costs, and it's not obvious that the benefits are worth it or can't be achieved in other ways. More importantly, this would only justify a thin slice of what is subjected to copyright laws in practice, so it hardly deserves more than a passing mention in this context.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
As others say, you're at best making a semantic argument. I would also like to argue that communism is indeed more genocidal than Nazism.
"Damn everybody other than my ethic in-group" is not that impractical of a life project, it can even be argued that it's simply natural human inclination driven to extreme. "Damn inequality and hierarchy", on the other hand, is at odds with the very bedrock of reality. Hence the disparity in the body count of these two worldviews.
You can run out of undesirable racial groups to kill, but you absolutely cannot run out of your betters. Communist project is completed when the last proletarian shoots the last kulak in the head. Perfect communism in not possible in practice, much like a perfect circle must remain in the realm of platonic forms, but you can still go quite far - current world record of communism belongs to Pol Pot with up to a third of Cambodia's population dead
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
I found myself agreeing with both of you and my synthesis is that I shouldn't fuss over the regulars, but strongly avoid downvoting newbies to groom them into staying
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
10mo ago
I wonder what makes this line of thinking so tenacious that I have to keep having this conversation again and again. Maybe its time to compose a copypasta for this occasion or something...
Anyway, a state with a nuclear triad just doesn't suffer the same risks as Russia did during the times of Napoleon or Hitler. It's true that any state would prefer to not have potentially hostile neighbors on its doorstep, but for Russia, this train has departed long time ago. As for Ukraine, it didn't look like they would be invited to NATO anytime soon, especially not after annexation of Crimea. (I would say that, at least, was a well executed operation, but still argue that it did Russia more harm than good).
Moreover, let's say they seized Kiev, and everything to the east of Dnipro. Now what? You still got an aggressive "anti-Russian" half of Ukraine on your border. Let's say they conquered Ukraine in its entirety. It has to be pacified, at quite a steep cost. What is achieved? Security against Western land invasion (really outlandish scenario)? Not even that, there is still Baltic border, even closer to Moscow, and Kremlin would never have the balls to invade a NATO country.
As it is, I'm actually mad at Putin for not being able to present an alternative to the West, a multipolar world as he says. He had infinite money, common cultural heritage that he could leverage to expand influence in eastern Europe, instead he preferred to get high at his own supply, believing that Ukraine is a pseudo country that would collapse the moment Russian soldier's foot stepped into it, and that Ukrainians are Russians anyway, and decided to play conqueror.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Having a goal of "the world doesn't end" does have its advantages. Can't wait until 2030, AI still doesn't kill anyone, and Yud saying "you are welcome" graciously lifting his fedora. Though who am I kidding, the world will then be in need of saving from AI killing everyone by year 20XX.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
This seems to be just a regular mildly charitable interpretation to me?
Per Merriam-Webster, Hunka would be a Nazi if he was either a
1.Member of the Nazi party
2.Supported Nazi ideology.
He wasn't a party member, and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi.
There's a small matter of him fighting under Nazi command but given the historical context, it's entirely plausible, indeed probable, that him volunteering had nothing to do with a sympathy toward Nazis, but rather hatred of communists
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
10mo ago
I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.
I finished the latest installment of Sun Eater the other day. Unlike a certain infamous fat garden gnome, Ruocchio is a fruitful writer - he puts out a book every 1.5 years or so, with the conclusion of the series planned for next year. I might as well shill it and share some of my impressions here, he well deserves it.
1.Sun Eater is a space opera about a traitor and genocidal murderer to some, hero of mankind to others. Told from his own perspective, as a memoir that he writes at the dusk of his life. From the first pages, Dune and Warhammer influences become apparent, but I quickly forgot about this: don't let anyone say that Ruocchio doesn't have his own creative voice.Considering that criticism of materialism/nihilism is also prominent in Ruocchio's books, and now that Disquiet Gods made his Christian angle explicit, this looks almost funny - like he's taking a dig at the competition.
2.The quality of writing—the way the books are written word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence—is where Ruocchio really shines, and that's fortunate, since I consider this to be the backbone of any work of fiction. In this regard, Ruocchio mogs...wait, the spell checker is upset with me for using zoomer dialect...I meant to say dramatically outperforms most authors I've ever read, and the vast majority of modern writers overall. He will make you open a dictionary a few times if you want to understand some sentences fully, but the prose is by no means overly ornate. It's elegant, memorable, and quite detached from modern conversational English, fittingly for something presented as the writing of a far-future aristocrat. Maybe there's something to say in favor of the more down-to-earth style most common in modern prose, but my guess is that most other writers don't write as Ruocchio simply because they lack the wits and sufficient command of their language.
3.I find evil/irreconcilably antagonistic aliens to be a much more interesting direction to take than the Star Trek approach, or, god forbid, "humans are the real evil". It's not just that it's terribly overdone and tediously misanthropic in practice, hostile aliens seem inherently more plausible. Finding common ground with beings that share our own nature is challenging enough. Competition for resources might not be the most plausible cause for conflict when interstellar civilizations are concerned, but there are any number of others to explore.
4.I enjoy speculations on alien cultures and theology, and here Ruocchio doesn't disappoint either. We humans can observe our flaws and some of the worst animal inclinations in ourselves easily enough. The Cielcin can as well, and as their condition is more degraded and repulsive, even given their habituation to it, they draw more radical conclusions than most human religions. They remind me of Gnostics, believing this universe to be corrupted and seeking release from it. They also resemble Muslims in their rejection of the visual arts.
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